I didn't start playing Galactic Civilizations II until long after it came out.

At first it was hard, and as you say there isn't a lot advice out there.

What I finally did to learn the ropes was to create a game. Save it before I did anything.

Then I played through the first year. I did this about 7 to 10 times changing my strategy each time.

By doing this I figured out what worked, and what didn't work.

In my opinion the game will be won or lost in the first year, and once you learn how to deal with the first year then it won't be so crucial that you do everything perfectly all the time.

That first year is crucial because it is all about economics. A strong economy is the foundation of almost any strategy. And you can't really do anything if you aren't managing your economy.

So my advice is don't even try finishing the games at first. Simply play through the first year over and over and find out what works for you and what doesn't work.

- Livonya

I've only played GalCiv 2 twice, I'm actually in the middle of my second game. I've played other strategy games including GalCiv 1 (that was a while ago).

My basic strategy is to expand as quickly as possible. I usually skip any planet with a PQ of less than 10. PQ9 is sometimes acceptable though. The only exception is if it is in a strategic location. I only focus on these less than desirable worlds when all the planets with good PQs have been taken.

I kinda play a "defenseless" strategy where I have no military ships other than the survey ship and a couple of unarmed scout ship I build. All I really do is build colony ship and contructors when I find strategic resources. I keep the default settings for military/social/research production, but I'll change it later to suit my needs. I also push the tax rate up to 40% and I keep production at 100%.

Social production is very basic. I build a factory first, then a market and lastly a research lab. And repeat. Oh yeah, a starport every so often and one farm when I reach the population cap and if the planet's approval rate is high enough. Only build entertainment centers as necessary. I focus mostly on factories and economic structures.

Research is a bit more complicated. Since I've only played GalCiv 2 twice I don't know the name of the exact tech to research, but I usually focus on the ones that improves (not in any particular order):

1. Ship speed
2. Morale
3. Diplomacy
4. Improved production
5. Improved economy
6. Improved research
7. Beneficial trade good that increases any of the above
8. Government improvements since they allow better economies

Notice I make no mention of defense, weapons, ship hulls, or star bases. They take a backseat in my game. I typically rely on diplomacy to keep me out of trouble, and a bribe or two. My first game was at normal difficulty. My current game is the next level up which is the challenging difficulty if I am correct.

Having trade routes with other races is a good idea since it means they are less likely to start a war. They are less likely to attack if you are contributing to thier economies.

The lack of a military allows me so quickly build up my bank account which I use to rush production of colony ships and various social projects. I don't really build a military until later on in the game. That usually does not happen until I have researched at least two different weapons and defenses at least half way up the tech tree.

During those United Planet Council meetings, if you have an opportunity to vote "Yes" to force all races to operate under a Star Democracy then do so. It's random though, in my first game that was the topic of the first meeting. Naturally I voted yes. In the second game that proposal never came up. I actually had to research for it.

My game kicks into high gear when the random event "Economic Boon" happens. Fortunately it has occurred somewhat early in both of my games. It is the best way to build up your treasury account. Currently I pull in about 40K credits every week into my treasury. That will go a long way to maintain my military once I build it up.

Building up military later on in the game means I don't really have to worry about upgrading obsolete designs which saves money. I also lets me determine what weapons and defenses everyone else is developing. In my first game the other races were developing a mix of all three weapon types. In my current game, all their ships are armed with projectile weapons and armor. Therefore, I focus on energy and missile weapons since the other races barely have any defenses against these weapons.

When you see an unclaimed strategic resource, grab it as soon as you can regardless of what it is. If you have, then no other race can benefit from it. My favorites are economic, military and morale in that order. You just need one constructor to claim it, but build more so that you can mine more bonus and don't forget to fortify it when you get a chance.

I guess I'm a constructor nutcase. I build as many of them as possible to create economic star bases that will boost my production and research. This is especially true in my sectors with many planets with starports. In fact in my current game I there are 3 planets that I have where I get 50% - 60% starship bonus. That means the weapons are more effective. These will be for my elite starships.

So far I have built 8 fully decked out economic bases to boost production around each of these planets. That means I get a 192% production bonus on these planets for when I am ready to produce my elite dreadnoughts. And they are armed to the teeth. That also means that I've built 984 constructors just for these planets. A fully equiped base needs 41 constructors to complete. 8 bases for each of the three planets means 24 bases. 41 x 24 = 984. I think I went overboard, oh well. That doesn't include all my resource bases and other economic bases that I have.

My strategy is not for everyone since it takes a very long time to develop a military. Definitely not for the bloodthirty strategists. At least not until my Dreadnoughts begins to roll off the production lines.

Some important things to remember, for the medium-large range of galaxies with "typical" settings.

COLONY RUSH:

Early in the game it's important to colonize as many decent planets as possible, the good ol' colony rush (ignore PQ 1 and probably PQ 2 planets... probably useless the AI will be ignoring them too, so no need to grab them right now). Get some more factories on your homeworld and send out some colony ships. You want to send them *outward first* to get worlds before the AI does. There will always be a decent planet right in your home system, do NOT send your first colony ship to it. Send your third or fourth colony ship to it, because it will be a while before any AI tries to colonize that planet. Use the minimap to send your ships toward star clusters. If you're toward an edge of the map, send your ships toward the middle first - the point is to be the first to reach systems that are likely to be contested. Stars between you and the edge of the map are not likely the AI's first target, so you can send a ship toward them later.

DEFICIT SPENDING:

Do NOT spend all of your early cash rush buying things. If you have anomalies on (most people do), set your survey ship to auto-survey. This is its most valuable use. Rush buy things only if you have lots of money in your treasury, say 3000-4000 BC. Rush buying one or two factories may not do as much as you think unless you build them on bonus tiles - your homeworld's colony building already produces as much as six basic factories or four standard factories.

Use the rest to sustain a massive deficit. Lower your taxes until you get 100% approval. Keep this going as long as you can, to grow the population on all your planets at double rate. You will often be losing 100+ BC per turn. If you have a lot of cash anomalies you can keep deficit spending going for ages. Otherwise, you'll otherwise have to set taxes to about 49%.

TAXES AND APPROVAL

Now's the time to learn the relation between taxes and approval. It's not straightforward, there are "cutoff points".

Basically, for any form of government you want to avoid rebellion or losing elections, and high population growth is nice. Above 60% approval you're not likely to lose an election (I think imperial governments may be able to go lower). At 75% you get a significant bonus to population growth. At 100% you get double population growth. But basically, if population growth isn't a huge priority then approval above 60% is basically OK.

Up until the 30-40% range, increasing tax point by one point decreases approval by roughly one point. But as you increase tax you will see some *sudden* drops in approval, usually at numbers that are multiples of 10. One of the biggest is at 50%. This is why I tend to keep my taxes at 49% until I have quite a few morale-boosting technologies.

UNDERDEVELOPING NEW COLONIES:

A new colony is a money sink. At the beginning of the game, you're short of cash. So... it's often best not to try and do much with a new colony. Put a few factories in the build queue (don't rush buy anything) so that it's ready to be developed when you have the money, but consider just leaving them idle. Definitely do not build other stuff until A) the planet has enough population to start generating taxes or your empire has enough money that you need more space to build factories and labs, and the space might as well be on this colony.

In the early game you really have to be careful with your money. A lot of your colonizing is just "planting flags" very quickly to keep the AI from taking the worlds. You can't actually *use* the colonies quite that fast. So you develop your homeworld and one or two of the best worlds you've found, and then you build up other worlds as you have the money to pay for them. Otherwise you will have lots of planets full of buildings that you can't pay the maintenance for.

MAXIMIZING YOUR INCOME:

This game has some interesting formulas for making money. The amount a planet makes depends on the tax rate, and how much you can tax depends on morale. What's taxed on a planet is its population (not industry/research output), so as the population goes up the tax goes up. But as the population goes up, morale goes DOWN. To keep morale up you have to build morale-boosting structures, which takes up space that you could have used for something else. Like, for example, stock exchanges that would boost your taxes!

The way it works out, the ideal population seems to me to be somewhere in the range of 12-15 billion (it depends on planet quality and tech level). Not nearly as high as you might think.

First reason: tax rate is proportional to the *square root* of population. This means that doubling the planet's population only results in a 50% increase in tax rate. So a pop 24 planet only makes 50% more than a pop 12, and a pop 48 would only make 2.25 times as much.

Second reason: there is a *big* dropoff of approval that starts roughly around population 20 and reaches a huge peak around pop 25. There is just no reason to exceed pop 18 or so at all, morale goes too low.

So to make a lot of money you find a pretty high PQ planet (minimum PQ 10). Build farms to get the population to 12 billion, or around 15 if it's late game and PQ is higher. Build one morale building, or 2 for population 15. Then you basically fill it with trade centers/banks/stock exchanges.

Obviously, your economic capitol should go on such a world. Do NOT build the economic capitol on your homeworld if you don't plan to make your homeworld into an economic world in the long term.

However, unless your homeworld has lots of manufacturing bonus tiles or something, I strongly recommend making it into more and more of an econ world as the game progresses. The economic capital can be build *early* in the game because Trade is not a very expensive tech to research, and it will greatly improve your finances. Your homeworld has the population and PQ to make a good econ world. And in most cases it will be relatively far from the front line as the game progresses.

PLANET SPECIALIZATION:

The section above suggests specialized economic worlds. To get a money-maker planet (other than on your homeworld which starts with a higher base population) you might start with two farms, a morale structure, and a minimum of four or five econ structures (banks etc). There's no point spending the space on all that population boosting if you can't also put in the econ boosting structures to roughly double your output.

Add in your initial capitol and two factories to leave around for upgrades and that's 10-11 tiles taken up right there. Unless you find one of those rare worlds with ridiculously high PQ, your economic planets should be fairly specialized in what they do. They might have a sideline in building smaller ships or galactic achievements or whatever, but they should basically be specialized money-makers.

Which brings us to the rest of the planets... they have no reason to be specialized money-makers, and therefore they have no reason to exceed pop 6. In fact I often mine their population for transports, dropping it down to 2-3 a lot of the time (drop it further and it will grow back sloooowly).

Your other planets will be the money spenders, research and industrial worlds. You can split them between research and industry, or you can have all-research and all-industry worlds. At least a few worlds *should* be purely specialized. Your technological capitol structure, for example, is precious. Build it on a relatively high PQ world. I'd consider anything less than PQ 10 a waste unless you are really strapped for planets... you want it to apply to at least 6 labs even before you get to advanced terraforming techs, or the bonus-tile-boosted equivalent of 6 labs. That structure is a prize... it doubles the research output of a planet while only increasing the cost by 100%. Anyway, stuff that planet with labs and just enough factories to upgrade them.

It's really all about maximizing use of space. A good research world should have a research coordination center, but you need 4+ labs for it to be worthwhile. A good manufacturing world needs a starport, and it should have an antimatter power plant, but now you need at least 4 factories for that to be worthwhile (and only one world can get the manufacturing capitol, so it should have as many factories as possible). If you're working with worlds that are "only" PQ 8-10, then generally they make good manufacturing or research specialist worlds.

For worlds with very low PQ, I give them some factories then I either build a starport and use them for emergency buying ships, or put them "on hold" for better terraforming techs, or I use the planet as a dumping ground for galactic achievements.

BUILD-AND-REPLACE FACTORIES:

An often overlooked fact is that you can "upgrade" any structure into any other structure. What this basically means is you build something on top of something else, and the previous structure doesn't stop working until the instant it's replaced.

This is useful for quickly developing new colonies. Basically, you can build more factories than you'll ultimately need (especially if the world will eventually be a research or econ world), and especially you can build *older* factory designs which are faster and more efficient to build. The classic Basic Factory and Factory designs are the fastest to build for how much they produce (Factory just has a slight maintenance cost and takes up less space). So what you can do is practically fill up a world with these, then use them to "upgrade" to more advanced structures right on top of themselves.

THE LAST MINUTE MILITARY:

There will come a point in the game where the AIs will have finally build up a bit of real military, and start to look for easy pickings. If you're weak at that point you will suddenly see them ALL start to threaten you and/or declare war on you at once.

You want to be ready before that point - by having established some diplomacy, and by having some military techs and ships ready. And you want to watch for it coming. You can look for relations going downhill and one of the "minuses" on the foreign relations screen being military strength, and other indicators are them developing planetary invasion tech (this means that if they declare war, they're actually a real threat rather than a nuisance).

But until that point is nearing, don't build a military unless you really want to beat the AI to the bunch. Research the core techs that will build up your economy, industry, and so forth. Some that new players may forget include trade (economic capitol), xeno ethics (instant +15 morale), and the one that gives you harmony crystals.

Intellekt post was very interesting, and really proved that everyone has a diferent strategy.

The great thing about this game is that there really are a lot of winning options. Its not like Civilization, where the main option is the conquest one, and diplomacy, technology and everything else is secondary.

I´ve finished most of my games before even reaching half of the weapons techs. I barely fight other civilizations, unless its the Dregin, which you just dont have a choice.

About starting a game, I usually just rush for the colonies. Yes, I do buy a factory in my home world, because I feel 490 credits is cheap enough. I use my miner to explore, because in the start the mining wont help. I do BUY my first/second colony ship, even if it costs 1300 credits, like it usually do. So, in the start, I get about 3/4 colonie ships, and colonize every single planet I can even if I get a huge deficit. This will probabily means you will be pretty much the underdog in the few months of the game, but it will pay off when you start to build your colonies up, because you have more of them than the enemy.

BTW, I dont care about morality. I just raise taxes as much as I can, and usually the aproval goes down to 45%/50%. Raise the production to 100% very early.

Also, I kind of "tech rush". I focus on extreme colonization, and after that I focus on the type of world colonization that is close to me. After I have colonized those extreme planets close to me (usually water worlds), I trade this technology with a close civilization that would not be able to use it anymore. Why I do this? Because a extreme colonization is very expensive, and usually I can trade it for a lot of lesser techs, that I was suposed to be researching while doing extreme worlds tech.

That way I tech up as much as everyone else, yet having the planets the extreme tech is suposed to be used. DETAILS: I always play as humans. There is a huge boost there in diplomacy. Ok, you may be thinking "if you dont military tech up, you will be weak".

Wrong. Because planet invasion is a pretty high tech. If you dont have planet invasion, you cant conquer a planet, and they cant conquer yours too. So, after I get the extreme colonization, I go for Planet Invasion. And I usually get it much earlier than anyone else. I use it to conquer minor civilizations, and also to conquer some of the closer civs.

Ok, I dont give a shit about morals, so I get a low population growth. Bugger that. I trade, and I trade a lot. Its one of the first techs I get. Make sure you trade as much as you can, and know that trading with someone will make him like you more, so if you´re afraid someone might atack you, you might consider trading with him.

Also, give a lot of stuff. Yes, GIVE STUFF. Make sure you get an allie, because unlike other games, allies in this game are awesome. Make sure he likes you by giving him stuff and trading with him a lot. About the techs, never give anything too powerfull, just give small useless tech to them, and trade the best techs for money, influence or other techs, like military techs. If you´re worried someone might atack you, give him stuff too, usually useless stuff.

Now, how about ships? I dont waste a lot of time on military and ship techs. I get all the early military skills by trading it with Extreme techs. Sensors is totaly ignored. Suport Systems too. I just build a constructor and send it close to the borders, where I build a space station.

Space stations are very important. I´ve won quite a lot of games with the influence conquest tech and stations. I think its much better to set all your worlds to build constructors, set a rally point, and send waves after waves of constructors there to build a good space station quite quickly.

I also focus a lot of effort on economy and production. Who cares about military? Ok, usually my ships suck, and they are worst than the enemies. But who cares when you can build three times more, and use two weaker ships to crush a stronger one.

So, you see, there are very diferent ways to win a game. But I do think the humans are the best ones (due to diplomacy), and a good economy and industry are the best choices you can make.

The usefulness of diplomacy depends A LOT on difficulty level and how militaristic/nasty the other races are. At higher difficulty the main benefit of diplomacy is getting the other races to go to war with each other rather than with you. In that case, the Draath super manipulator ability is the thing to have.

For the player who just wants to build themselves up and strike when ready, the Thalans are a really good bet. Their super hiver ability lets them build factories VERY VERY FAST (4x normal speed). This allows them to make worlds productive incredibly fast.

Try taking Thalans, giving them a maximum economy bonus and a morale bonus, and then picking the industrialist party.

Nothing like having a 53% bonus to all production, an extra-strong economy, and the ability to build and upgrade factories at 4x the normal rate.

Why would you want to give Industrialist to Thalans? They already inhale money enough as it is. They need Federalist to feed all those factories.

The Thalans don't have to build *more* factories than anyone else, they just build them *faster* and they can get more production out of them. Their racial production bonuses (including from the Industrialist party if that's picked) do not have to be paid for.

So they don't actually need more cash than other races, though I picked maximum econ and morale bonuses anyway.

Yeah basically beginners should read Intellekt's post. He has a very good sense of strategy. Besides that know what stuff does. Know how population relates to taxes and income. Know how much it costs for you to produce each research and manufacturing point. Get a general understanding of moral vs tax rate. Figure out how populations grow. Post all the settings of your game when you ask a question for better answers (i.e. Large galaxy, abundant planets...). If you dont understand these and some other basic concepts and relative relationships you are not going to fair well in this game. Each game try something different and new to see what impact it has.

Good luck noobs!