MoAus

Join Date 03/2006

My economy & tech always let me down, despite my best efforts

Help! I'm getting my ass kicked!

I a problem where my economy and technology is always woeful. I play Humans and often find that the other races have more powerful economies and research than I do. I don't know why. I am normally forced to pick "Federalists" (economy bonus) as my political party so that I am not running out of cash.

Even if I "play turtle" and allocate most of my spending to research, the AI opponents always have better tech than me. I am playing on the "Normal" mode of difficulty. I often find that, particularly the Dregin, attack me with advanced ships and fleets... when I've been busting my guts to make my military technology hi-tech and am behind the Dregin.

What am I doing wrong? Here is how I lay out Earth (Class 10):
- Colony Capital x 1
- Basic Factory x 4
- Market x 1
- Farm x 1
- Entertainment x 1
- Research Lab x 1
- Starport x 1

Then for Mars (Class 4) I do the following:
- Initial Colony x 1
- Basic Factory x 1
- Entertainment x 1
- Starport x 1

I will then try to build up my economy by researching trade, improved industry & economy as well as better research labs. By time I make any sort of headway in these areas, the AI opponents have build fleets and are duking it out with each other. All I can do is sit there, hope no one attacks me and that when they finally DO attack me, I'll have enough decent military tech to start building ships to provide a defense.

Also, I find that cash is definitely not my friend. I never have more than 2000 BC in my treasury, and that's when I've got 5 trade routes (which no one is attacking). When this happens, I can only use the cash to buy maybe a constructor or a cheap heavy fighter. Meanwhile, the AI is zooming around the galaxy with scores and scores of fleets. Why is their economy so damn strong?

Help, advice, please.

economics

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Hey! Thats exactly how I feel!

I feel pathetic and helpless. Everyone else, just like you say, zooming around with tons of constructors, fighter fleets, advanced tech...and I can barely scrounge up a single basic fighter...

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Okay, this is what I do. I play as a custom race, so your mileage may vary, but it should be the same as my last game was as Federalists as well and none of my starting bonuses were economy bonuses (military type bonuses only).

1. Go into your star port and design a new colony ship. One that allows you to move 3 parsecs, not 2.

2. Set your spending to 100%

3. Set your military rate to 100%

4. Put a factory in your build queue on Earth. Do NOT auto build it.. Just leave it there.

5. Auto purchase your newly designed colony ship.

6. Have your initial colony ship settle Mars.. It's too slow for anything else.

7. Send your survey ship out to surrounding clusters, then do auto-survey. The BC bonsues you get are nice when you do that.

8. Send colony ships to groups of stars and grab any planets you have. Keep auto building them too, until you get to about 700 BC, by now you'll be running negatives so that little padding will let you defecit spend.

You do this until you colonize just about everything. You don't build any infrastructure at all. Nothing. Eventually, you will start making money this way. Very little, but enough to be able to purchase that factory. When you do, design a crappy fighter and build them out of that star port to get your military ready and now the rest is up to you. You should have a decent amount of planets to start tailoring your empire on how you like.

Oh, yes, you will be terribly behind on tech. Horribly so. Don't be afraid to tech trade, buy tech, pay tribute and tech up. You'll catch up eventually. Seems like an economy is your big worry. With a good economy you can find a generous minor and tech trade your hearts content to catch up.

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I definitely agree. When I can get this game to work, I've noticed a HUGE difference between playing on normal and the lesser difficulty levels! Normal means I'm a bumblef*ck moron of a civilization with a mighty fleet of 1 or 2 small Laser II fighters and a possibly-even-shielded starbase, while everyone else fights mighty battles over who gets to surround Earth with influence starbases. While any lesser difficulty level means everyone else is my bee-*otch, I NEVER get attacked even though I have 50 planets and 2 measley fighters, and the only way to start a war is to just swallow my "GOOD" pride and start the damn war. It seems like a large gap between levels of difficulty. I've turned to re-writing the XMLs to get what I want on "normal" so that I'm not a puss, but the other civs still have a pair. Or pairs. Except the Thalans. I don't let them play.

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MoAus. It is not clear exactly how you are playing. Is it on a small or medium map with rare suns and planets because if its not then you should have many many many more planets with which to specialise. Are you building colony ships at the start to go and grab more planets - this initial rush to colonise is very much a part of the game. Once you have multiple planets under your belt you can tailor them towards certain goals like making an economy planet.

If you are playing with settings that only allow you Earth and Mars then it does make it more difficult and you need to focus more on your economy. Those 4 factories on earth for example are eating up all your cash. Build the economic capital there instead of one of those - consider changing another to a bank.

On Mars, I would generally use it for pure research (all labs), even if I only have the 2 planets.... it will never build anything remotely quickly enough to invest spending your military budget there (unless it has bonus manu tiles). Next make sure that you have a lot of economy bases around your planet - on this setting I tend to have 4 econ bases to help boost my production - worth more in the long term than those factories on Earth!

If you are new to this game, put the settings low, fire up a larger map, control&n until you get yourself a nice amount of room to settle - preferably in a corner. Then see how things go when you have a few planets.

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I mean, I agree with MoAus, NOT Guderian.

I'd say buy a couple factories right away on your home planet and as many colony ships as you can until you reach $0 (or $1000, 2000, etc, whatever buffer you prefer - I usually leave a couple grand for buying the first factories on the better of my newly colonized planets, and 1 or 2 constructor ships just to make sure I can claim a few resource modules, or whatever they're called). As with most non-scenario 4x Strategy games, the beginning's just a land grab (see other posts, most would agree). The weakness of this game (or challenge if you're not a pansy like me) is that if you don't make the most of the initial land grab (i.e. placed close to other hostile civs = early wars), whoever is NOT embroiled in early war, etc IS going to make a killing on the land grab. Anyway, if I elaborate more I'll probably never get another girl to talk to me. So I'm stopping. Good luck.

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Well here is one problem.... why are you building a star port on mars? it isn't like you are ever going to be able to build a ship of any power there.

My advice, ignore mars for now and grab the other worlds, even with that slow starting colony ship, it will be ages before any other civ tries to take it from you and honestly Mars or what ever your class 4 home system world, isn't ever going to be that important. Normal is not that hard once you get the hang of the economy and get good at the giant land grab at the begining.

On your main world:
Ditch the farm, population is more a burden than a boon in the early game.
Build 2 factories before anything else (buy the first one) then maybe some entertainment and research. Dont be afraid to leave tiles blank for now, they aren't going anywhere.

seize as many worlds as you can, if you chance upon one that has a +manufacturing tile, make that your production capital, same thing wiith research bonus worlds, approval worlds or food bonus worlds can be your giant ghetto planet later.

Practice a few games, just try and colonize as many worlds as you can as fast as you can and then start on a new map. When you get good at that start the odds of victory grow substantialy.

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Oh, one more thing before I sink too deep into nerdery:

Other races start off with better skills/techs in certain areas. Feel free to open the XMLs in Notepad and play God. I've done great things with the ship config, but can't seem to get the same results with the races....

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Here's something that worked for me on normal. Take your basic humans, and instead of federalists, take the populists. (I've been attempting to go for a diplomatic victory, but end up tempted by conquest. Practice makes perfect, and I'm slowly getting better at that early rush). Eventually, I might even be able to clearly and thoroughly explain my strategies.

Now, as long as possible, I keep my tax rate at 33%, no higher.
On decent planets:
I get a factory out ASAP, followed by an entertainment center, Starport, and farm. In this case, I colonize with only 100 colonists. Sorry, 100 hundred million. Then I specialize. Because of the morale bonus and low tax rate, it is rather easy to keep them one-hundred percent happy. In a way, an entertainment center is less expensive than a factory. It has a maximum maintenance of 1 bc a turn while a factory might spend eight or more BC a turn. The population will grow much faster now. (I half wonder if pop-growth has undergone an undocumented tweak or I'm simply paying more attention to it in action. I have a feeling that the growth rate cap is different than at release).

On mars: I sometimes buy two factories and a starport, starport first. I then buy scouts (and once the factories are up, build them) to get ahead of the enemies in the colony race. I always seem to be crowded in with other civilizations, even if there is plenty of room. After I get the military production running smoothly, I buy little else.

Once my treasury is endangered, then I finally hike the tax rate up to 49% or more. If I still have a deficit, I spend one turn with spending to zero percent, and shift it back up to 100% the next. I prefer that to throttling my economy at sixty or so percent. If I have any planets with under one billion colonists, I shuttle five hundred million or so on a spare colony ship to them.

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Oh, and regarding economy, I've often found it better to postpone the social improvements branch for at least a short while. Better factories spend more and take longer to build, after all.

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First: Mars should probably be specialized to either econ or research, personally I go for research. First I build a factory then two research centers, then demolish the factory and build another reseach center. Basicly anything under PQ5 isn't worth building a starport and factories because in the late game you won't be using them except to maybe rush a ship you really need, so in the long run it's not worth it.

Second: About your econ...the reason it's taking such a hit, especially when you first start to colonize is because you are taking people away from Earth, which may or may not have a market center, and moving them were you won't get the extra income. The other reason for this is because as you build more factories they cost more to maintain and since you probably aren't getting more people at a fast enough rate your econ goes into the red. One of the best things to do is try to put at least one farm and one market center on each planet (excpet low PQ ones). And make sure to specialize!!! have some planets just be for econ, so just farms and entertainment and markets.

I hope this makes sence, it seems to work for me.

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Franco fx

Join Date 04/2003

+59

Keep your taxes as hitgh as possible and set spending to 100%. Check you sliders often and adjust as needed. Early in the game you may need to fall below 100% a few points to control your deficit but by the end of the third quarter you should be solidly in the black (green) and never look back.

Set your military spending up to where you build the improved colony ship in about 5 turns. On a tiny or small map you might need to buy a couple of factories and a couple of colony ships. If you wait one turn before buying you can cut the cost significantly. My cash reserves usually don't fall below 2000 before they start growing.

Don't colonize Mars until you have all the planets you want. If the AI gets it they don't have anything and it will flip back to you in 40-50 turns. Don't build scouts in a small map game. That is the biggest mistake the AI makes and it makes it easy to dominate those maps with your faster colony ships.

On Earth I usually build 1-2 factories, lab, market, entertainment, in that order. New planets get a starport and a factory to start with. In small map games Earth build all my colony ships and each new planet starts building constructors as soon as the starport is finished (3-5 turns max). When the factories are complete you will be building constructors in about 15 turns. When the constructors start coming on line run for the mining resources. If you get all or nearly all of them you will win the game on your own terms.

Don't build farms untill you have entainment in place and the planet is at or near max population, then you can build farms on 10 and above PQ and control moral with entertainment up grades moral mining and moral projects.

On the small maps, I research Translator, Xeno research, Propulsion techniques, Planetary improvements and diplomacy in that order before going up the military tree to space weapons. By that time I will be about third in power but when I build a few defenders I usually move up to first and I have no problem staying first or second throughout the game.

Remember, the game bases military ratings on number of attack ships and I have often been second and even third while knowing the AI would not have a prayer against my smaller but far more powerful ships.

All this is based on playing at normal and challenging level.

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Tetrasodium

Join Date 03/2006

+17

it took me a while to get the hang of starting out and getting a good enough foothold to avoid being crushed on normal. I'm stil a bit hit or miss on normal, but will admit that blatantly using the cheat options (mainly clone ship, +10k credits, teleport ship, and insta complete current research) gave me a chance to get a grasp on figuring out ways to balance the economy and output in useful manners.

Some important things I learned:
- Scouting out the anomalies as soon as possible is incredibly useful. Build a few ships with a couple engines, life support units, sensors, and of course the salvage unit (it's called something else i think, but allows you to harvest the anomalies).
- There are a bunch of options you can automate ships with, if you double click a ship it will let you select them and show the hotkeys for them. Set your anomalie scouts to autoscout anomalies.
- High populations on a planet will hurt your approval there. Farms will let you get a larger tax base, but can hurt you even more by making you lower that tax % so far down that it turns out as a los overall.
- If you research a better farm, stop the upgrade on it for any planets that are starting to get unacceptably high amounts of unhappy people due to overpopulation.
- Entertainment facillities are great for helping you keep taxes high. Simply researching the techs gives you a bonus of +5% each step, you can setup more than one entertainment facillity on a planet to help with people hating you. -80% is the worst you can get from people due to overpopulation, it's good to setup some planet(s) as giant slums with people, farms, and entertainment... lots of entertainment... as much as needed to keep them happy.
- The floating resources you can build bases around are far far more useful than they appear. The millitary (red), science (purple), and economy (green), are the most important ones to snatch up if you can. Approval and Influence are also very nice, but not nearly as important in my experience.
- Remember that giant slum with farms and entertainment? Use a colony ship or transport to move unhappy people from overpopulated worlds to it if you have one sitting around.
- You get some massive bonus' for the different types of governments. +25, +50, +75 economy and a couple other things I can't recall off the top of my head. Grab them if you can without serious sacrifice.
- +economy buildings are incredibly useful for planets with high output.
- Setup economy starbases and fully upgrade for traderoutes and +social/military/science around any planets with lots of factories/labs or trade routes. It makes an absolutely huge difference.
- slap an extra engine or three on your colony pods if you can without serious sacrifice.
- screw the universal translator during the early landgrab and anomaly cleanup. Go for better engines, lifesupport, and sensors depending on your race. Miniaturization isn't bad either.
- Certain species really dislike each other, certain ones will almost always attack certain species.
- Establish trade routes with anyone who might attack you. Start with people nearby that don't really like you, move towards people who are militaristic towards you or simply bordering depending on how likely they are to attack your species. Trade routes improve relations and have the added benefit of giving you money.
- Fund any wars your neighbor is fighting as long as they don't look hopeless. Throwing an occasional fleet of ships or lump of credits at someone can drag a war on for ages and give you time to buld up on techs, useful warships, and similar things before they get tired.
- Call for peace if the UP resolution for it comes up, the people fighting will almost always bulk up their armies and crumble on each other when it ends.
- A lot of the time you can give tech and ships to people to help keep them down that tree. If you are using a different branch for your weapons, you get to come at them wtih something they probably aren't prepared for.
- influence bases can occasionally cause people to attack you, be careful about using them to expand your borders when you have a weak military.
- Spreading around parts of the trade tech tree can greatly assist with keeping the galaxy a more peaceful place and has the added benefit of occasionally earning you some extra cash.
- Avoid researching the lab and factory upgrades too much until your planets are somewhat settled, at least wait until the landrush is over and you have some production capabilities on all your planets. Paying a few hundred credits for a basic lab or factory, or waiting 10-20 turns isn't a huge thing... paying thousands of credits or waiting hundreds of weeks means your planet is essentially useless.

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Lol I play on huge with 7 AI and intelligent AI's all. I'm always first in tech and economy and I could give squat about military in the early game. The key is the ion drive tech at start screen and 4pc/wk movement colony ships. Also you don't need to build factories for quite awhile, build markets at least one on every planet and have one 11 or 12 planet focus on nothing but markets with 1 startport and 1 entertainment square and 1 or 2 farm squares. Get the tech that gives economics capital and build that suker quickly and focus all your planets on social except your initial coloy which will focus on military and churn out colony ships only, run a 50% research, 40% social and 10% military buildup for quite awhile, switching around a little when necessary. Also focus a 2nd planet on research facilities like the economic planet. Get that technological capital was well as soon as possible. And TRADE TRADE TRADE with the AI at the start, but, trade for the good stuff like banking and manufactoring upgrades that they like to go after first a lot of the time. Go after advance trade and get those trade ships out and be sure and put some life support on them so they can go pretty far in their trade routes.

Set your tax slider as near to 59% as possible and always keep your production slider to 100%, when colonizing a planet the build sequence is 1 startport, 1 entertainment facility, 1 market, with near 59% tax you are going to be very near 45% approval. Don't let this go into the red, adjust taxes EVERY turn and FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS SOCIAL!!! Just make sure you keep all your planets at 45% approval every turn and you should fly into the lead with economics and technology.

Also don't colonize that pos class 4 planet at the start, you can get that pos planet a lot lot lot later in the game, go looking for a 9+ planet to colonize, hopefully a 12+ and get that economics planet going.

BUY your colony ships at the start until you are below 1000crs or more. Then as I said focus military on your initial planet and churn out colony ships every 3 turns if you've built correctly and built 3-4 factories after your initial market and entertainment facility.

Also another way the AI gets ahead on you is they use the "loan/lease" method of play. This is something I NEVER use because it's so costly per turn in the early game. But, you might want to try it and buy factories quickly so you can churn out colony ships faster.

You start building up a military when you check the leaderboard screen and see that a race has a positive strength military number. This means the AI is now in military/scout ship building mode. If you don't start building military when they do, you'll look like ripe pickings for them. Put at least 1 ship in orbit around every planet. Every game I eventually move into first in military and most often am 2nd for most of the time. This keeps them from attacking you. Gives you time to tech diplomacy and start trade routes and before you know it everyone is your friend while you watch them fight each other and reap the rewards when they come begging for techs. Minors do this a lot.

I also always get 14 to 16 planets at the start. Then I get a few more with influence starbases where the AI came across the borders and colonized those pos planets 4-6 class. I just took 3 of the YOR planets this way never firing a shot.

This game is so easy heh for an economics major or cpa type person. lol

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You can't turtle in Gal Civ 2 sadly. So that is probably why you are having problems overall.

Also it sounds like your using a typical strategy that works in other 4x games (turtle and tech up). The reason that doesn't really work in this game is the way the economy is set up.

Specifically because the more population your planet has the less tax per person you get plus a high pop gives you an approval penalty.

Even worse that approval penalty lowers your morale bonus from buildings making it harder to improve approval.

You basically have to have a bunch of planets with nothing but morale and economy buildings if you want enough money to afford research.

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what i do. I set spending to 100%.
Play the thalan insect race with
planetary magical 20% 8pts or speed +2 for 8pts.
(thalan already have bonuses on social and military and speed creates a long term advantage that will serve you well when your racing transports to early planetary raid the AI's undefended planets. planetary size increase means you'll have less colonys but the ones you have will be larger and more productive then the enemy's.

you land a 26 planet with a 20% multipler + a evil +20% planet size multiplier.
you wind up with a class 36-39 planet. once built up can crank out capital ships every 3-4 turns.

your inital colony should be at least a class 12.
build 4 factorys, 4 markets, 1 entertainment 1 farm and starport should already be there. 1 open space which you will want to put a manufacturing capital on later.
if you have bonus tiles with food bonuses. use them but then plan on using 2 entertainment instead of 1 and reducing the number of markets.

don't grab the nearest crappy class 4 planet. auto survey with your survey ship, automine with your miner. send your colony ship out to the closest starsystem.

do autobuild the factory. don't auto build a colony ship. (1000bc will be better spent buying factorys for 141 bc with the thalan race.

(early research galactic warfare, planetary improvemnets and sensors and then engines and minuterazation.. you'll want to create a few survey ships to grab loot for you as soon as you get impulse engines) I won't buy freighters what i'll do is tech trade for frieghters later in game with the korx or some AI that has frieghters built already. then as soon as i get his frieghters i send them to his world and start trade routes with them quickly) (colony techs do research on radiated planets and heavy gravity planets first because you can trade with a adaptor ictharian for aquatic and toxic and the yor has barren already.)

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Focus your production on planets, ie have them specialize much possible... by doing this you only need a few planets "focused" on research and the rest to military, with economic production. keep planets pops below 12 billion so you don't have to build morale structures. i build 2-3 factories on planets focused to research, and 4-5 factories on planets focused to economic, only time i will place several different types of structures is if the planets has many different pre-cursor artifacts.

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

If your having trouble in DA then play DL, it is a little more generous economically.

Also in DL i would recomend using the game option of 'tactician' and use the custom map called 'epic' and set anomalies to abundant.

Using 'tactician' does slow technology but it gives you much more starting cash and using the custom map called 'epic' provides no servey ships to the AI - so all the anomalies are yours.

If your economy runs down with those options then you might want to set your difficulty level to 'beginner'!!!

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