Ship Guide - Help

When you click on Warp Drive in the tech screen you can see the ships it enables like Dreadnought (5 other techs) and then it shows the five other techs you need (Large Hull Building, etc).


This post is 55% helpful and 45% inaccurate.

You practically have to design your own. If you do not care about looks, you just need to slap a few things on a hull, and of you go! That way, you can build large ships using even better weopons than the small ships can hold. (For larger ships, it is also good to put defenses on them so that they last longer, especially after 1.2)

What worked for me on abundant world was:
Military: 2 engines,fill up with weapons. I prefer the largest hull since they last longer.
Colony & constructor: one module, fill up with engines. Rely on military/resource starbases to extend range.
Scout: even mix between engines and survey modules (level 2)
Transport: min 2 engines,max troop modules

In coarse galactic I've got beaten because my research was way slower.
Get atleast impulse drive. Moving slower makes your ship outdated when they arrive.
You started a cakewalk, medium/large galaxy?

The best way to excel at this game is through micromanagement. If you're willing to micromanage your way through the game, you can play at essentially any difficulty level and win. In most so-called "4X" games, your willingness to obsessively micromanage your empire (building new ships, constantly trading tech, tweaking whether a planet should optimize for social production, research, or military production, etc) determines the maximum difficulty level on which you can play, rather than any kind of tactical or strategic skill.

If you'd like to minimize the amount of micromanagement in the game, try playing on the lower difficulty levels. Also, you might try downloading pre-made ship collections. I think there are some of those in the mods section. Hopefully, these collections will have enough pre-made ships that you won't have to constantly create or tweak your own designs.

If you'd like help in designing ships, I think there are a few guides floating around. The best advice I can give you is to spend a little money on espionage, then design ships to counter what your current enemy uses. For example, let's say that you want to invade the Terrans. You've spent a handful of credits on espionage, and you can see their basic stats now. For example, you know their military strength is greater than yours. This is not a problem, because you know that their entire fleet is made up of laser attackers. You can make a bunch of ships that use Shield defense. With enough Shield defense, the Terrans will never be able to shoot down your ships. Also, you know that the Terran fleet is outfitted sporadically with Point Defense. This means that you should probably avoid using Missiles. Instead, use Lasers or Mass Drivers. Now that your fleet is custom-designed to destroy the Terran Fleet, you can cut through their defenses and land several troop transports on their undefended planets.

You should be able to successfully mount an invasion on any difficulty level now, except perhaps the last two.

why are you so worried about finding all the core ships? they all suck except for the colonizer and constructor right at the beginning, and I usually just obsolete core designs because they'd otherwise clutter the Shipyard screen and the starport governor screen.

Also, as far as finding out what the enemy has in thier fleets, I use scout ships (which are blank cargo hull ships crammed with sensors, if you don't have Kryo's hull mod, just use whatever cargo class ship is available) to look around at thier worlds and in thier region to see what weapons and defenses they have.

one thing you may not be appreciating is the power of logistic tech. if your ships are weaker but you have more of the you can still come out of top.

as to the actual shipbuilding, concentrate one one weapon type per ship. do not spread it around or you will just maximize the defenses of enemy ships.

know what enemy ships have on them. espionage or checking stats on the actual combat screen if you don't have the intel lvl high enough. if they have you owned defensively you may need to start researching another weapon branch.

missles are the most expensive to research but also the best buy early on. that is, early it is cheap to research good attack value wpns, but in the end it gets bad. antimatter torps is where it starts getting expensive. and all the defensive techs are fairly cheap to research, just expensive to put on ships.

make sure your ships are as fast or faster than your opponents. if you can't win maybe you should run until you can merge fleets to outnumber them. if you can take a spare fleet of replacements so that you always fight with full strengh fleets of full strengh ships. a reinforcement fleet does wonders for increasing the experience level of your ships. levels = hitpoints = survival. check the 'wild weasel' thread for some shipbuilding tips too.

there are several other issues that could be contributing to your military difficulties. inefficeincy in research, economy, colony rush... all sorts of things. are you matching the ai in these areas? if not there are several good threads active atm to help. bottom line, this is a complex game. if that is not what you enjoy then pls do yourself a favor and find a game more to your taste. if, on the other hand, you do like having many paths to victory, and a sense of accomplishment of having mastered a complex and difficult game, good luck finding better

gl, hope this helps

Dealing with ships can be confusing at first, but you settle into a strategy pretty quick once you've played a few games. Great tips in the previous posts. Main thing is to outpace the other races then you have the resources to build bigger ships with more weapons. As stated earlier, specialize in one line of weaponry at first. I like missles myself. Do well in the initial planet grab. Once you've beat the AI there, you've got a good chance of winning. Your fleets will generally be more powerful no matter how you build them (lots of small ships or less large ships). Run your attack ships in fleets as large as your logistics allows and sacrifice some range and speed for weapon levels until you have good miniturization, hulls, and logistics. Use diplomacy to keep the AI from attacking before you're ready (trade and diplomacy techs). If you use a few good strategies in the beginning, you'll find you can beat the game easily at Normal and even Challenging difficulty regardless of how you build your fighting ships. And you do have to micro-manage your planets. The AI does not do a good job of utilizing their planetary resources even at higher difficulty levels. That gives you an opportunity to get ahead right from the start.

don't forget the AI can't resist an undefended transport....so design one with lots of engines to be able to stay a step or two ahead of his fleet, they'll give chase and eventually you'll have all his fleets racing after this one quick transport...then go attack his planets...lol, I don't know how well this works on levels higher than challenging...

Ship designs?

I use the standard constructor and freighter, but most everything else depends upon what techs I have on hand.

Sometimes I like playing with the ship designer, but mostly I just double click what I want on the ship and end up with something lopsided and ugly, but takes only a moment to design.

I guess the real problem is that each ship requires a lot of different things:

Two engines
One (or more) support moduals
The specialty item that defines the ship:

Could be weapons
Could be colony modual
Could be troop transport

Then you might also need some defense.

Sid Mier (creator of civilization computer games) said the secret to good game design is 'interesting choices'.

I guess that's why I LIKE the ship design challenge in Galciv II.

Every game I have to adapt my ship design to what I NEED and what I HAVE.

The Drengin are trying to extort money from me, I know that means they are going to decare war soon. They've got Enhanced Logistics, Medium Hulls and Harpoon Missiles, but no shield techs and I've got beam weapons.

I have INTERESTING CHOICES on how to counter this threat.

I can research a missile defense tech, or more powerful weapons, or better logistics or a better hull size, or maybe even more military starbase techs or possibly I just need an advanced support modual or engines or a miniaturization tech to squeeze just a tiny bit more stuff into my existing hull.

Whatever I decide, I'll have to do it immediately, which means I won't have everything I NEED, but I can quickly make some INTERESTING DECISIONS about what I can use that I HAVE.

Maybe I'll rush-build some existing ships, but probably I'll quickly hop into the ship designer and quickly make something that is the best I can do with existing tech to counter the specific threat that the Drengan are presenting.

So... I have medium hulls, but most of my fleet doesn't have my highest beam weapon, or my fastest engines. With just a little more logistics, I could get an extra medium ship into a fleet, so that's what I'll research. My newly designed ship has a little missle defense, one or two of my best engines, a support modual, and as many of my best beam weapons as I can fit. I just double click what I want, and let the ship designer auto-place the items.

Now for more interesting choices... I've got a design that will help me when (not if...) the Drengin attack. I'll get started on producing this design, but how much money do I have? Can I afford to rush-build a few on the border of my empire and the Drengans?

Maybe a better answer is to grab an older ship with the same hull size and update it to the new design... only takes a week or three. Do I update ALL of an older design to counter the Drengan threat, or just a couple of ships?

Interesting choices.

My advice?

Play a few more quick games on Tiny or Small maps at a difficulty level that you are comfortable winning at. Normal. Maybe Challenging. Save Tough for later.

When you are obviously going to win, just alliance everyone, win, and start a new game. That prevents the tedium of mopping up the galaxy.

Your objective is to gain familiarity with what techs you NEED and how to get accustomed to how the game flows... what the game is going to MAKE you need.

Go Neutral. Get the Neutrality Learning Center early in the game and out-research everyone. Tech advantage is HUGE in this game.

And that's probably what your real problem is... you don't have tech advantage, so you don't have good choices to make when war comes to your system. It's pretty frustrating trying to fight a war when you don't have half the techs needed to build a fleet that can respond!

Good luck!