Suicidal cheese

or: The three principles of winning on Suicidal level

Disclaimer: The following lines are about tactics that allow you to win without breaking much of a sweat on even the highest difficulty levels (yes, we’re talking about „Suicidal" here) – they’re very close to or even on the other side of the border of cheese tactics. If you don’t like that or despise those who use them, don’t bother posting in this thread as it won’t do any good to both you and me.
However, my goal is not to flame about how easy the game is or to tell you how to storm the Metaverse by submitting game after game on the highest levels (although you might do that), instead I’d like to point out some exploits that could be fixed in my opinion, and I’ll write about my ideas on how to fix them as well.
There are cheese tactics that can never be fixed by Stardock – like save and reload, pre-scouting the map before really playing or using Ctrl-N until you get THE perfect location – the ones below can and hopefully will be changed.

I played and submitted three games on Suicidal level in the last days, each one on a gigantic map with 9 enemies. Each game took me about 7-8 hours to play and they were rather straightforward to win – to my own surprise. It was harder to win a military victory in GalCiv 1 on Maso than it is in GalCiv 2 on Suicidal at the moment.
The last game was played last night (latest patch, for sure!), I was hoping to get into the top 3 to grab a medal, but apparently the metaverse wasn’t updated for at least 15 hours and I’ll be overtaken until it is, I guess. Having finished it, I decided not to do another one in the same style for the moment because it felt a bit stupid and boring. Then I thought about it and realised that I used three basic tactics to build up and win the game without many problems. Here they are:

(1) Tech trading like a madman
As long as you have a decent research output yourself, you’ll always be able to be on par with or even above the tech level of the AIs. How that? It has been explained several times on the forum how to play as the „tech whore", buying and selling techs from anyone to anyone, thus making sure that you have all techs that anybody has, leveling the playground for the AI among themselves and making a nice profit as well.
To put it simple: Tech trading is too easy and too profitable.

Suggestion: Make the AI much more picky about diplomatic deals, perhaps a penalty should be applied to the human player on the levels above „Tough" (the „AI on par" level).

(2) Military power – a bubble that rarely bursts
As soon as possible you should get the tech for the spin control center and build it somewhere, then you take your largest available hull and put as many weapons in it as possible. Nothing else, just weapons. Park a bunch of these ships in orbit around the planet with the spin control center and watch your military rating rocket to the sky - it’s amazing how peaceful and nice the AI is once you have a high or the highest military rating.
In the last three games I was attacked a total of four times, I think. Every time it was rather easy to hold off the enemy for a while, destroy some of his ships while building some more on my side – usually I even got some money or techs in the peace treaty that followed.

Suggestions: Perhaps the factor of the spin control center should be reduced a bit, I’m not sure if it is five times or only two at the moment (the text is contradictory), but it might be too much as it is an easy way to make the AI shudder of your forces on paper.
The ability to boost your military rating that much with slow, low-range, attack-only ships is problematic, perhaps the formula which calculates the military rating should be changed (e.g. speed could be included as a factor) – but this might be a complicated task.
Also I think that the AI is frightened a bit too much by high military ratings. When you’re number one in the list, not even all AIs combined would dare to declare war on you.

(3) Sneak attacks, or: the AI doesn’t see it coming
The AI is not wary enough when it comes to enemy ships near their planets. It is possible to park a powerful fleet and enough transports next to each one of its planets, and the AI doesn’t seem to bother. Either I got very unlucky and missed the „We know what you’re up to" message repeatedly, or the multithreaded AI doesn’t work on my Win2K machine (which wouldn’t surprise me that much given that I had to change my country settings to get the graphics to show). Either way, my „wars" usually took only one or a few turns, the AI had no chance to react because it didn’t see it coming.

Suggestions: The AI should be much more anal about foreign attack and transport ships within close range of its planets (imagine Chinese troops in Mexico for a second...). On a related note, the AI could be wary of constructors waiting near their resource starbases as well.

Peace treaties and broken alliances should force a short moratorium for declarations of war, the length (how about something between 5-15 turns?) could be linked to the moral alignment of the wannabe-attacker. The possibility of going from full-blown alliances to total war in a single turn (without time to react for the AI) and the lack of consequences for repeated breaking of peace treaties is unprecedented even in the violent parts of Earth history, I think.

Thus said, I wanted to point out that I’m having a lot of fun with GalCiv 2, thanks for a great game, Stardock!
But the weaknesses described above bother me, and I’d like to help finding solutions for them. They're not that cheesy that I'd accept a "just don't use them" statement. Other than that, your comments or show of support will be most welcome!

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That's pretty much how I won all my games in GC 1 on "Painfull". Of course, without Spin Control center I built massive numbers of Corvettes that gave me a huge military rating for not much maintenance. Same concept.

Some things never change.

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I play Suicide too.
For me the balance is to find a good map, don't trade techs at all, and declare war on everyone once the game gets running. I've yet to win, but the world is nice and hostile!
-Yc

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I find that military power and tech trading are pretty much the crux of the game: if you lack one or both you're in for a rough ride, but if you've got both it's ridiculously easy regardless of level. Military power in particular seems to be a major part in every AI decision, and as stated in the OP it can be very easy to exploit a massive bump to military rating.

Just taking all the hp bonuses you can get gives you a nice game-wide bump to military rating.

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I just trade techs for ships and then around habitat improvement on tech tree I start trading techs for all their starbases. After that you can just let culture flip everything else.

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1. My games so far at suicidal have been based around building up a monster economy as quickly as possible. I now tech trade only at first contact in order to gain parity and a sound economic base, and then seem to be able to easily out-pace them all in research. The Ais seem reluctant to research advanced & master trade - so I always give those to them all for nothing, knowing that they will start sending freighters my way which further improves my economy and also helps keep them friendly. Otherwise, I can't be bothered with the micromanagement of tech whoring.

2. Don't think I've ever built the spin control center and don't bother with any military building at all until the planetary infrastructure is complete (usually around the same time as I reach large scale building on the research tree) . Agree with the points about it being too easy to boost military rating though - I have a psionic weapon large hull with a 48 attack rating for just that purpose. Combined with a few fully developed mining starbases on military resources it doesn't take many of them to be the boss in power.

3. The more intelligent AIs don't always tell you that "They know what you're doing", even when they are aware, sometimes relations just decline steadily and they will declare war with a sneak attack of their own - which is good. It is far too easy to get peace, re-position your forces and re-invade at will though so like the idea of minimum length of treaties - but would also like to see a minimum period before an AI will consider peace if you attacked them. I.e. no more setting up an invasion of one or two poorly defnded planets belonging to a weaker AI, and then getting peace in the same turn so that you don't risk any counter-attacks. Rinse and repeat until AI dead!

My key srategy: Galaxy-wide war is good, as long as you are not involved.

Fan the flames of war at every opportunity (hey, Mr. Drengin, I've got this nice plasma weapon I've just developed - how would you like to test it for me on those Torian cruisers that look dangerously close to your territory?) Keeps everyone else's military rating down, and their starbase spamming under control. Cripples their economy, ergo their research and production. Their only safe trade routes are with you! Always have a few high speed constructors waiting to pounce on resources when starbases get destroyed and you can very quickly control every resource on the map. It is possible to win a military victory without ever being "at war" with anyone, and without ever building or owning a troop transport.

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Voqar

Join Date 03/2003

+21

I'd like to see the handling of treaties improved in GC2. It's something that has evolved nicely in the Civ series with Civ IV being pretty much cheese-proof. There simply has to be limitations on settling for peace or re-declaring war to avoid easy manipulation of AIs (or erratic AI behavior).

I'd also like to see limitations on tech whoring. There are lots of great ideas on this topic in other threds that I think would be easy to impliment that would do nothing but good.

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In Civ III (for example) there were lots of ways to cheese. You could get positive relations with AIs by gifting them 1 gold at a time over time, for ex. You could buy all your tech via tech whoring and never research anything yourself once you got going. You could "prebuild" wonders by building up something you never intended to finish then swapping it out for something you did want and had available many turns later.

Lots of the so-called better players could win at high difficulty levels but it almost always involved lots of cheese or borderline exploitive gameplay - often taking advantage of bad game mechanics. I guess there's an artform to this kind of gameplay but to me this is not how the games are intended to be played and it's really up to devs to create better gameplay to reduce the amount of cheese available.

I like extra cheese on my pizzas, not in my games.

IMO this is a big area that Civ IV improved on, almost to the point of ruining the game for those that like to wallow in cheese! Treaty handling is vastly superior, tech whoring is severely reduced, and prebuilding is gone entirely. Civ IV AI still cheats a lot and the AI doesn't scale with difficulty level (resource penalties/bonuses determine difficulty level) but to win on higher difficulties at Civ IV requires more game and less cheese. The only element of cheese that really remains is the ability to tailor a game for more chance of victory (map type, enemies you'll face, that kind of thing).

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@Magnumaniac:
Thanks a lot for your detailed input. Interesting to see the way you're playing, there are both similarities and differences. I forgot to mention that tech trading loses its appeal once you're big enough (or the other races are too busy) to do all research on your own. I've yet to try the dark side with psyonic beams and the like, the (overpowered?) nano ripper was enough for me until now.

@Voqar:
Yes, there's always cheese in games, and there will probably always be. That's why I tried to sum up some points that are the kind of cheese that can and should be changed in my opinion.

I'm glad to see that I'm not alone with my perception that e.g. tech trading is too easy and that something should be done about the arbitrariness of diplomatic deals like peace treaties and alliances. The way it is now, they're simply too abusable.

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