I must be an absolute oldie newbie

We all know the game cheats, as a way to counter the effects of our ability to strategically think

Wrong, it isn't cheating yet. It's beating you by out-thinking you. AND it isn't on the highest level, it still can't see you building up. Tough is the last level without cheating of any kind. Sorry to break it to you

The war issue: You sound like you don't have a big enough army. You're a weakling and they know it. Get armed or prepare to die, always. You MUST design your own ships in the beginning to hold people off.

Influence: Starbases have to be built up, and planets must have a high population to make influence. Add influence bonuses etc.

Trade is important. A), it's a constant relationship +, it's free money.

Balance is very bad. Planets MUST be specialised. I mean it. You have capitals for a reason, they produce loads.

What's your spending?

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

Marcathonas hit the nails on the head there. AI smell weak targets like sharks are attracted to blood.

If you have more questions shoot.

Basically I'd rethink your priority on military. You can be not overly military but still have a decent defense force plus 1-2 fighters per planet.

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.

Your military ratng is based on the number of starships with attack capability you have. Or it might be the number of attack points on all of your ships, I'm not completely sure. The best thing you can do to boost your military rating is first of all, take the time to research or trade space weapons quickly. This tech gives you the basic particle beam weapon. Next, and throughout the colonization phase, build one tiny ship with this weapon on every world that has a starport. The Defender is fine for this, or build you own. Just having this one basic ship on each world will give you a decent early military rating.

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. Your relations with the other races are directly influenced by your Diplomacy rating, though, so it's also worth investing in some Diplo techs to keep them off your back while you build up. Additionally, a high Diplomacy rating makes it easier to trade for other races' techs.

I can't tell whether you're doing this or not from your post, but build at least a couple of factories on a new planet (colonized or conquered) before you start cranking out research buildings - it helps the research facilities go up much faster, and can help you build ships faster when you need them later.

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

Really? I must have missed that among the hundreds of lines of fixes

[steals away from forum, checks to make sure wife is firmly planted in front of television, starts up a new sandbox game...]

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.

Ok We all know the game cheats, as a way to counter the effects of our ability to strategically think, but this is rediculous.

No, the AI does not cheat until you turn it up above the "tough" setting. It really is just better than you. Here are a few pointers to get you started.

Make sure your spending is at 100%. Each tax rate that is a multiple of ten represents a big jump in how unhappy your people are, so stick with 49%, 59%, 69%, etc. Purchase your first couple of colony ships instead of building them. (Or purchase a couple of factories and turn social spending way up, either way) Specialize your planets whenever possible, at least one specialized planet for each capital. Build a military early to stop people from picking on you and design your own ships. The AI will design its ships to counter the ships it has already fought, so using the same weapons and defenses the entire game can really screw you over unless you have a huge tech lead. Trade for techs if that is enabled; the AI does it, you should too. Trade is free money and it makes people like you. Bribe your neighbor's neighbor to go to war with your neighbor if you can afford it.

So specialization is better than balancing each planet ?

But wont it affect the manufacturing point on a planet ?

Be careful you don't pump out colony ships too fast, it can really cripple you early on as population growth was lowered in 1.1 making mass colony rush less viable (pretty sure one of the journal entries mentioned this). This is also why I love my custom civ with population growth and morale bonuses.

As mentioned, specialize planets (watch out for the population hard cap that is tied to PQ)

Keep a close eye on military rating. I usually sit and watch the graphs, and as soon as one civ shows up as having power I switch to military research and production, get myself high enough to avoid being seen as easy pickings, and then switch back. Rinse and repeat as needed.

Last thing: influence. It is based heavily upon the population of a planet.....if your planets have a 5 billion cap and all of theirs are holding, at the least, 10+ billion you'll lose the influence race every time.

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.

You may also want to check those spending sliders folks have mentioned every few turns or so. As you build more buildings on yoru worlds, the balance there changes. As your overall population grows, you will need to adjust higher tax rates for more money, or lower for more moral. You get a nice boost to poplulation growth as you raise your moral above 75% on up to 100%. Really big bonuses at 100%.

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.

Regarding influence, the Torians may have traded for it, instead of cash if their neighbours were broke. They also get population bonuses. I'm not sure if influence is related to the population per planet or just the number of planets.

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.

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.

Yes, the AI's main strength is that they can micromanage spending + military/social/research sliders, a lot more optimally than the human. I find that if I'm willing to experiment with the 5 sliders I can always squeeze out more bcs for the same work but it is never really worth the effort.

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.

Very good advise and I fully agree. I would add that keeping spending at 100% at all times, while keeping
tax rates reasonable is prettty much impossible unless you do some of the following

1) Build lots of economy buildings in big planets, also economic improvement techs also add to your econ ability.
2) Build up and mine economy resources.
3) Rsearch and change to advanced governments

I find that doing 3) pretty much does the trick.

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.

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.

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.

what i try to do is to keep planets populations about the same so i can keep my tax rate as high as possable. t

Again I don't get you, why are you so worried about the one or two planets with slightly lower morale than average? Okay so they arent at 98% but at 90% so what?

Is this merely an optimizing thing? Seems an awful lot of work, and it's unclear to me whether it is worth trying to keep all your population on all planets exactly the same just for this. I just let the planets that grow faster do so naturally and shore up weak spots when I need to.

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

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).

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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.

There is big difference between approal of 99% and 100%.
Yes +100% growth bonus!
So it's imperative, for at least those colonies with less then 5mil to have 100approval, so they could grow quickly and give you economy boost.
That's why small colonies need entertainment centers too. Too offset tax penalty, while still keeping 100% approval.

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.

Gotta love guys who make statements without knowing the facts.