Newbie: where to start?

For me personally the sandbox mode was the place to start. The campaigns, while they have a story line, tend to be a bit restrictive in what you can do. Also things don't carry over from one scenario to the next so you end up playing a lot of little games.

My advice would be to start on a medium sized map, abundant everything, normal tech or fast tech, 3 - 4 AIs chose ones that aren't militaristic, and set the difficulty to Easy. This means that the AIs will still interact with you but they really won't do a whole lot giving you time to figure out what everything does.

Also I'd suggest if you play in DA to turn off Mega Events. They can be game changing in the extreme and something a new player shouldn't deal with in their first go . Personally now that I've played DA I wouldn't go back to DL for anything. But you may want to start with DL just so you can see what improvements they made with the expansion.

I think cyberj914 offers pretty good basic advice about starting with a relatively small sandbox game on a lower difficulty level.

It's also traditional around here to tell new folks to Learn Your GC2 Economics! As you practice colonizing, developing worlds, and building fleets, keep a close eye on what these changes do to your budget.

Setting anomalies to maximum and building an extra survey ship or two as soon as you can will probably yield several cash infusions as you explore your map. These can be a real life-saver while you're figuring out how to balance production, population, and maintainence.

Be careful when you get events that artificially boost your economy. There's one "empire event" that does it directly and there's another United Planets resolution that boosts your population's morale temporarily, which allows you to crank up your overall economy. Sometimes these things will last for awhile giving you a feeling that you're doing well. But when they end you discover that you're actually on the verge of bankruptcy. Don't allow these things to make you over confident.

Getting your economy going and generating cash is very important. But there are as many opinions as players about this.

It's so easy to overstretch yourself so badly in the early stages that it's almost impossible to recover.

A suggestion I read (can't remember who by) was to start a game and save it immediately, then play that same game several times for about a year (50ish turns) varying what you do each time. this will give you a feel as to what works and what doesn't.

Also, be prepared to lose track of time like nothing else. This game just sucks you in and before you know it many hours have past.

Would "space priacy" be an example of a mega event? I was playing my first game (tiny with 4 AIs) when some movie played and then large groups of attact 11 pirates (I had barely attack 2 and not many) destroyed pretty much everything of everyones in the game and now are sitting on top of colonies blowing anything up that is created. I think I need to start over and all players seemed totally pinned by the pirates.

Yeah, Piracy is one of the mega events, It's a normal occurrence too, but by the scale of your problem it looks like you've hit the jackpot.

I think you might be right in restarting. as the game is obviously very restricted and you probably wont learn much pinned down like that. Especially considering it'll take you a long time to develop enough to bust out and take them on.

That's the key in dealing with the Pirates, don't create anything. Just crank up your research until your weaponry becomes advanced enough to tak them on. I wish I had thought of that when it happened to me.   

Oh well, I got a pretty nifty ship design out of it.

Okay, I am still very new. How do I "crank up the research"? I know I can buy more labs, but my pitiful 2 planets are full. I found an economy slider, does that work in addition to the number of labs I have? Is there a cost to raising the research bar and lowering manufacture if I am not building any ships or buildings?

While I am at it, I saw a tax rate, I have not touched it should I raise or lower it, my citizens are already kinda unhappy (I am guessing from max pop with 1 farm and no entertainment).

Yes, it's those sliders you adjust. Drop your Military to nothing and give those points to Research instead. And yes you should be adjusting your tax rate, it will allow you to build more and research faster. I turn my taxes up until my approval rating reaches 45%. After that my overall unhappiness goes into the red. I've had no problems with it being in the yellow range though.

And you don't want to neglect your buildings either. Keep your social spending at around 30% so your planets can still build things. Just don't put any money into your military construction. So in the case of the Pirates, you'd have 70% Research spending, 30% Social.

You also should be building at least 1 Entertainment Centre to boost your people's Morale. More if you have a large planet with a high population. Keep an eye on your planet's morale, you'll see the percentage near the top of the screen. 45-50% or more is good. If it's less, build Entertainment Centres for your people. It's not necessary to have 100%, you can get away with much less. Just don't let it get too low.

Also, if you go into your Civilization Manager screen and the Colonies window, you'll see all your planet's morale ratings at once. If it's low, the number will be red. The same thing applies to how much money they're making. Any deficit will also show up as a red number. That's a very handy screen to keep tabs of your empire with, make sure to check it periodically, if not frequently.

GC2/DA economy is the hardest part to learn. Use the easy settings with 2-3 AI on Small or even Tiny with abundant everything and learn how to balance your economy during the early colony expansion and early mid game planet buildup. Focus your learning just on the economy for a few games and restart (Ctrl-N) when you start to get 100+ BC per turn in profit. After you think you got this down, up the difficulty and/or map size at your discrecion and fine tune the economy tactics more while can complete games now.

Yep all sound advice. And on top of what I said earlier I will also say this: the easiest way to learn this game is start messing with things and see what happens. Keep in mind these early games aren't about winning necessarily but to give you a feel for the economy system in the game. Understanding it is the most important thing and one of the harder concepts for a new player to grasp. A lot of games while not won in the first 50 turns are certainly lost because of mismanagement in terms of your economy.

You can think of your economy in this way: People = Money. The larger your population the more tax revenue they generate. Also the higher your tax rate the more money you generate with same amount of people. The down side to a large population or high taxes is that your empire morale will drop. If it falls too low your population will stop growing and actually start to decline. So you must balance your taxes, population, and morale to get the most out of your economy. You can see this effect easily if you watch your morale number as you adjust your tax rate. Increase it and morale drops. Decrease it and morale goes up.

Planetary population is a bit trickier in terms of how it effects morale. Generally speaking do not try to get a planetary population much larger then 12-15 million. Going beyond that unless you have major empire wide morale bonuses is difficult.

You know you are on the right track when you can get your economy positive with a tax rate of around 39%, morale of 75%-80%, and 90%-100% spending. This can be done just as the colonization phase ends. As you become better at the game you'll learn that even this guideline can be improved upon but just starting out it is a good bench mark to shoot for.

Also saving a game before doing anything major or heck every turn isn't a bad thing if you mess up and don't want to have to start a new game all over again.

There are dozens and dozens of paths to success in this game. The real trick is finding the one that makes sense to you and fits your style of play. Doesn't hurt that you get to kick alien butt with really cool ships you've designed either .

That seems rather excessive to me. I have no problems running tax at about 50% and I try to keep my morale at or just above 45%. Below that figure and the numbers actually turn red, so it's a convenient target for me.

Here are a couple of economy micromanagement ideas. They are more important early in the game and more important on higher difficulty levels.

When you are completing a research project extra research points spill through to be used on another reserach project, but this is not true for social or military projects (you just lose any excess miliatary or social points). You can use micromanagement to squeeze out more research. Just turn the focus on research for planets that have one or two turns left on a social or military project and see if increases the number of turns to completion.

When you buy a military project you can't start another military project until the next turn, but this is not true for social projects. If you have one turn remaining in a social project you can buy that project and start a new one that same turn. This way you won't lose any excess social production.

Well as I said it is a simple bench mark. Having your morale at 45% also means that you cannot start to go up the government types without risk of losing your empire bonuses. So this sort of thing I typically categorize as more of an advanced strategy because you have to understand the system very well to keep from crippling yourself later.

On the flip side of this I very rarely have my taxes above 45% and never go above 49%. I normally figure if I've got to have my taxes that high I've done something seriously wrong with my economy. The only time I set it and leave it that high is late in the game when I've got enough of a morale boost through trade goods and such that my morale is still 99% even with taxes at 49%.

The problem with this is you'll not get much population growth and this will be crucial when you start invading planets, Dead citizens don't pay tax and that extra planet costs money to run also.
I think this is one of the reasons why military victory get a higher game score, you're economy has to be strong to lose so many citizens fighting another race.



I totally agree, Keep 'em happy, keep 'em breeding. Anyway I'd rather go out with a bang than the slow strangulation caused by too little income. from underpopulated worlds.

Obviously it all depends on what difficulty level. as the AI's economy has massive handicaps at the easiest levels