Trade is very helpful. Like it was said, it's free money.

Also being neutral won't help things with the Altarians and Torians if you're trying to stay out of war with them. If you're good then the other good races will be a bit more reluctant to attack you.

Secondly, consider investing some of your racial ability points into Diplomacy instead of Research. Research ability points only actually give half of their stated bonus, according to earlier posts on this forum.

No longer true as of 1.1

The issue with the Altarians invading you, they probably used Mass Drivers or some other invasion tech to cut down on the effectiveness of your troops. That would explain why they were able to take out your 5000m planet.

The Torians seem to be masters at population and morale. In my current game, the only one who rivals them in influence are the Altarians.

Oh, and another possibility may be that you're not using your production to its fullest potential, meaning you still have the slider at 50% rather than boosting it all the way up to 100% or some point between those two values. If you invest some points into espionage, you'll be able to keep track of your opponents' research values and their research projects.

Regarding your military, they'll pick on you if you don't have a physical showing of military strength. They don't seem to take your potential military strength into account. The AI will jump on you if you have no defenses. Trade does help to make your relations with them more positive.

So specialization is better than balancing each planet ?

But wont it affect the manufacturing point on a planet ?

The reason the Torians have more influence than you is because influence is affected by population. And they probably have more people than you.

So specialization is better than balancing each planet ?

A common debate, but unless it's a high-class world (27+), I find that this is true. Small worlds make research, medium worlds build stuff, large worlds are money farms (because they can afford the large number of buildings to keep people happy). But every world (just about) needs to start with 2 factories. That's just required.

I bought GC2 off the shelf the day it was placed on it. I played the beginner level, and as predicted I won without a sinlge issue. So I elevated myself to the rank of normal. and I have yet to win a game. Ok We all know the game cheats, as a way to counter the effects of our ability to strategically think, but this is rediculous. Just about every civ out researches me, and I have all the bonuses and 2 starbases mining research. I have research academies, and they are still using level one or two labs. What gives?

Sorry, but it's actually player that cheats the AI at normal.
AI economy is run only at 75% at Normal difficulty and AI doesn't use all of its available AI algorithms (so it's just dumber).

Read the manual, where difficulties are explained.

I got my butt handed to me the first few times on Normal too. Mostly because I didn't understand the economy very well which is probably the trickiest part of this game. It's no doubt the reason why the AI's seem so overproductive comparatively speaking.

My beginer econ advice: always try to make enough money to keep that spending slider maxed out. If it's not maxed out the you are wasting productivity. It doesn't matter how many factories and research centers there are if you can't fund them.

Other have stated it, but you must must must have a military even if you wish to play it Swiss. At minimum the Drengin will always come for you if you don't fortify.

3) Rsearch and change to advanced governments

so true, even researching republic can take you from a 50BC debit per turn to a 30 BC credit per turn.

my general path is that i get to second stage factorys, then max out the economic buildings then go for atleast democracy (i run high taxes so i like the political capitol on earth)

another 'trick' ive learned is this. your tax rate and how it relates to moral is kinda confusing. since the tax rate is empire wide but your moral score is a function of each planet.

and example, you have 10 size 10 planets, with 10 billion people each and one moral booster. what ever you set your tax rate too all the planets will drop moral the exact same. if you set your tax rate at 59% moral will be 100%, if you move your tax rate too 60% ALL your planets will now have a moral of 98%.

NOW this is where you can get bit in the ass. say you have your 10 planets, PLUS your home world. now your homeworld has 15 billion people instead of the 10 billion the rest of your empire has. when you jump that slider to 60% instead of earth having a moral of 98% its got a moral of 90% (since their over crounding moral hit is larger than the rest of the empire). but the REST of your empire would still be 98%. so earth is the single biggest effector of moral and your empire wide tax rate can only be set based on earths moral rate because thats your weakest link.

what i try to do is to keep planets populations about the same so i can keep my tax rate as high as possable. then i use the political capitol improvment to ballance out my homeworlds 5 billion population bonus that it gets for being the homeworld. at the end of most of my games all my planets of PQ 10 or larger have atleast 15 billion people with earth at 20 billion (and the political cap to remove moral hits for the extra 5 billion over crouding). this system allows me to keep the tax rate as high as possable for the most number of planets and still maintain good moral.

all the PQ 9 and smaller planets generaly are used for super projects, or research anyhow. i dont really develope them i just keep the enemy from doing anything with them, and since i build no farms on them they never get over crouded, and their moral curve is allways higher than my core empires is with farms.

just remeber your moral in relation to your tax rate is based largly on your LEAST liked planet, and that is generaly your highest population planet, avoid having a few large population planets and many mid range population planets since you will have to set your tax rate lower to make those large population planets happy and that in turn will make you miss out on all the taxes from the mid range planets.

a few games ago i was fooling around trying to get one planet with as large a population as possable. it was a class 18 to start (24 after teraforming) with 2 tripple farm tiles. as soons as i hit about 20 billion people my moral was at 46% for the planet, with a tax rate of 49% and an income of about 300 BC per turn. while the REST of my empire with 10 billion per planet was at 100% moral.

i striped the farms and got the population to 10 billion on my 18 PQ world like the rest of my empire, then i jacked the tax rate to 69%. now ALL my planets had a moral of 75% and my income was about 780 BCs a turn.

almost doubleing my income from NOT having huge populations on one or two planets.

I think i missing something about this morale thing....

its just based on the fact you get population bonusus for having a certian moral level is all.

i target 100% but ill settle for 75%. and since they changed the population growth in 1.1 its actualy importiant to concider now how fast your population grows.

I don't understand, what do you mean it's your weakest link? True in your example Earth would have the lowest morale, but so what? Just build morale improvements there if you really care. I wouldn't.

if you try to keep earth at a reasonable moral level then all your other smaller pop planets are under taxed to fund earths moral. and adding moral boosters is not allways a viable answer since there are huge moral hits for over crounding and moral buildings just cant keep up. the hits grow faster than the bonusus do after a certian pop point.

if it was to be fixed then all planets tax rate would be able to be set on an individual basis. that way you could have 20 billion people on earth with a 49% tax rate and 15 billion people on skybow 3 with a 69% tax rate.

the game is just set up odd in my opinion. you either have to over tax your large planets or under tax your medium, or do as i do and keep all your planets about the same population so you can max taxes empire wide.


to really see this in action , the next time you get a tripple food tile on your home world, use it. put a farm on it and see how huge the moral differences can be from a large population plant to a mid size planet can get due to over crouding. to keep earth at even 50% moral your taxes have to be at less than 30% or you have to build nothing but moral boosters along with that one farm.

it makes all the farm bonus tiles almost worthless. since the way the tax system works you cant really adjust to the differences between low pop worlds and high pop worlds. your either over taxing or under taxing.

in my opinion the tax rates should either be adjustable on each individual planet (like moral is now), or the moral should NOT be based on each individual planet but rather empire wide (like the tax rate is now).

Each difficulty level and map size and race choice has optimal opening strategies. Practicing and streamlining the early game is one of the most effective ways for a player to improve. Rush buying, research choices, slider choices are all important. I like to purchase a factory or two, a fast colony ship (three move) on the beginning, research engines until Impulse drive. I like to keep morale at 100% with low, low taxes early, because that extra population will pay off big time during the expansion phase.

Like I said, on other map sizes there may be better openings.

Another cool trick is to put the initial colony ship back home to load more people. There are only 100 million loaded, and it can hold 500 million. A planet seems to need a full one billion to get normal pop growth. Starting at 100 million takes a LONG time to get there.

A new update from 1.1, may make other choices more interesting.

Trade is big help. It improves relations and brings in much needed money. The game is setup so the average player will barely have enough money or run a deficit if they don't trade.

You should feel happy that normal is challenging you. As an experienced gamer, tough (best AI w/o cheating) is ridiculously easy. I am playing on "painful" now and that is also too easy.

At least you can have fun with the game.