Difference between Beginner and Normal

Three things and these relate to 1.0X1 so if you are playing the BETA things maybe slightly different.

1) Beginner difficulty runs the AI at sub-normal level if memory serves. At this level their economy is set at 50% of normal and they get no higher algos. On the Normal difficulty the AI starts to get it's higher level algos along with an economy at 75%. Those two things can cause it to behave more aggressively.

2) It's not that difficult to maintain the same level of colony rush as the computer. It does however take an understanding of the underlying mechanics of how to manipulate your economy to get it to work. To pull it off you have to adjust your allocations on almost a turn by turn basis. If you notice the AI doesn't build a factory first. It builds a star port. Now it can rush build 2 ships in that turn. Couple that with a few 2500 bc anomalies and you'll quickly see how they had 4 colony ships to your 1.

3) I don't think the AI waits to find a good planet before building the colony ship. I think it will simply send a completed ship in the direction of the stars it can detect on the mini map and if those happen to have a habitable planet it settles there. Shaves a few turns off to say the least.

So if you follow their scheme you can easily have as many colonies as the AI does. You just have to accept that those colonies may not be as developed as you'd like. And no the AI is not cheating. Never has... never will.

THE AI DOESNT CHEAT. stardock has said it over and over again, and for each level it is clearly documented in many places what each level the ai gets. i have no problem at normal, i cant play higher then that yet. just play more games, try new strategies, and you'll get better. you have to buy your first few colony ships, and maybe factory too. it makes it a lot easier. i usually buy colony ships till i have about 600 cash left. its not soo hard like that.

cyber is right, you really have to mortgage your self to the hilt and basically build a colony ship per turn. You also have to accept that you won't get all the planets you want on the higher levels.

Really they need a mode between beginner and normal where the AI has access to the higher level algorithms but only 50% of the economy so the step up isn't so hard. Part of it is also human annoyance factor tho - nothing worse than having the AI grab that class 15 world when your colony ship is two turns away (and having it happen again and again)

On small maps you basically want to get 4 or 5 colony ships out there, with about an extra two or three per map size after that.

I don't do the same as the AI, but I still manage to keep up with them last time I played Normal.

The A.I. doesn't cheat. I play at higher levels and don't have a problem out colonizing the computer opponents.

Keep in mind that starports are also among the cheapest buildings. Rush building a staport the same turn you land (or the turn after) is only around a couple hundred bc. So in the beginning, it's no problem to have every world you touch producing colony ships, at least until you can't afford to buy them anymore.

I'm playing on the step above challenging (tough I think its called...) and (with a spot of luck here and there) got a significantly better grab than the AI at the beginning. Just follow the above steps about buying out 3-4 straight colony ships and at least one manufacturing plant at the beginning and you'll be alright.
Another thing that helps me is to send my flagship and my colony ships in DIFFERENT directions. This lets me scout more faster, if the flagship hits a world that no colony ships are near... well drat, but at least I know its there, otherwise I'd never see it and not have a chance at getting ahold of it. And on the flipside, alot of the time the flagship verifies blank systems for me while colony ships hit habitable worlds.

I highly reccomend upgrading your colony ships with new engines, so they'll double their speed.

It'll take a turn to upgrade your first one, but it's well worth it.

I just finished a game where my flagship came across a system with a 16, a 14, a 12 and a 10. Needless to say, I really wanted that system. Unfortunately, when my flagship spotted it, I also noticed the Korx flagship. I sent my flagship on a path to backtrack towards the Korx homeworld and encountered some of their colony ships on the way. I had my colony ships on the way, but the lead Korx ship was much closer and they had several more colony ships behind. From their positions, it looked like they would get half the system, at least.

So I started harassing the lead Korx colony ship with my flagship. Every turn, I'd move my flagship directly in front of it, to force it to skip sideways and drive it off-course a little. I continued my little interference pattern even when it was in the system, herding it in the direction of the planets that I calculated I could take half a turn ahead. The best part came when I had taken both planets on the near side of the system, and used my flagship, a colony ship and the sun to block him from directly crossing to the other side of the system. The end result of the little dance was four planets for me and four very PO'd Korx colony ships. They ended up only having 3 planets total in that game

So, next time you want to curse the AI for cheating, just be glad it doesn't pull this kind of dirty trick...

Dude, that's flippin hilarious.

The only thing I think is fishy is that AI seems to know where the planets and resourses are before me. Where I have to scout extensively to find them, they make a bee line right for them, and I would bet my left nut that there flagship has not been there yet.

The AI does NOT know where the good planets are. Only humans (played by the computer or yourself) don't know where planets are. Everyone else knows wher the planets are - but NOT weht quality they are.


Just to rpeat what's said above - the AI doesn't cheat at normal, it has a 25% handicap economically even, and it's dumbed down, too. If you find yourself 25% behind them at that level - well, that makes you 50% worse than a fairly playing dumbed down AI player. No cheating going on, just good play.

ok that's all great but somehow the AI buys lots of colonyships, also gets some constructors, which are more expensive and is most times way ahead in research, a thing that i don't understand, when they spend all their money on colony ships, also when you don't have enough money to buy factories at the start, the development of your colonies will take quite a while,

i'm able to keep up with AI at grabbing planets but not at the same time researching techs that are way ahead of theirs and develop my colonies

well it doesn't cheat, so if you can't keep up, they're obviously managing their taxes better, exchanging techs so they can spend money elsewhere, finding good anomalies...

They're not cheating, and at normal they actually run dumber and with less money than you. Try playing around with your strategy.

I guess thats why I said "it feels like"

You just get that feeling where no matter where you turn up, they have already been there, and this includes places you didn't really think they had the chance to reach given the period of time and how far away it was from their home world.

The "feeling" is that they knew more about the universe than you did, and I used *almost* every trick in the book (Will try the starport one next, I do build a factory first). Still... not only do they do this rush, but they also maintain decent research on top which baffles me.

But its probably true... just need to get out of the "Beginner" mentality and start redeveloping strategies for "Normal"

well... this is how it feels like to me...

AI DO scout for planets before sending colonyship (I have seen it many times in my games) for the most part.
Other than Human, all races start with "Stellar Cartography." So all races (other than human) know where all planets are. But they don't know plants' class. So scouts were sended out to check on them. As soon as the planet is within scout's sensor range, the class of the planet can be deterimine. Then the scout will move on to another sector, to another system... so on and so on... Its just that for the most of time this happened before your ship get to that area. So it looks like as if AI never scout them.

Now, there are times players sending colony ship out blindly.
Because "Stellar Cartography," all planets' locations are known. If you see 2-3 star systems nearby each other with 8-13 plants total, won't you send a colony ship there blindly? After all, the chance of finding a useable planet within that group is much much higher. And even if your colony ship gets there late, there might be 2-4 planets still available.
Taking a calculated risk like this is a very "Human" move (good AI design if you ask me ).

perhaps you should play a race that's not human next time, so you would have "Stellar Cartography" in the begining. And try more *tricks* , out colony rush AI at the normal level is not hard at all...

In my second ever game of GalCiv I out settled all the other civs on Normal. Granted I have come to this game from Civ4 so some things make sense, but if I can do it so can you. Personnally, I am really happy there are lots of levels ahead to provide a challenge. It is so hard to find a game that is challenging, so I am really happy to know that I have that to look forward to when playing GC.

I, too, am having a REALLY hard time making the jump from beginner to normal. I can hold my ground, but my chances of achieving supremacy are based on luck... last time I tried on Normal, I made it a point to have a strong defensive military but stay neutral in the galactic wars if I could. It only paid off when races started surrendering to me just to spite their enemies... I still managed to lose because of the technology gap...

I still agree that it is much more fun to lose gracefully than it is to win without a challenge.

I, too, am having a REALLY hard time making the jump from beginner to normal.

At first I found it really difficult too. The trick is to have a very strong economy through starbases even if you haven't got many planets. A diplomacy bonus also helps a lot too. The colony rush does help, but it is definitely not the be all end all.

The initial colony grab appears to be critical to victory on the harder levels. Here are some strategies I use on the small/medium sized maps at "tough" level as human:

As rygar said, build faster colony ships. They're more expensive but worth it.
Buy your colony ships, don't wait for them to build.
Get Stellar Cartography fast. You can micromanage your research slider so that you get it within a few weeks.
If I can see two promising systems near each other, I'll gamble on sending a fast colony ship toward them before scouting.

Does anyone know if the initial setup tries to "balance" the available worlds? Sometimes I start in what looks like a hopeless position, with 90% of the systems behind other players. On the other hand, I played one game where I took half the map by grabbing the worlds at the computer players' borders. The remaining systems were out of their range and I could take them at my leisure.

The initial colony grab appears to be critical to victory on the harder levels.

Everyone in this thread is commenting on a series of fundamental flaws in this game:

1) You start with limited fog of war - you know where stars are and how many planets there are per star (AI knows this as well). There is very limited exploration in the game.
2) You start with (for all intents and purposes) unlimited ship range - so you can instantly colonize vast expanses of the galaxy.
3) You start with far to much cash - enough to buy four or five colony ships, or several planetary improvements. You should maybe have enough starting cash to buy ONE ship or ONE improvement.
4) All colonizable planets can be colonized by all races (unlike MOO where planets had size AND type, and type dictated what tech or race was required to settle on the planet).
5) There are no research techs that allow you to colonize "grade 0" planets or create new planets - what you get at the beginning of the game is it.

So what's left? An all-out land grab for the first hour of the game that dictates the winner 90% of the time. The rest is just careful management of resources until your planetary superiority overwhelms your opponents.

The thing that made MOO so successful was the DEPTH of gameplay strategy, and that you could play the game over and over and use different races and different strategies and win the game in very different ways. GC2 is close, but needs some definite tweaking to get there. The whole early game aspect of "race to colonize planets regardless of your race, situation, or strategy" has to be reworked.

Perhaps stardock should add a in between difficulty, between beginner and normal. EG: 75% econ, but no higher level algorithms or 50% econ with higher level algorithms. It's help noobies (like me) get used to the AI being smarter, or the AI being richer without getting overwhelmed.

I think the problem is that you depend on your population due to taxes, there is actually no drawback in having lots of planets colonized, you get more money, you can have more research and more production since there is more space for those buildings, it's all about colonizing the most planets so your econ gets boosted beyond morality, the problem is that you cannot sit back and try to get ahead in research or influence since research only works with enough money which you can only get through taxes at the beginning, another point is that teching is way to powerful, you get so much bonuses through some techs, it's unbelieveable

WEll, not even tough is that tough on a gigantic. I think the games are harder on smaller galaxies because if you have one less planet than everyone it's alot where as on a gigantic I'm 20 to 30 planets behind number one yet still have a stronger military, Economy, and tech base. So this "Land Grab" thing isn't quite as powerfuli in those larger galaxies.

As for different types, I only played MoO2 with the toxic, barren etc. I really enjoyed the "Lithovore" ability as I never had to farm. Add in Unification (bonus to production) or maybe telepathic, and you win. I usually liked Telepathic, Creative, Unification and large homeworld. for plusses...

Anyway, It would be great if you could BUILD an orbital terraformer to terraform class 0 planets up to class 5 or so. That would be it, but it could help.