EDIT: The combat and shipbuilding tips in this guide apparently are going to be COMPLETELY invalid pretty soon. Stardock's working on altering the game again to where ships can still shoot back, even if you attack and kill them first.
So...... I guess the combat tips will apply as of RIGHT NOW (May 6), but not in the future. I'll guess I'll spend several days seeing how the new combat engine works and update this guide yet again.

This is an update to the older guide I wrote a while back. https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=162&AID=112366

1.1 is so different from 1.0 that my original guide does more harm than good if it's applied to the new version. It has better tips too.

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Legal Crap
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Galactic Civilizations II is published by Stardock. Please pay for your game instead of downloading a torrent. These guys (and girl) are clearly gamers themselves and created a bad ass game. Please support their effort.

Copyright and other rights are waived. Feel free to copy it wherever you like.

You should use this guide if you are new to the game or if you have been playing for a while can't seem to get anywhere with it. I suggest playing the game at "Normal" or "Challenging" difficulty. At the higher levels, you're going to get your butt kicked. Some of these tips will actually hurt you, if you apply them to the higher levels. At the lower levels, nothing interesting happens. "Normal" is just about right for non-experts.

The guide assumes that you are somewhat familiar with the game. Sometimes I say to do something without explaining HOW to do it, because anyone familiar with the game should know how. This guide will become a novel if I try to explain every little detail. This guide is to explain how to win the game, not how to operate it.

This is Version Two of this guide. It applies only to version 1.1 of the game. Many of the tips will not make sense if applied to earlier versions. Only the combat tips should be used with the campaign missions. The tips on setting up your civilization will not work in the campaign.

I rewrote this entire guide from an earlier version because Stardock completely redesigned the game in between version 1.0 and 1.1. My original guide is junk if you're using the latest version of the game. (Some people thought it was junk to begin with, but oh well).

I also made a big mistake the first time around. I was playing with rare habitable planets and tight star clusters. I had no idea just how NICE it is to have a fair number of very high quality planets, because the game will not give you high quality planets with the rare setting.

Quite a few people didn't like the fact that I suggested, in the first guide, restarting if there are no planet bonuses on your home world. I'm not including that part this time, because it is nowhere near as important now anyway.

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BEFORE YOU START...
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Make sure AUTOSAVE is enabled. Yes, it's annoyingly slow when making a save point. It is even more annoying when the game crashes 50 turns after your last manual save. You can decrease the frequency in the beginning of the game, but you'll need to move it back to 12 turns or less later on, when each turn becomes more complicated.

CUSTOMIZING YOUR RACE

IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID

Pick the Federalist party, which should be selected already. The tech boost in picking Technologist isn't all that helpful. The production boost for picking Industrialist is nice, but.... If you don't have very many planets, you won't be able to pay for the ships you can build, you will go bankrupt and eventually lose the game. Federalists have a nice economic boost and the economy is one of the most important things you can boost.

You also should reset the racial abilities and give yourself the biggest economy boost you can. What you do with the other points is up to you. I strongly suggest Weapons, Defense and Morale.

On your very first game, I suggest going with a medium galaxy. Play it through just to get a feel for the game, then move on to huge or gigantic galaxies. If your computer is slow, don't play on a gigantic galaxy on any level above "Normal", because it will really slow down.


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SETTING UP YOUR CIVILIZATION
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IN THE BEGINNING....

The game starts with the research screen. Click DONE, because it's already researching the first thing you need. Then the planet screen pops up for your home world.

You may have bonuses on some of the planet tiles. Research or manufacturing bonuses are very good to have. Make sure to put factories on the manufacturing bonuses, labs on the research bonuses, entertainment buildings on the approval bonuses, etc.

First thing, buy a factory (buy it, don't build it). Next, build a market center, a research facility, an entertainment center, then a couple more factories. On every other tile, put a market center (you can replace them later).

If you have a precursor mine bonus tile on your home world, that is FANTASTIC. One factory built on that tile will be worth 7 factories built on any other tile. The thing is, you can't build a factory there just yet. You will go into debt pretty quickly if you build a factory there right off, so just build factories on other tiles until you start pulling in hundreds of billions of credits per turn. After you're making a bunch of money, THEN you can put a factory on that tile.

You want to build at least three or four factories on Earth in the beginning, since this will be the planet with the highest industrial capacity in the beginning. You can replace them later with other stuff, when another colony takes over the ship building duties.

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER build a farm on your home world. NEVER DO THAT. EVER. You will run into huge morale problems that can't be solved by lowering taxes.

I once built a farm on Earth, on a tile with a 300% agriculture bonus. By the time I'd researched Advanced Farming, I had the capacity to feed 42 billion people on that planet. Trust me, even at half that population, you'll never keep your people happy. Your approval rating goes way down, you have to stop taxing your population altogether and you could end up with a revolt. The last thing you want to see is that Earth has broken away to form the Terran Confederacy. Then you have to invade your own home world just to get it back.

On colony worlds, you should build one farm. I don't recommend more than one farm, even on your economic capital. By following my tips, you'll be making plenty of money without the extra population and you won't have the morale problems. Do not build farms on tiles with agriculture bonuses. More trouble than it's worth.

Click DONE to close the planet screen. Your survey vessel will be selected. Press A to send it off after anomalies. DO NOT USE THE SURVEY VESSEL TO SCOUT. Those anomalies give you some outrageous bonuses and by the time you can build another survey vessel, all the anomalies will be gone.

Your colony ship will be selected next. Send it off to the nearest star to scout for planets. You can see stars on the minimap, but not planets just yet.

NOTE: Ignore the following tip if you are playing the game at "Tough" or higher.
Don't colonize Mars yet. It is a very poor planet and you have better uses for that colony ship. Wait until you can't find any other habitable planets before you colonize Mars. It doesn't matter if another race colonizes it, because the influence of Earth will overwhelm the alien's influence and you'll get it anyway.

Next, you need to immediately design four new ships: A fast colony ship, a long range colony ship, a fast scout and a fast constructor.

Supposedly they fixed it so that there isn't a massive rush to colonize every habitable planet in the galaxy all at once. I don't know what they did but I don't see any difference. If you don't start colonizing on a massive scale right away, it's going to hurt you severely because the other civs will be doing it. Colonies == taxes == production capacity.

FAST COLONIZER - In the ship designer, pick a cargo hull. Put a colony module on it and as many engines as you can make fit. If there is room left over, put on life support modules. This is the ship you'll send to planets near the other civs. Hopefully you can beat them there. There's nothing more frustrating than sending an armada of colony ships to an empty star cluster, only to have the other civs beat you there with faster colonizers twenty turns later.

LONG RANGE COLONIZER - Once you get stellar cartography researched, look for planets a long way off with no other civs near them. You'll send your long range colonizers there and hope no one beats you to them. Put on one colony module, then pack it with as many life support modules as you can fit. Don't put engines, sensors or anything else. It'll be slow, but it'll be able to reach planets the regular colony ship can't.

SCOUT MK II - The default scout is a piece of junk. Obsolete the design and build another one. Pick a cargo hull and pack as many engines as you can fit. I have found that it is much more useful for the scout to be fast than for it to have sensors, so don't waste space on sensors. Buy one (don't build it) as soon as the game starts and send it off to every star you see on the minimap. After that, switch to building new colony ships. If, later on, you can't get to an area because of range, either send a constructor to build a starbase or wait until a nearby planet is colonized. That will increase the range of the scout. Or, if you've managed to research miniaturization or better life support, you can upgrade the design for longer range.

FAST CONSTRUCTOR - There are natural resources scattered around the galaxy that give very powerful boosts. A properly mined morale resource will let you tax your citizens at an outrageous level in an emergency. Try doing that without a morale resource and you'll end up with a revolt. Keep sending constructors to add more mining modules.

The default constructor is fine for resources far away from anybody else. For resources that are close to another civ, you need a faster constructor to beat out anyone else. Cargo hull > constructor module > as many engines as will fit. Bear in mind that it will be more expensive, so use it only when needed.

Try to avoid colonizing low quality planets (class 4 or lower), unless there is no better planet within range. That goes even if it's in the same star system with a planet you have colonized. If someone else gets it, the influence of the better planet usually will overwhelm the alien influence and you'll end up with it anyway. You might end up with better factories out of it. That applies only if playing the game at "Normal" or lower. Don't try it at "Tough".

If you want to do well at all, you'll need AT LEAST 8 colonies - MINIMUM- of fairly high quality. Any less than that and you are going to have problems. You can get by with 4 or 5, but you will be at a disadvantage.

When sending out new colony ships, launch them with only 100 colonists (actually, 100 million, but it says 100). If you're playing with abundant planets, you could easily depopulate your home world. 100 million colonists is more than enough to start a colony.

At some point, you probably will run into money problems, especially when you have a bunch of colony ships running around. This is because a large part of your tax base is in deep space instead of earning money on a planet. You can bump up the tax rate in the domestic window. Raising taxes hurts morale. Try to keep the approval level at 76% or higher or your population growth will slow down. Never EVER let your approval go below 51% in any circumstance.

ETHICAL DILEMMAS

When colonizing planets and at random intervals, you might be presented with a situation and asked how to handle it. There is a good choice, a neutral choice and an evil choice. As often as possible, choose the neutral choice. If it mentions the precursors during the colonization of a planet, choose the evil choice, because you could end up with a precursor mine or a very nice research bonus. If choosing neutral is going to lead to some sort of penalty, like morale or soldiering penalties, choose evil. Every other time, choose neutral. That will be important later on.

RESEARCH

Once Xeno Research is done, start researching Stellar Cartography. If you zoom in on the minimap, you'll notice that you can see stars but not planets. Once you have Stellar Cartography, you can see planets in areas you haven't explored yet. THAT is how the AI tends to beat you to most of the planets, because they already have Stellar Cartography and they just send colony ships to any star system with planets.

Next, you want to research Galactic warfare, Space Militarization, Space Weapons (do we really need three separate techs here?) and Mass Driver Theory. The other civs will be researching other things, so they won't build warships as quickly as you can by doing this. The first two also boosts your ship building capacity.

Once you're done with "Space Weapons", start building a "Defender" on every planet that has completed its starport. Don't do it on Earth yet, because you need it producing other ships. As long as you get to this fairly quickly, your military rating should stay at a high enough level that the other civs won't bother you. More than likely, you'll be the first civ to build any sort of warship.

No other factor matters more in your relations with the other civs than your military strength. Beat the other civs in the arms race and they'll all be friendly or at least neutral. Never let any other civ become more powerful militarily if you can help it.

After that, start researching Planetary Improvements, then Xeno Economics. The first boosts your ship building/social/research production, the second boosts your economy. Don't start researching Xeno Industrial Theory until you have finished the initial colony rush, because you get a more expensive factory that takes longer to build. They take less time to build once you have a basic factory, so it's better to wait.

Then, start researching Universal Translater, Diplomatic Relations and finally Trade.

Contact every race you can and give them the Trade technology. Don't trade for it - give it to them for free. A) Giving gifts improves your relations and They'll start sending freighters to you before you ever finish one yourself. When you research Advanced Trade and Master Trade, also give that out to anyone who doesn't have it. Of course, if you've disabled tech trading in the options, you can't do this.

You can redesign the freighter to give it more speed or longer range. Don't bother arming it, because it'll die from one hit anyway.

As soon as you can, you need to research all the way up the sensor tech tree. It shouldn't take too long, though you may have to increase your research spending. Once you've researched Sensors MK IV, you can build something called "Eyes of the Universe". Build that (or buy it, if you have the money) as soon as possible. See the "Planetary Improvements" section for more info on this.

After you've done all that, I strongly suggest researching Advanced Computing and Basic Logistics as quickly as possible. Advanced Computing lets you build a Technological Capital, which you should put on the colony with the best research bonuses. Logistics lets you put more ships together into a fleet, research larger hulls and better life support components.

As tempting as it is to build a technological, economic or manufacturing capital as early as possible, don't do it until you have colonized every available planet. You can build only one of each, you cannot move or remove one once it is built and it sucks big time to build a manufacturing capital, only to colonize a planet later and find a precursor mine. Wait until every single habitable planet within your range has been colonized.

Now, here comes the main difference between this guide and the previous guide. In the first guide, I said to ignore xeno ethics. Since then, they have made a change that makes ethics one of the most important technologies in the game. That change is the "Neutrality Learning Center", which you can get only by aligning yourself as neutral. It is far better than any of the other research facilities - even the discovery sphere, which takes forever to research.

The instant you notice that xeno ethics is less than 20 weeks away, stop whatever it is you are doing. If you are at war, try to make peace immediately because this is more important and you don't need the distraction. Switch your research to xeno ethics.

Go to the domestic window, turn social and military production spending down to 10 or 20% and crank research production up as high as possible. Crank up the industrial spending slider to 100% also. Don't do this if it is going to bankrupt you, but spend as much money as possible. Raise taxes if you have to, just not so far as to cause a riot.

Once you have xeno ethics researched, a window will pop up and ask you to choose your alignment. Choose neutral. Now, go back to the research window and start researching "Research Academies". When that's done, start researching "Neutrality Learning Center". Keep your spending as high as possible until you get to it.

Once you have that done, you will have to go to every single planet and manually upgrade every single lab/research center to the Neutrality Learning Center, because the game will not do it automatically. Once that is done, switch 80% of your spending to social production, with the other 20% going to research. It will take a while to build all those centers, but it WILL be worth the wait.

After several of them have been built, you can decrease your social spending and raise research spending. Try to leave social spending on at least 20% until the last learning center is built. You will become amazingly more advanced than all of the other civilizations, if you build several of these centers. You are practically guaranteed to win, unless you're playing against Dread Lords or a difficult level. In fact, I predict that Stardock will redesign a future build to make the Neutrality Learning Center a little less powerful, simply because it makes things sooooooo easy. For now, this works beautifully.

As quickly as possible, research your way up to Galactic Stock Exchange. Money is extremely important in this game.

When you have the time (and after you have built several Stock Exchanges), research up the Mass Driver tech tree. Keep going until you get to "Singularity Driver IV". Once you have that researched, you can now build one of the most powerful weapons in the game - the Nano Ripper.

The Nano Ripper is insanely powerful. In fact, people complain to Stardock all the time that it is ridiculously overpowered. They did actually reduce its damage potential in one of the patches. Even at its currently reduced level, it is still too powerful .... but it sure is nice to have it when someone decides to invade you. Until you research as far as Photon Torpedoes or Phasors MK VII, no weapon is more powerful. Not even Zero Point Armor is an effective defense against it. And, for some reason, the other civs rarely seem to use it themselves (maybe they do at the higher levels). It is pretty expensive, but it most definitely is worth the cost.

After you have that weapon, I suggest switching to researching the beam weapons. You have to research all the way to the end of the mass driver tree before getting another weapon of equal power.

Eventually, you really need to research Interstellar Republic, Star Democracy and Star Federation. They provide huge economic and industrial capacity boosts. Don't start off with it though, because it takes A LONG TIME to get that far.

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PLANETARY IMPROVEMENTS
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There are some things you have to build as soon as possible. There are other things you should not build at all.

Be sure to build farms, but make sure you build one approval building for each farm, otherwise the people will be unhappy at the overcrowding. You need two or three approval buildings for each farm built on top of an agriculture bonus. Class 5 planets and lower will never reach a high population, so don't bother with farms on those planets. Unless you plan to ship more colonists there.

This is the order in which I build things when I colonize a new planet and it seems to work well for me.

Starport
Factory
Market Center
Research facility
Approval Building (entertainment network, in the beginning)
Farm
2nd Factory

You need the starport most of all, because you need to get a defender built on that planet. Plus, it builds faster than anything else. Some people prefer to not build any starport on crappy planets (class 4 and lower). They prefer to build nothing but research centers. You can do that if you want, but make sure you send a defender to that planet from somewhere else. And remember that whatever ship is sent to that planet cannot be launched again without a starport.

The factory lets you build all the other stuff far more quickly. If you have the cash, buy your first factory instead of building it, especially if there's a manufacturing bonus tile.

The market center is so the planet pays for itself.

The research facility should be obvious.

The approval building should be built before the farm. Otherwise, you could have a farm and a high population while the approval building is still not completed and you'll run into morale problems.

The second factory is because you should have at least two on every planet, except for poor planets. The first two available factories are crap and are hardly better than the initial colony for building things. Having two makes it easier to build other things.

MUST HAVES:

ECONOMIC CAPITAL - This drastically increases the amount of tax revenue you make from the planet on which it is built. Generally, you want to build this on the highest quality planet in your civilization, because then you can fill that planet with over a dozen stock exchanges and just RAKE in the money. Make absolutely certain you build at least one farm. If the planet is extremely high quality (class 30 or better), feel free to build two farms. Just be aware that you'll need 3 to 6 approval buildings to keep up morale if you do that.

Try to avoid building anything else on this planet, except for the starport and a couple of factories. After all the stock exchanges have been built, you can even remove the factories and put in more stock exchanges. You will need a couple of factories in the beginning, just so you can build all those stock exchanges.

You need to research Trade.

MANUFACTURING CAPITAL - Put this on the planet with the highest potential for military building. Look at all of your planets and see which one has the most manufacturing bonus tiles. If any planet has a precursor mine, that's your manufacturing capital. Build that, build a starport and then nothing else but factories. Later, you can replace one factory with a Hyperion Shipyard (assuming the planet is fairly high quality and you can afford to replace any factory). Do not replace the starport with a Hyperion shipyard, because it does not act as a starport.

Unfortunately, the game has a very annoying habit of putting the best manufacturing bonuses on crappy planets, which leaves you little room to build anything at all. Just remember, a factory built on top of a precursor mine is worth 7 factories built anywhere else, so it might be worth it to build your manufacturing capital on a crappy planet. You don't need a farm, stock exchange or any of the other stuff on this planet. Besides, after aligning as neutral, that class 5 planet might suddenly become a class 9 or better.

Wait until you have colonized every single available planet before building this. You don't want to build it on a planet with a 300% manufacturing bonus, only to colonize a planet later and find a precursor mine.

You need to research Xeno Industrial Theory.

DO NOT BUILD THIS ON A MANUFACTURING BONUS TILE. The manufacturing capital does not itself produce any industrial capacity. It is just an administrative building.

TECHNOLOGICAL CAPITAL - Put this on the planet producing the most research. It greatly increases the research production (how do you "produce" research anyway?).

Look through your planets and see which one has the most research bonuses. A bonus tile with two golden pyramids is a 300% research bonus. The highest quality planet you have that has that particular bonus (if you have any) is your tech capital.

You have to research Advanced Computing.

DO NOT BUILD THIS ON A RESEARCH BONUS TILE. The tech capital does not itself produce any research. It is just an administrative building.

EMBASSY/CULTURAL EXCHANGE CENTER - I hate it and so will you, but you'll need at least one on any colony close to somebody else. You may not want an influence victory but the AI does, so you'll find them building as many as 10 embassies on planets next to their neighbors. I've even caught them putting embassies on precursor mines, which is just insanely stupid.

Unless you want your colonies getting swallowed up in someone else's influence, you need these. If it's a low quality planet, ignore it. You probably won't lose it and you need other things on those planets. You do NOT need one on Earth (or whatever home world), because it has major influence anyway, as it is your capital. Be sure to build them on tiles with influence bonuses if you have any.

MARKET CENTER / TRADE CENTER / BANK / STOCK EXCHANGE - Build at least one on each planet, unless it's very low quality. Build two or three if you have room for them. However many you build, the first one should always be the third thing you build, after factory and starport (unless there are manufacturing/research bonuses).

If you're raking in enough dough, you can build a huge number of gargantuan battle fleets. If you're not making any money, you won't be able to maintain your warships, even if you can build them. I've had to decommission warships in the middle of a losing war because I simply couldn't afford the weekly maintenance costs.

Later, once you've colonized every available planet and built everything you need, start filling empty planet tiles with stock exchanges. Look at every planet and fill every empty tile with a stock exchange. If you need to build something later, you can just replace a stock exchange. In the meantime, that empty tile can be put to use making you money.

EYES OF THE UNIVERSE - BUILD THIS - AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. After you build this thing, every single ship and every single starbase will have sensor coverage out to 15 parsecs in every direction. Extremely damned useful. You also can see every ship and starbase on the minimap, which honestly I wish it wouldn't do. That kind of takes the fun out of it for me.

Only one of these can be built, so make absolutely certain you build it before anybody else does.

You need to research Sensors MK IV.

TIR QUAN TRAINING - This building gives an incredible boost to your soldiering skills. It can mean the difference between losing a planet and fighting off an invasion.

You need to research up to Space Marines.

GALACTIC PRIVATEER - Building this is supposed to prevent anyone from attacking your freighters. It doesn't always work (a bug I guess).

The exception is if you are playing the "Dread Lords on Parade" scenario. Never build this in that scenario. Although the Dread Lords can't attack your freighters, they'll keep trying anyway. The view will be jerked across the galaxy each time they try and they end up sending dozens of warships all following a freighter along its trade route, one square per turn. This will quickly drive you insane.

Contrary to popular belief, they did not fix that in 1.1. I've seen it happen.

You need to research Master Trade.

OPTIONAL BUILDINGS

POLITICAL CAPITAL - Really not all that important, unless you're going for an influence victory or trying to stave off someone else winning an influence victory. It does provide a pretty good morale boost to that planet though. You need to research Star Democracy.

XINATHIUM HULL PLATING / MICRO REPAIR BOTS - If you can build them first and you have room for them, by all means build them. The first one makes your ships a little bit tougher. The second one makes them repair faster. Both also are trade goods, so you can sell them to friendly races. If someone else beats you to them, you can just buy it from them. If you have few worlds, don't waste the space. Just buy them from whoever else builds them.

You need Advanced Hulls for the first and Enhanced Miniaturization for the repair bots.

GRAVITY ACCELERATOR / HYPERION SHIPYARD / HYPERION LOGISTICS / HYPERION RESUPPLY / HYPERION SHRINKER - Very useful. If you build a Hyperion Shipyard, build it on the planet that is producing most of your warships. Just DO NOT replace your standard starport, because it DOES NOT act as a starport (many people have made that mistake, including me).

You need to research Expert Logistics for the Hyperion Logistics and Resupply centers.
You need Expert Miniaturization for the Hyperion Shrinker.
You need - wait for it - Zero G Sports arenas (xeno entertainment tech tree) for Gravity Accelerators.
You need Master Hull Building for the Hyperion Shipyard.

BUILDINGS TO AVOID

ORBITAL FLEET MANAGER / PLANETARY DEFENSE / HYPERION FLEET DEFENSE / OMEGA DEFENSE - Don't build these. They take up space that could be put to better use and only rarely can you predict what planets are going to need them. And honestly, if enemy warships are filling your sky and you can't remove them, you've lost that planet anyway. A fleet manager ain't gonna help.

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THE UNITED PLANETS
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Honestly, you're better off leaving the United Planets, at least after you've become a Star Democracy or Federation. There is a chance that the UP could vote to require all civilizations to operate as an empire and you cannot let that happen. Being forced to go from a democracy/federation back to an empire is catastrophic. It will destroy your civilization worse than any other situation. You could lose all three capital worlds and your home world to invasions and that wouldn't hurt you as badly as this. Once you are operating as a federation, suddenly going back to being an empire is almost certainly going to bankrupt you.

If they vote to do this, leave the UP - immediately. Open the foreign relations window and click the United Planets tab. There is a button that lets you leave the UP. This will dissolve all of your trade routes and you can't open any more. However, having a democratic government is far better for your economy than having trade routes. You will have to go to the civilization manager and change your government back to what it was.

Don't leave the UP at the beginning of the game, because you'll need the trade routes until your economy picks up. Once you are a democracy or federation, feel free to leave if they make a decision that hurts you.

If you stay in the UP.....

Certain issues need to be voted on in certain ways.

Galactic Prison

Don't ever vote to give this to yourself. The production boost is not useful. There is almost always a prison riot, which will spawn a fleet of pirates right on top of that planet. You don't want trouble with the pirates. Always vote to give this to a civilization on the opposite end of the galaxy.

Arming Transports

This is the 2nd most backward ass decision they can make. Under the theory that an armed troop ship will be a less tempting target, they will vote whether or not to arm them. In reality, it makes them more likely to be shot up, because then your escorts will be ignored while the enemy shoots up your troop ships. Always vote no to this. If they vote to add weapons to transports, you will need to start putting defense modules on all of your troop ships, assuming you are escorting them.

Limiting Starbase modules

Always vote no on this. It should be pretty obvious that you don't want to limit how many modules you can install on a base.

Starbase Tax

I never build influence bases, so I always vote for the highest amount when this comes up. It annoys me to no end when someone drops a starbase near one of my planets.

Galactic Cease fire

This one depends on the situation. If you are on the verge of conquering someone, vote no. Of course, nothing is stopping you from continuing the war anyway. You'll just have to declare war all over again.

If you are on the losing end of a war, vote yes. Your enemy will most likely attack you again shortly, but at least it gives you some breathing room to rebuild some of your fleets.

How you handle other issues are up to you. Don't vote for anything that is going to cause you trouble.

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SHIP BUILDING STRATEGIES
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Do not stick to the core designs. Yes, you *can* play the game without designing your own ships, but you have a much better chance if you do. To be perfectly honest, most of the core designs are crap. Most of the core designs have bad weapons and bad defenses on large hulls. Very few of the core designs are fighters. Once you can build your own large-hulled ships, you'll have better weapons than what is on the core designs.

If you have a solid industrial base, build heavy fighters (small hull) and pack them with powerful weapons and sparse defenses. You can smash their fleets, replace any losses and hope they get tired of getting beat.

If you can't keep up with your losses, you'll need to put better defenses on your ships. Design them to match your enemy. If his warships are heavy on beam weapons, pack your ships with beam protection. If he's primarily using mass drivers, cover your ships with armor.

The same goes for his defenses. If his ships have heavy shielding or armor, use missiles. If he has heavy point defense, use mass drivers or beam weapons.

At the higher difficulty levels, be prepared for the fact that your enemy will be customizing his new ships to match your tactics. If you're blowing him away with missiles, expect him to start sending out ships with heavy point defense.

If you have no idea what sort of ships a potential enemy is using, because you are too far away to see any of them, you can get around that. Open a communication/trading window with that race. All of his warships that are not in a fleet will be listed. Simply right-click on the latest generation warships to see what he's putting on as far as defenses/weapons.

The latest generation will have the highest number. So, Heavy Fighter M9-3 will be newer and more advanced than Heavy Fighter M7-3.

THE NANO RIPPER

I am basically repeating what I said earlier. The Nano Ripper is an amazingly powerful weapon, one that you can build fairly early on in the game. For the most part, this is going to be the primary weapon on most of your ships.

BEAM WEAPONS

Beam weapons are sadly underpowered in the early part of the game. You'd have to research as far as Phasor VII just to match the destructive power you get early on with Nano Rippers. However, once you *do* research that far, it is better to start using them in favor of the Nano Ripper. They are cheaper and smaller. Once you get up to disruptors, you are going to have some very mean warships.

What I do is build Nano Ripper-armed ships early on, then throw all my weapons research at beam theory. Once I have Disruptors, I'll start replacing the older ships with Disruptor-armed ships. It also throws off any enemy that's started building armored ships to counter your Nano Rippers.

DEFENSE VS OFFENSE

There are three types of weapons and three matching types of defenses: Mass Driver / Armor, Missiles / Point Defense and Beam / Shielding.

Keep the following in mind. Even though a type of defense is not optimal against a different type of weapon, it still offers some protection. When attacked by a weapon for which your ship's defenses are not optimized, your defense strength is reduced to its square root value. I'm sorry if your head is spinning, but that's how it works.

If he attacks you with a plasma cannon (beam attack of 2) and your ship has armor protection worth 9, then your armor will give you a maximum possible protection of 3. So it's possible for your armor to completely block the plasma attack, even if he gets a full-on hit and even though armor is not as useful against beam weapons as is shielding.

CAPITAL SHIPS AND ESCORTS

If you have researched medium or large scale hulls, build a couple of frigates or battleships. Cover them in defenses, give them a good engine and some life support and several really devastating weapons. Three or four Nano Rippers will wreck any ship, no matter how tough it is and no matter how much armor it has.

Now, capital ships are valuable. They take more time to build and they cost more. Clearly, you don't want them getting killed if it can be helped. You have to build a bunch of escort fighters to keep the enemy off them. This is a little complicated (and very frustrating). You have to design an escort fighter that precisely matches your capital ships.

The way the game works, one fleet will throw all of its firepower against just one enemy ship at a time. It decides which ship to attack first based on its attack strength versus defense strength. If you've designed your ships correctly, the enemy will be forced to fight his way through your cheaper escorts before he can start shooting at your capital ships. Hopefully, the enemy dies before he ever fires the first shot at your frigates and battleships.

Here is where it gets complicated. A vessel with more firepower than defenses is considered to be an attack vessel / escort. Makes sense. A vessel with more defenses than firepower is considered to be a defense ship / capital ship. Still sensible. However, when trying to decide which ship is the capital ship and which ship is the escort.... well, the AI goes completely off the rails.

Let's say you build a battleship with 10 laser cannons and a Barrier II generator. The game's AI sees that ship as 10 Attack / 3 Defense. Now you build six escorts, each with 2 laser cannons and a Barrier II generator. The AI sees those ships as 2 Attack / 3 Defense. The AI will come to the brilliant conclusion that you are using a single, large hulled vessel with 50 hit points to escort six tiny vessels with 6 hit points each. I'm trying to be nice here, but you should feel free to mutter your own comments.

Not only does your escort fighter have to be weaker and cheaper, it also has to have more firepower than defense as compared to the ships it is escorting. If you build that battleship with 12 lasers and no shielding at all, the AI will completely ignore your escorts in favor of beating on your capital ship.

You can put *some* defenses on your escorts, but the firepower has to greatly outweigh the defenses. Unless you have some pretty serious miniaturization tech, you will not be able to put more than one protection module on your escorts.

This is how I like to build my escorts.

I'll start with two of the fastest engines available, plus enough life support to keep up with the ships it will be escorting. I put on an extra engine because A) Not being able to put on much defense means there is room left over and you want to be able to get reinforcements to your fleets as quickly as possible so you can keep pressing the enemy. I tend to use small hull ships instead of tiny hull, because there is more room for stuff.

I will pack it with the nastiest weapons available and as many as will fit. My escorts tend to have almost as much firepower as the capital ships, which is just crazy but that's how the game works. If there is room left over, then I'll put on a defense module. After all, they are going to be shot at very frequently, so it's worth putting on some sort of defensive protection. Just make sure the attack strength greatly outweighs any defensive strength.

Now, you have to test it, because sometimes the AI gets this wrong. Start building your capital ship on one world, then build JUST ONE escort on a different world. Make sure the two worlds are fairly close. Launch both and put them into a two-ship fleet. At the bottom, the capital ship should be listed BELOW the escort. If it is, put everything into production.

If the capital ship is listed ABOVE your escort, then you put on too much defense and have confused the AI. You will have to redesign it and try again. Go back to the ship designer and, when you are done, upgrade the existing escort rather than waste time building a new one. It is far better to weaken or remove the defense from the escort than to remove firepower from any ship.

Keep in mind that your enemy also (usually) will be escorting his capital ships. When you are fighting an enemy fleet, you have to kill their escorts before you can start firing on the big boys. This is why you HAVE to have escorts for your own capital ships. You can't just put 5 battleships in a fleet and expect it to slaughter the enemy. You'll just throw away battleships to shoot up enemy escort fighters. This is most especially true when fighting pirates, because they can put together fleets of insane size and power. Until you get really advanced logistical abilities, you usually can't have more than one or two capital ships in a fleet.

It is vitally important that you put engines on your warships. Ideally, you never let the enemy attack you first. Enough fighters, attacking first and with enough firepower, can blow away an entire fleet of frigates without giving them the chance to shoot back. Yes, you can ignore engines to pack on more weapons, but what good does that do you if you can't catch the enemy, or run away?

Keep in mind that it is not always the best idea to use the most powerful available weapon. Let me give you an example.

I was fighting the Drengin. I started off with a crappy fighter but eventually was able to build a really good X-Wing look alike, with a laser cannon on each wing tip. That's a beam attack strength of FOUR. Plus, using the tiny hull, I could put seven of them into a fleet (logistics of 15 at this point) for a combined fleet beam attack of TWENTY-EIGHT. Despite the weak weapons and weak hulls, these were very lethal fleets. Using these fighters, I began to methodically smash the Drengin Empire to pieces. Then I goofed up.

My research went from Laser MK V to Plasma MK I. Plasma cannons are twice as lethal as lasers, so it seemed to make sense to start using them. They are also much larger than lasers, so I couldn't use as many.

I put them on small hull fighters, because I couldn't fit them onto the tiny hull. And I could only put two plasma cannons on each fighter. AND... I could only put five heavy fighters into a fleet, instead of seven. The total attack strength of one of those fleets was only TWENTY. For some reason, that just didn't occur to me and I put this new fighter into mass production. And my superior fighter nearly lost the war for me.

It was only the fact that I had beat them down so bad and had a huge numerical advantage that let me win that war. In the end, their fighters were better than mine and I just wore them down with numbers. That was just a boneheaded mistake on my part.

So keep in mind that sometimes it is better to keep the lesser weapon in production, even though you can build something slightly more powerful.

ADVANCED DEFENDER

The default defender is worthless. One particle cannon and no defenses. The enemy will laugh at you for using it. Ever see a Drengin laugh? *shudder*

Design a small hull ship, install massive armor/shielding/missile defense and one each of two types of weapons (missile/mass driver usually). Or just one weapon if you don't have room for two. You can safely ignore engines, sensors and life support, because this isn't a warship - it's strictly for planetary defense. Just be careful you don't make it so expensive that it bankrupts you to keep one in orbit around every planet. Don't use Nano Rippers, as tempting as it may be. TOO. FRIGGIN. EXPENSIVE.

If an enemy is coming right at your planet with troop ships, custom design a new defender that matches his warships and buy it. Buy a couple of them. Buy a bunch of them if you have to. That's why you have all that money in the treasury, right?

If he is using singularity drivers and point defense, cover your defender in armor and stick on a couple of Nano Rippers. In this situation, go right ahead and use Nano Rippers, because this is an emergency.

Or, in a VERY SERIOUS emergency, you can design what the game calls a cruiser. I'm not sure I buy the concept, but this is what the AI will do. They will build a medium hull ship with massive defenses and some good weapons. Then they use this ship as a defender, rather than putting it into a fleet. It does make it hard to attack the planet, but it's an expensive and time consuming way to defend a planet. I'd rather just build a bunch of cheaper fighters and try to drive the enemy away from the planet.

TROOP SHIPS

You will need to custom design a troop transport. The default transport is too slow and doesn't carry enough troops. The default "Combat Transport" ..... who in the world wants to throw away a dreadnought in an invasion??

Pick a cargo hull. Stick on some life support modules. Two ultra support or three advanced support modules are enough. Stick on two advanced troop modules. If you haven't researched as far as the advanced troop module, do so. Now. Go!

Two advanced troop modules. That's two billion troops per ship, so obviously you don't want it getting caught by the enemy out in deep space. Stick on as many engines as you can cram onto the hull. This ship MUST be at least three times faster than anything the enemy has. AT LEAST.

You really won't need to escort these ships, because they will be able to outrun any trouble that comes looking for them. No escort fighter could possible keep up with them anyway, and you don't want to slow them down just to escort them.

Keep a few of these ships on each planet and launch them as needed. As long as you've researched up to Shock Troops, your 2 billion troops will conquer damned near any planet in a single invasion attempt. When you're not about to use them, keep them on planets. Don't leave them lying around, because it could cause one of the other civs to think you're about to attack them. They might declare war. If you need to, build them on one planet, launch them with just 1 troop and send them to a different planet. You don't want to launch more than two from any one planet at the same time with a full load.


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INTERSTELLAR WARFARE
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Sooner or later, no matter how peaceful you try to be, you WILL get into a fight. If your military is weak, the other races will try to extort money from you. If you don't pay up, expect an invasion. Sometimes they don't even bother extorting you, if they are vastly more powerful. Never let any other race become significantly more powerful than you if you can help it. The Drengin, Korx, Yor and the Iconians are particularly bad about this. I never pay the extortion. I give them the finger and tell them to bring it on. Whether you pay up or not is up to you.

STRATEGY

How you fight the war depends on what you're trying to do.

THE DEFENSIVE WAR

The Drengin have finally realized that you are not scared and will not pay their extortion demands. They think they have the power to crush you like a bug. The war is on.

If you're just fighting a defensive war and have no interest in conquering your enemy, concentrate on keeping sensor coverage around your worlds and smashing their fleets when they move to invade. If you repeatedly smash the enemy, to the point that you become more powerful than him, he will sue for peace. Try to keep him happy from that point on, either with bribes or just by maintaining a much larger military.

Build military starbases around your worlds, arm them to the teeth and install as many ship assist modules as possible. The firepower that a military starbase can give to a crappy little fighter will leave you breathless. I had a fleet of heavy fighters armed with plasma cannons and shields that absolutely slaughtered massive armadas of Drengin and Arcean battleships, all because they were supported by powerful military bases.

This also works if your enemy's worlds are protected by powerful fleets. Build an armada of fast constructor ships and send them in just behind your warships. Just before you plan to take on the enemy, build a military base and put on all the ship assist modules you can. Make absolutely certain that it will cover the enemy's fleet. You MUST build the entire base and every possible module in one turn, because otherwise they could destroy the base or move out of range of it.

This is extremely expensive, so make it count when you do it. Decomission any bases located in areas that are no longer useful.

In order for a ship to take advantage of attack or defense modules on a starbase, the ship must already have at least one weapon and at least one defense module. You can't throw a scout ship into a battle and expect the starbase to do all the shooting.

CONQUEST

If you plan to conquer the enemy, be prepared for a long and ugly war. Depending on the situation, it could mean countless invasions and counterattacks against dozens of heavily defended colonies. If you don't have a massive population to begin with, you may not be able to do this. The troops on your transport ships have to come from somewhere. Weaken yourself too far in repeated invasions and you may end up not being able to protect your own worlds. You could also piss off your enemy's friends and end up fighting an alliance of different races.

CLEAR OUT THE DEFENSES

This should be really obvious, but it has to be said. Before you can launch an invasion, you have to remove any ships orbiting the target planet. If there is even a freighter in the planet's starport, you'll have to kill it before invading. Troop ships should not EVER be used for this, because they are too fragile and far too valuable.

PLANETARY INVASION

I've watched how the Torians make war and, to be honest, they scare the hell out of me. They will build HORDES of troop ships. Huge, massive armadas of troop ships. When they go to take a world, they will send just enough warships to clear out the defenses and then keep throwing troop ships at it. You might survive the first invasion. And the second. And the third. Twenty invasions in a row will get you every damn time, I don't care how tough your troops are.

And they DO NOT CARE about losing troop ships, so don't expect to scare them off by parking warships near your worlds. You have to kill those things.

I thought that was sort of cheesy at first, but it makes sense. As cool as it is to have huge fleets fighting it out in deep space, that's not the point of a war. The point of fighting a war is to win. (Unless it's to justify violating civil liberties, in which case you want it to continue forever, but that doesn't apply here...).

When sizing up an enemy for invasion, you need to have good intelligence. Early on in the game, you should start spending money on espionage for every other race. Once you have "High" intelligence on them, you can look at their planets, see what bonuses are there and what they've built on them. You may be surprised to find that they haven't built anything at all on most of their planets. No idea why they waste all that real estate.

The very first enemy planet you want to take is the enemy's manufacturing capital, followed shortly by his tech capital. Unless both are his home world, in which case that might be too much trouble. Then, you want to take the planets with the best manufacturing and research bonuses. Any planet with a precursor mine should be taken as quickly as possible.

Basically, you want to cripple him as badly as possible, as quickly as possible. And, you want to put his planets to use in building more warships to fight off any counterattack. And, most importantly, you want his best planets before he surrenders them to someone else.

Be aware of something. The AI is extremely stupid about how it builds its worlds. It will pick the worst possible location for a manufacturing or tech capital. And, if you capture someone else's capital, you can't build one of your own. So make certain you have built one yourself before you capture someone else's.

MINOR RACES

I generally leave the minor races alone. But.... they do have very nice planets. They automatically have a class 15 planet, which could easily become class 22 or higher if you get it (because of your Neutrality bonus). They are civilization capitals, which means they'll feed twice as many people as a regular colony, without the need for farms. They also have very high influence, so you could end up taking nearby AI planets through influence, without having to invade them.

Another good thing about minor races is, they'll build a tech, manufacturing and economic capital on their world. If you take it, those are all your's.

Just be careful. They may be a "minor" race, but most of them have damned tough soldiers. Even with Tir Quan and all the invasion/defense techs researched, you could easily lose the invasion. If and when you decide to invade a minor race planet, you should put five troop ships into a fleet and throw all of them at the planet in a single attack.

INVASION TACTICS

There are numerous tactics that you can use when taking a planet. In most cases, you want to use the one called "Mini Soldiers". This one sends a bunch of robot soldiers down to attack everything in sight before your troops invade and it is very effective. There is a slight chance that they could destroy one or two buildings, but it's extremely rare.

Avoid using tidal disruption if you can help it and don't EVER use orbital bombardment or gas attack. Tidal disruption destroys nearly every building on the planet. Orbital bombardment and gas attacks destroy the planet itself, to the point that it can become useless.

I once watched the Torians and Dread Lords fight over Amalda (the Dread Lords' home world) for hours. Every time the Torians invaded, they used orbital bombardment. Amalda went from being a class 13 planet to a class 10, then class 8, class 6, class 4 and eventually class *. Mars was a better planet at that point.

Occasionally, you might get away with using the tactic called "Information Warfare", especially if you're taking a tech or manufacturing capital and don't want to risk destroying them with mini soldiers. With this one, your invasion fleet broadcasts a warning to the population and asks people to join your army. You will see how many citizens you can expect to join your side before you decide on the tactic. If the planet has a very low approval rating, this just might be worth it.

Other than increasing the size of your invasion force, this gives your troops no other advantages, so you may want to put several troop ships into a fleet and use all of them in the invasion. The more troops you use to invade, the better they will do. You will use up only one troop ship, unless you lose more than two billion troops in the fight (assuming your troop ships have 2 billion troops each).

SNEAK ATTACK

This is going to work only if your enemy has very few worlds. It is also very, very cheesy.

Simply move a huge fleet of troop transports near your enemy's planets, launch a massive surprise attack against any of their warships in orbit, then invade. If you do it right, the war is over before you have to press the TURN button. This avoids that highly annoying habit they have of surrendering their planets to some other race. It also avoids you taking heavy ship losses, because you only have to fight those warships in orbit around the planets, plus anything within immediate range of your transports. When all their planets are gone, their warships are automatically decommissioned.

At the higher difficulty levels, this will not work. The AI may realize what is going on and launch a preemptive attack on you.

PLANETARY DEFENSE

Like I said earlier, don't waste planet tiles on defenses. If an enemy is closing on a planet, buy a cheap fighter or an advanced defender on that planet so that the planet is not "undefended". As long as any ship is in orbit, they cannot invade that planet until they deal with the ship in orbit. At the very least, this can buy you a few turns.

If your planet has warships in the starport, don't leave them there to defend from orbit. Launch all your warships - all but one anyway - put them into a fleet and try to attack first. You'll have a much better chance of removing the enemy that way, even without an Omega Defense or Hyperion Fleet manager. Even if you can't kill them, your warships still will do more damage to the enemy, which helps you the next time you face that particular fleet. You might even hurt him bad enough that he withdraws the fleet to do repairs or to reinforce.

This especially applies to Dread Lords, because one shot from their weapons will kill anything they hit. If you can attack them first and with enough ships, you can usually destroy anything from a frigate on down, even with the most primitive weapons. If it's a battleship or dreadnought and you don't see any troop ships coming, it's better to just run. It'll take two or more fleets to kill a dreadnought, unless your fighters have Nano Rippers or better.

The exception is if you have several fleets of fighters available. Then, by all means, throw them at the dreadnought and hope you eventually kill it. Just don't be surprised to see it smash four, five, six or seven fleets before it dies.

A really slick trick that someone on the GalCiv msg board told me about is, you can build a cargo-hull ship packed with engines and a pop gun weapon like a particle beam or laser. If nothing else, you can outrun the enemy and blast his troop transports. The Dread Lords will escort their troop ships, but usually not until later in the game.

IF YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE THE PLANET ANYWAY...

The Terran Alliance Navy stood and fought to the death to defend your world. That was very brave of them. Make sure you name a school after them.

In the mean time, the enemy has smashed your defenses and troop ships are filling the sky. The planet is lost. This is when you do exactly what the Russians did to the Germans - scorched earth.

Destroy every factory, every farm, every stock exchange, every embassy - EVERYTHING. Don't leave the enemy anything on that planet that they can use. Most especially, destroy the starport. If it has a bonus research or manufacturing tile, build something useless on it, like an embassy. Chances are the enemy will never get around to replacing it. You sure as hell don't want to give him a bunch of Industrial Sectors when all he can build for himself is an enhanced factory.

If you can afford it, design a fast troop transport with as many troop modules as you can fit on it, buy it (don't build it), pull out as many of your people as possible and run for the nearest friendly fleet. You can always try to use those same troop ships to retake the planet later. If you haven't researched planetary invasion yet and can't build troop ships, build a fast colony ship instead. Chances are the enemy will catch and destroy it, but they will exterminate your colonists anyway, so it's worth the effort. Just make sure you do this BEFORE destroying the starport.

If you think you can retake the planet in the next dozen or so turns, don't do this, because you'll just end up screwing yourself.

Never expect to win an invasion. Never expect that you can hold onto the planet. Never fight to the death with every warship you have to protect any particular world, as long as you have other worlds somewhere else. If it's gone so far that you have nothing left to defend that planet, it's better to deny your enemy the factories. This applies even to the home world.

You can probably fight off one or two invasions, but if dozens of enemy troop ships are heading for that planet, it's gone. Don't expect to hold onto it, even if you've built Tir Quan somewhere.

Unless you're down to your last star system, you can always pull off a miracle comeback. I've done it. Or someone else might declare war on your enemy and start tearing him up on the other side of the galaxy. Or the UP might decide on a galactic cease fire. Or a pirate fleet could spawn right next to his troop transports. Anything is possible.

If you are absolutely positive that you will never be able to retake that planet, because of its location or for other reasons, you can destroy the whole colony. Double-click the planet to open the planet screen, then click the "Details" button. There is a button there to destroy the colony, which removes everything. It's as if the planet were never colonized in the first place. If you do this, make sure you pull out as many people as possible first.

THE PROXY WAR

At the higher difficulty levels, one race that is hostile towards you could end up supplying massive numbers of warships to your enemy. I had this happen with the Arceans. I had fleets covering every single one of their worlds, had destroyed every Arcean warship in the galaxy, and yet they still managed to come at me with massive fleets of battleships. It was because the Thalans were arming them.

Of course, this works the other way around too. Let's say you want to get rid of the Drengin or the Korx, but you don't want to risk open war. Chances are very good that someone else will be at war with them, because nobody likes these particular races. The Altarians, in particular, tend to be in a constant state of war with the Drengin and Korx.

Instead of fighting them directly, fight a proxy war. Build massive battle fleets, move them near to the action, disband the fleet and just give them over to whoever is fighting against the race you don't like. Don't sell them, because you could end up bankrupting your new friends. Give the warships away. At best, they will conquer the race you don't like and end up being very friendly to you. More likely, they will severely weaken them and the enemy will sue for peace. If they've been weakened far enough, it might be safe now to invade them yourself. At the very least, they are no longer a threat to you.

NEVER GIVE OVER YOUR BEST WARSHIPS. If you are playing right, you should have better technology than anyone else. Never give away or sell warships you can't beat yourself, because you never know when your new "friends" may decide you're next on the agenda. Or you could get a random event where your ambassador insults their president and they declare war. Never give away warships you can't destroy yourself, because you may end up fighting them later.

Never arm the evil races. Ever. No matter what the circumstances are, it is much better to have a powerful Altarian Republic next door than a powerful Drengin Empire. Don't give them weapon techs, don't give them warships. Trust me on this. If they beg for help, give them a little bit of money. It's harmless and it improves your relations.

CULTURE WAR

I never go for cultural victory, simply because it's way too easy. Just find and mine influence resources and build a couple of influence starbases. You're guaranteed to win and it's really no fun.

On the other hand, sometimes the other races will drop influence starbases next to your worlds. This is an aggressive action, just short of open war. However, it is not worth a shooting war to remove them. If you don't mind cheating, just teleport the thing somewhere else. If you do mind cheating, find someone they are at war with, put a fighter next to the base and then give it to their enemy. They'll destroy the base for you. This also works well if someone has a resource you'd rather be mining yourself. Just position a constructor next to it, hand over a fighter to someone and wait a couple turns.

Be certain that the fighter has enough life support range to be immediately useful to whoever you give it to and be sure you park it right next to the starbase before you give it away.

ENTANGLING ALLIANCES

Another victory that is just way too easy is the diplomatic victory. Too easy and no fun.

As a matter of fact, you are far better off not allying yourself with anyone. It seems like a perfect way to keep potential enemies from attacking you, but in reality it's just a pain in the butt. It commits you to going to war with someone who attacks your ally, and that someone could be vastly more powerful than you. Or they could be your biggest trading partner. Or their empire could be right next to your's, and you certainly don't want trouble with the neighbors. Never ally yourself with a minor race, because the major races always go after their planets.

If, for some reason, you have ignored this advice and find yourself in a war with someone, but you don't want to go to the trouble of actually fighting, there are a few options.

The most obvious is simply to make peace. As long as you are more powerful than they are, this shouldn't be a problem.

If they are on the other side of the galaxy and they won't make peace, just do a little raiding and make sure all of your colonies are protected. Let your ally do all the fighting.

The best way to do this is to pack a cargo hull with engines, life support, sensors (if needed) and one weapon. Send it out and start hitting enemy freighters, starbases, troop transports and any other unarmed target. A cargo hulled vessel is too weak to fight a real battle, so don't ever attack anything that can shoot back.

Be careful attacking freighters though. If you cause them to lose a trade route, you could tick off another race, because that hurts their economy. If it's just wandering around without a trade route or it's going to another race that you also are at war with, by all means attack. Otherwise, leave it alone.

TACTICS

This ain't Star Trek, where Captain Picard gives the order to fire phasers once every five minutes and hopes the shields hold. There is no retreat. There is no surrender. This is a fight to the death. When two fleets engage, only one of them is coming away from it.

Gal Civ II is very realistic. You can only move as fast as your engines allow. You can't see the enemy unless your sensors can see that far. This applies to you and to your enemy (except the Dread Lords). The ideal is for your warships to have overwhelming firepower, more speed, better sensors and to be able to attack first in every engagement. It doesn't matter if his weapons are more advanced, as long as you can attack him first.

The most important advantage you can have is sensors, which is why it is vitally important for you to build that "Eyes of the universe" thing. Otherwise you have to sacrifice firepower for sensor range. Or you have to build fast scouts and keep them near your fleet to find the enemy. I fought a war with the Yor that went on forever, simply because they could run out of my sensor range before I could react to them. I ended up having to produce a huge number of scouts with very long range sensors.

If you find yourself fighting the very race that beat you out of building the "Eyes of the universe", then you are in trouble. Either find a way to make peace or build fleets that can move better than 15 parsecs per turn. And don't expect to win that war, because I am very serious about the advantage sensors give you. Try to fight them to a draw so they'll make peace and then keep them friendly. Your only other alternative is to invade the planet where they built it so you can have it yourself, and I'm honestly not sure if that would even work.

When your fleet is close to the enemy, you have to turn on the grid. Press CTRL + G and a grid appears over the galaxy. Each grid is one parsec. If your speed is 5pc, that means you can move five squares in one turn. Keep this information in mind when moving your fleets around. Even if the enemy is faster than you, you can still lead them into a trap and bushwhack them.

Never, EVER move your fleet at its maximum speed, unless that speed is very slow or you have a scout ahead of you showing that the way is clear. If you can move 10/pc per turn and can see out to fifteen, you still might land yourself right next to an enemy fleet and not have any movement speed left in the turn. Always move at half your speed at a time to make sure the way is clear. Keep doing this until you have no more movement left for that turn. Don't ever let yourself fly right into an ambush. Don't ever be so eager to attack an enemy that you end up within their range at the end of the turn without any movement points.

Keep this in mind, because it will trip you up. Although you don't actually move, it counts as one movement point when you attack. So if you can move at 4, move 4 squares and land right next to an enemy, then all you've done is delivered yourself into an ambush. You can't move into that fifth square to launch the attack. Your turn is over and the enemy can do whatever he likes with you.

THE TRAP

The best way to lead the enemy into an ambush is to trail a scout in front of him. The AI is obsessed with killing scouts. By focusing on their fleet with the mouse, you can see how fast they can move. Put a scout just outside that range and they will move toward it. Keep moving the scout closer to your fleet. In most cases, the enemy AI ignores putting sensors on their warships, which is a major mistake. They'll chase that scout right into an ambush. Just make certain that the scout has enough speed to stay ahead of them.

Let's say you have a fleet speed of 4 and the enemy can move 6. But the enemy can only see out to 6 or 7 parsecs. On the last move, they should chase your scout into a position where your fleet is only two or three squares away from them. Their turn is over. They see your fleet now, but they can no longer move to attack or to run. You pounce on them and hopefully smash them into rubble.

COUNTERING THE TRAP

Sometimes, the AI can be really, really sneaky. They will put a single fighter somewhere and have an enormously fast fleet just within movement range of it. If you attack that fighter, a huge fleet will pop in from out of nowhere and slaughter you. Be especially careful if that one fighter belongs to pirates. The pirate AI is *VERY* good and very sneaky.

If you ever see an enemy fighter just sitting around doing nothing, be very cautious before attacking it. Move a scout forward and just barely keep the enemy fighter within your sensor range. Scout everything within 30 parsecs in every direction from that fighter. I've never seen any ship move faster than that, so scout around at least that far. Be patient - move your scout ONE SQUARE AT A TIME. DON'T let the enemy see you or your scout.

If you DO spot an ambush, here is how you handle that.

Move a fighter ahead of your fleet. If you can move at 7 parsecs/turn, keep the fighter 6 parsecs ahead of your fleet. Make sure that your one fighter can kill the enemy fighter, or put two or three fighters into a small fleet. Kill the enemy fighter. The enemy thinks he's sprung his trap and will pounce on your fighter. In all probability, that fighter is dead. That doesn't matter.

What does matter is that now your enemy is sitting within range of your fleet and can no longer move to do anything about it. Wail on them.

DEFEND YOUR WORLDS

Never have any colony without a ship in orbit. If there is at least one ship in the starport, the planet cannot be invaded until the enemy destroys whatever is orbiting it. It doesn't matter if it's just a constructor. It doesn't have to be a warship, although having a fighter or defender in orbit is always a good idea.

FIGHTING THE DREAD LORDS

If you are playing the "Dread Lords on Parade" scenario, you have to play differently.

It is very important that you pay attention to the engine technologies, because the DL warships are so fast that they can just run rings around you in the beginning. Once you get into warp technology, they will lose that speed advantage almost entirely. Once you research Hyperwarp, you will be their equal in terms of speed, even without adding extra engines to your ships.

You also can ignore defenses in the early part of the game, because nothing will protect you from their weapons anyway. If they shoot at you, you die, and no amount of armor will help. Go for firepower and larger fleets of smaller ships and be prepared for a series of meat grinder battles.

This is most especially true since 1.1 came out. They increased the DL miniaturization ability, so now you will see them building dreadnoughts that have up to 30 blackhole erupters. If you think you can protect a ship against that, you're crazy.

They have also made them a little bit smarter. In version 1.0 and 1.1 beta 1, beta 2 and beta 3, they NEVER put defenses on their warships. Sometimes they would do that for a defender, but almost never for their warships. Ever since beta 4 came out, they have started putting defenses on their warships.

I found all this out the hard way, completely by surprise, the very day I downloaded 1.1 beta 4. Take my advice - if your enemy has Aeron point defense and your fighters only have Stinger missiles, RUN!

I don't know if this is different at the higher levels, but at the "Normal" level, the Dread Lords tend to build only one sort of weapon almost exclusively. Either it will be all Doom Rays, all Blackhole Erupters or all Blackhole guns. Almost never a mix on the same ship. Usually a few ships will have blackhole guns, even if every other ship is using something else.

Once you figure out what type of weapon they've decided to use, you can research the matching defense tech. However, you have to go almost to the end of that tech tree before you can actually use any of it. The weapons are so powerful that the low level defenses are just uselessly taking up space that could be replaced by another weapon or another engine.

Once you research as far as force fields, you can start using those against doom rays. Once you research Duralthene armor, you can start using that against blackhole guns. Once you research droid sentries or pd combo, you can start using that against the blackhole erupters. Anything less than those particular defenses are useless against Dread Lord weapons. Just don't expect it to do much good, no matter how advanced it is. Use them only if you have extra room on a new design or on your capital ships.

If you research as far as large-scale building and have very advanced miniaturization tech AND you've researched to the very last defense that matches their weapons (Aeron point defense, Zero Point Armor or Ultimate Invulnerability), you can try building battleships. Frigates are going to be no good against them, so don't waste time on it. But a battleship might have the room to let you put on enough defenses that it can survive a firefight. You're still going to lose a few, but it might be worth it, assuming you have enough industrial capacity to actually build one. You'll need a swarm of escorts though, plus really advanced logistics, so factor that in too.

The same seems to be true of their defenses. Once they decide on a particular sort of defense, that's all they'll build. And they'll only put one defense module per ship (usually). They also don't do it right away. They seem to wait until a little later in the game before doing this, so you can't tell what defense they are going to use until one of the new ships shows up to bang on you.

Even if they do use armor as their one defense, the nano ripper can still kill them. Put two on each fighter and usually you will get kills. Put on three per fighter and you will be able to just pound on them, despite their armor. The battles will still be messy, but as long as you outnumber them, you'll probably win.

As with any other game, switch to researching the beam weapons after you have the Nano Ripper. Once you have Disruptors, their shielding won't matter because disruptors will just punch right through it. For that matter, so will Phasors MK VII, but those aren't as powerful.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BUILD A STARBASE.

I have complained about this and my complaint was dismissed with "the AI is supposed to be dumb until you play it on 'Tough'". Well, I can't play it on tough, and neither can you if you need this guide.

On the "Normal" difficulty level, the Dread Lord AI is insanely, PSYCHOTICALLY obsessed with killing starbases. In versions 1.1 b1, 1.1 b2 and 1.1 b3, building a starbase was guaranteed to instantly draw a horde of Dread Lord warships. You could watch it happen on the minimap, assuming you had "Eyes of the Universe". Whenever all the little red dots started moving toward a single location, it was because somebody was foolish enough to build a base.

It was so bad that every single Dread Lord warship in the entire galaxy would INSTANTLY redeploy towards a starbase. And they NEVER STOPPED COMING until that base was gone. And they would ignore all other things to make a direct, unswerving beeline for the base. They would zoom right past freighters and other enemy ships without taking a second look.

I once slaughtered them so badly and held their attention for so long that seven fleets of Stinger-armed fighters destroyed every single Dread Lord warship in existence while defending a single starbase. They completely ignored my ships and my planets to go straight at a starbase I'd built, which I was just as determined to keep (I needed the trade modules).

I am not exaggerating to make a point. This is how that particular game went. While they were busy sending all of their warships after that one base, they completely ignored a Drengin invasion fleet and got themselves conquered. Game Over. That is a pretty serious AI flaw, which can't be dismissed with "play it on a tougher level".

As for HOW they seem to know you've built the base....

I asked that question once, which was a mistake. The only answer I got was a message board flame war.

Basically, the "fog of war" doesn't apply to the Dread Lords. They don't need sensors. Everything on the map can be seen by them. Why they bother with the scout in the beginning is beyond me. So, don't expect to sneak up on the Dread Lords, because they know exactly where you are anyway.

It isn't so bad in 1.1 final, but they still spend too much effort on starbases. They may ignore it for a while, but eventually you will draw a horde of DL warships down on you if you try to build any sort of base. And their weapons are so powerful now that no amount of defenses will protect it. It's not worth the effort, unless you are deliberately baiting them to set up an ambush.

You now should know better than to try and build a starbase. Unfortunately, the other AI races don't know better. They'll build a starbase, which draws an armada of DL warships. Then, since they're in the area anyway, the Dread Lords will smash every single ship within view. And since the AI races tend to build these bases near their homeworlds, they end up having their entire military destroyed all at once. Good thing for them the DL didn't send troop ships.

While that may be amusing to watch, it could also cause you some problems. If a resource is located close to one of your worlds, you might know better than to try to build a base on it. The other civs will if you don't. The only thing you can do about this is to position your own constructor right next to it. If you spot someone else's constructor, build a base. When their constructor goes away, destroy the base and send a new constructor to watch over it. This is really annoying and I wish they would correct this insane obsession with starbases. Or at least let us turn off the resources as an option.

For the same reason, any time you play the Dread Lords scenario, you MUST disable the minor races. The minors, and most especially the Akilians, have nothing better to do than spam the whole map with influence bases. I've actually had to invade and exterminate the Akilians because they kept building bases near me and it kept drawing hordes of Dread Lords down on my planets.

FIGHTING THE PIRATES

In general, stay away from pirates. They are really tough bastards and one good-sized fleet can easily crush your entire military. It's better to just leave them alone and stay away from the area. Even the Dread Lords have sense enough to run from them (I've seen it).

Some annoying facts about pirates:

- They have impossible logistical and miniaturization ability that you cannot hope to match, so they can put together fleets with over 100 logistical points, and every damned slot will be filled. You have to fight your way past half a dozen fighters and frigates just to start shooting at their heavy ships. Their ships will have insane speed, firepower and defenses.

- When they spawn, they usually will have weapons, defenses and engines equal to the most advanced technology that you have researched, even if you haven't built them. They also are perfectly optimized against your existing warships. If you have ships equipped with disruptors and Aeron Point Defense, they will be firing nano rippers and be protected by ultimate invulnerability. If you plan to take them on, you'll have to design an entire battle fleet from scratch.

- Their ships have the exact same color as the Drath Legion ships. That's caused me to ignore pirate ships before. I wish they'd change that.

Sometimes, you have no choice but to deal with them. Usually they spawn near someone else or out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, they spawn right on top of Earth and start beating on your starbases and freighters.

Like I said, you have to design a brand new battle fleet from scratch, because your existing fleets won't put much of a dent in their defenses. And you have to sneak up on them, because they are EXTREMELY fast and they will attack first, if they detect your fleet. You'll have to sacrifice a scout or fighter to get them to move into position, if you don't have enough engines to outrun them.

***************
GAME ANNOYANCES
***************

As you play the game, you will notice certain very annoying things. There are ways to get around most of them.

-Autofocus

The biggest annoyance and the largest single hindrance to game play is the automatic focusing of ships. Nothing else the game does will be more of an obstacle to actually playing it.

Let's say you have several ships in one area and you are moving them toward a location. You move one ship and reach for another. But after the first ship moves, the game will select another ship at random, focus it and jerk the view of the map to its location. That location is frequently on the opposite side of the map from where you were.

You cannot ignore it when this happens, because it will continue to do it. Over and over and over and over. And then it will do it a few more times, just to make sure it's pissed you off. Remember, this is a FEATURE, not a BUG.

Press the G button when this starts to happen. That puts the ship/fleet on "Guard" duty. Most likely, it will then select another ship at random and continue to do this. Keep pressing G until it stops selecting ships at random. Then you can try to figure out what you were trying to do and go back to playing the game. And then you repeat all of this on the next turn. Try not to swear too loudly.

Stardock, FOR THE LOVE OF HOLY GOD, FIX THIS!

-Major Breakthrough!

Major Breakthrough on %planet%! A report has come in that %race% has built a %thing%! WHO FRIGGIN CARES????

Sorry. Nothing you can do about these stupid, annoying announcements.

-Constructors that ignore orders

Sometimes you will send a constructor to build a new starbase module, only it doesn't do it. It ends up stacked with the starbase. Just move it away and then back to the starbase. It should work properly the second time.

-Sensors that go out

If you have not built "Eyes of the Universe" (which you should, if you haven't) and you have sensor modules on starbases or on ships, the sensor coverage could go out occasionally. This happens when another ship, with lesser sensors, passes through the same square as the unit with the good sensors. You have to click on that ship/starbase to get the sensors to come back. If it's happening to a starbase, maybe because you built an economy base directly on a trade route, you'll have to cheat and teleport it one square over so it comes off the trade route. Then make sure no ship ever passes through that square.

-The Nebula and the sound

When you start a game or reload a save, sometimes there will be a really bright nebula in the background, which completely blocks your ability to see anything else. You can turn that down or off in the options, but then you have to restart the game (why a restart is necessary, who knows..). To get around this, try to remember to reset the nebula setting to 1 or 0 just before turning off the game. You're shutting it down anyway, so hopefully it prevents this issue the next time around.

You'll also notice that, when turning on the game, THE MUSIC VOLUME IS JACKED ALL THE WAY UP. If you have a volume knob on your speakers, I suggest turning it all the way down until the game is loaded. Then press the ESC button to get into the options menu and reset the volume.

-Rally Points

You can set planets to send all newly constructed ships to a rally point. Sometimes this doesn't work properly. It will launch the ship but not give it any orders, in which case you have to manually tell that ship to go to the rally point. Sometimes you can solve this by telling the planet to stop building, resetting it to not use the rally point, resetting it again to use the rally point and then telling it to start building again. That doesn't always work. It's about 50/50.

-The Minimap

The minimap doesn't update until the next turn is over. So, if you destroy an enemy ship, you'll still see it on the minimap. You can make it update by zooming in and zooming back out.

If it zooms in on the wrong location, you can center the main map on a location (or select a ship/planet and press C) and then zoom the minimap again. That should put it right where it should be.

-The TURN button

The ENTER key is your friend. Use it to end a turn, instead of clicking the TURN button with the mouse. The tendons in your wrist will thank you for it.


CHEATING

Most of the following info comes from https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Cheats

You want to play in god mode? Sorry, ain't gonna happen. But you can cheat and give yourself godlike technology.

Find the following file on your hard drive: C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\GalCiv2.exe

Right-click the file and drag it to your desktop and make a shortcut (don't copy or move or you'll break the game). Right-click the shortcut, click PROPERTIES and change the target information to the following:

"C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\GalCiv2.exe" cheat

Use that to start the game and now you can use cheat codes. The most useful cheats are:
CTRL + C
CTRL + M
CTRL + R
CTRL + T
CTRL + SHIFT + R

Here are most of the cheat codes:

CTRL + A : Upgrades the selected ship's quality, hit points and movement.
CTRL + B : Spawns a battleship. Don't get excited - the core battleship is junk.
CTRL + C : Makes an exact copy of the selected ship. For instance, send one constructor out, make 61 clones, then build a military starbase with every possible module all at once.
CTRL + F : Shows the game's frames-per-second. Works with or without cheat mode.
CTRL + H : Repairs any damage to the selected ship or starbase
CTRL + I : Shows information box for selected unit. Without cheats, this doesn't work without having intelligence on the owner of the unit.
CTRL + J : Completes the next social and military project in the build queue on every world in your civilization.
CTRL + L : Assigns the remaining planets in the galaxy to the major races.
CTRL + M : Adds 10,000 bc to your treasury
CTRL + N : Restarts the game with the current setting. Works with or without cheat mode. Don't do this with a metaverse game (don't cheat either).
CTRL + P : Increases selected planet's quality by one. Doesn't seem to actually do anything to the planet.
CTRL + R : Completes research on the tech currently being researched.
CTRL + S : Does a quicksave. Works with or without cheat mode.
CTRL + T : Teleports the currently selected unit to the point where your cursor is. DO NOT TRY TO TELEPORT A PLANET OR STAR - instant game death.
CTRL + U : Removes the fog of war. In other words, you see everything - all at the same time - without the need for sensors. I don't recommend it, as it isn't very fun and it dramatically slows the game.
CTRL + V : Prompts a United Planets meeting.
CTRL + W : You retire and go to the end game summary.
CTRL + Z : The AI will begin doing their turns without waiting for you. Press it again to make it stop that. Also lets you continue to watch a game, even after you have been exterminated or have surrendered to another race.
CTRL + SHIFT + B : Spawns a starbase. You cannot control which sort of starbase it is.
CTRL + SHIFT + D : Adds a new minor race to the game. Doesn't always work.
CTRL + SHIFT + E : Triggers a planetary event.
CTRL + SHIFT + H : Damages the selected ship.
CTRL + SHIFT + J : Completes other races' projects (could be wrong)
CTRL + SHIFT + R : Completes research on all possible technologies, giving you godlike power. If research victory condition is enabled, it completes all but technology victory. Pressing CTRL + R will complete the last one and you win the game.
CTRL + SHIFT + M : Triggers the ethical alignment screen, where you choose to be "good", "neutral" or "evil". Gives you all other technology too, except for miniaturization.
CTRL + SHIFT + W : Selected enemy ship or planet becomes your's.
CTRL + SHIFT + Z : Enables autoplay / quasi-hot seat game. The AI takes turns without waiting for you. (I have no idea what this means, but it's listed as a cheat).