Tired of Same Old Game (AI WAR)

From what you have described, it seems that you need to do a couple things to reacht eh game state that you want:

1) Get more experiance with the game. Once you learn the game mechanics then you can easily play a game focused on diplomacy or influence. A big thing to remember with those play styles is that it becomes less about playig the game, and more about playing your opponents.

Also, while you may be a "research race", you have to think big picture about it. You may be better at researching then race X, but if race X has better manufacturing, then they may be building more labs at a faster pace. Or, if race X has an economic bonus, then they may be able to divert more money to research then you can. Either one of these may be happening, and if so, then they could easily out pacing you in research even though your race is better at it.

2)Turn up the difficulty. The AI plays much smarter at higher levels.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If you don't want to fignt XXX neighbor, then give some warships and cash to XXX's neighbor and help bankroll anyone fighting them .

When you start out, look at the mini-map and see whether you have a good position.
If not, you can hit Ctrl-N and get a new map.

If you start boxed in, you will be in bad shape.

If you want to cheat a bit, keep hitting Ctrl-N until you get another star with one or two decent inhabitable planets. This may take a while to get such a combination.

Always have a good military, not like you have to use the ships but if you'r a big economic & militaristic power... chances are the ai will go limp and their relations will go up.. hoping you'r one of those sappy players who won't hurt them if it says "Close,Friendly or Warm".

I'm playing my first challenging game and I'm having absolutely no trouble Well I was at the start but... it does help to try and trade stuff so they are always warring each-other instead of you!

Actually he needs to turn it down. The game "always turns into a war" because he's not keeping up in production, research, or anything else. The AI sees him as weak, then, and decides to take him out. He seems to be upset that they're always choosing to eliminate him militarily, because he doesn't understand that influence and diplomacy are reserved for civilizations you can't just roll over.

Your right, I was thinking that my two suggestions would be taken as doing #1 first, and then going for #2, but I guess I didn't make that clear.

Ah, I see. Yes, once he's mastered point 1 any remnants of his problem should disappear with point 2.

I think a big part of the 'always at war' phenomenon is due to the double whammy introduced in the latest patch.

The first whammy is the increased restrictions on tech trading. The second is the fact that AI factions have been made hypersensitive to culture influence effects.

The player is now practically forced to research all of the colonization techs single-handedly, guaranteeting that planets in your area of infuence will be colonized by other factions. Your influence will affect these planets, making it much more likely that those factions will go to war with you, especially if you flip a planet.

Some of these effects are supposed to scale up and down with the game difficulty level, so I don't know how much affect this has on Challenging, but at Obscene level I have found that you can just expect to be constantly at war from year 1.5 on, pretty much like every other strategy game I have played.

yep if you dont want a military victory, then you will need a much bigger military!!

I am playing on the latest patch. In regards to research and production, I keep up just fine. The key is to have "a strong military". I strong military requires significant research into military items. Which means that something else has to suffer. I don't want a strong military (or rather spend resources researching one). Why can't I be Canada or Germany?

I just finished another game where I researched every diplomatic and influence item. The result? War with 2 of the "warrior" races. I was successful in getting others to declare war on the first race to declare war on me. Then, after that race was finished, they came after me. Even with my Max diplomacy and Influence, It would cast 40000 credits to get a peace treaty. What is the point?

As I see it, you are very limited in how you can play this game. You can win by Influence, BUT you better have a strong military. So you are forced to research military, planetary assault and planetary improvements from the start.

So it would seem that I would have to play each game the same way (i.e. research the same items) every time. I'm sorry, but that is boring. In MOO, of course it was largely about war. However, I had to vary my playing style based on my race and the techs available. As I see it in this game, it really makes sense to research ground combat techs and go conquer.

Sorry about the babble in the previous post. Too much beer Anyway, I wouldn't be so annoyed with this game if it hadn't been so highly praised for it's AI. Since it is, I expected better. I like the fact that it doesn't have to cheat to compete. However, I would like the races to have some personality. Some races will fight no matter what, while some will research exclusively, "buying" support when they need it. Others could be galactic power-brokers negotiating peace and trade deals. From what I've seen, that isn't there. So the races are just stats with no flavor (personality). This is why I could never get into the Space Empires series.

So this game just comes off as being more of the same. This game would have "wowed" me in 1993 when MOO was new. But in 2007, I just expect more.

Out of curiosity, are you playing Dread Lords or Dark Avater?

Becuase in DA the races all have super abilities, which give them a lot of flavor. For example, the Drath (who I used to ignore) are now one of my first targets/allies since they can quickly get most of the galaxy to gang up on you if they feel threatend (I had a total of 9 races, both major and minor, declare war in a matter of a few turns one time).

ugh scratch what i said earlier

Is there a way in the game to disable 'wars'? That might be the answer to the question

A warless game would be interesting, but I'm not sure the AI is set up for it at all.

Sometimes I think the AI goes for war because it's the most straightforward - "i have more stuff than you, now I take what I want."

I've actually found it too easy to win without war so far, in two games at Normal. It seems like if you have a good economic/research strategy where you're attentive to trade and don't neglect your military, it's easy to have "Close" relations with everybody, even diametrically opposed alignments. I won my first game by pretty much just allying with every major power. Even the Drengin were "Close," but I decided to declare war and try out my big, shiny fleet before winning....

I think maybe the AI is *too* rational - in most games like this, one of the bad guys will have a "psychotic episode" and start an idiotic war with you at some point. I've been trying to provoke the Drath, the next major power, into declaring war on me by doing obnoxious things with Influencer starbases, but so far it hasn't worked.

Canada and Germany (and the rest of the Western nations, for that matter) can get away with small military spending because they are able to use alliances (NATO) and their Big Brother the US to do the heavy lifting. A GalCiv2 example of this would be the Altarians with a supremely powerful military with an alliance with smaller but economically strong and militarily weak Good neighbors - it works only as long as the Altarians can hold the line (which they'll do for allies). But if you are militarily weak and isolated then the Nazi Germany's of the galaxy will descend like locusts to strip your economic and technological empire to the bone. And, from their point of view, they are just following their strategy: conquer the weak. They call them Evil for a reason, you know.

Like other posters have said, you need to have at least an average military rating to dissuade the aggressive races out there. A high diplomacy certainly helps, too. Even better, a very strong (or strongest) military is the key to peace. You don't have to use it - but the Club in the Closet is always there if someone makes trouble.

I know it is annoying to have to research all the military tech and build all those ships, but there is a basis for this in the Real World. Prosperity and peace are not cheap.

Hydro

You can't be like Canada or Germany because the galaxy in GC isn't like the world today. Today europe and north america are pretty peaceful, and no one is worried about their neighbour carving chunks out of them if they don't keep up a strong defence. In GC the Galaxy is like the world from ~1500-1900 where a lot of the world (galaxy) has just become accessible and whoever gets there fastest with the mostest can claim territory and resources and might makes right. Worse still, there are activly hostile races like the Dregin out there, who will eat you given half a chance.



Why not? Do you expect the ais to just sit about while you win a diplo or inf victory? Why would they do that? They don't want to lose. The ais are being smart here, you seem to want or expect them to be dumb and let you win.



Ok, so the race that attacked you was powerful enough to hold you off while crushing another race? If you're that weak compared to them you will get attacked. Again you seem to expect the ai to just sit there and not use its crushing military advantage while you win by other means. Not gonna happen.



It's because they know they're winning. If you were beating them, or even just holding them off for long enough you could get a peace treaty for a lot less. If you want to win by diplomacy you need to use it to avoid being in a situation like this. You need to be friendly with everyone and trading with the major powers. You need to use you diplomatic powers to forge alliaces and get others to gang up on any race pulling too far ahead. You also need to have a semi-decent military or ally with someone strong, because if you're a pushover someone will push you over and take your stuff.



Well yes. If you only focus on one area of the game it's going to leave you weak in other areas and other races will exploit that.



Not true at all. You do need to spread your focus a bit so there are some basic things you'll need to do every time, just like moving your pawns out of the way of the more powerful peices in chess. However, if you could do what you seem to want to, just focus all in one area, there would be even less varity and then it really would get boring as you'd just focus on the winning path every time and coast to victory.



Not really. I suppose on small maps you could just do that and rush everyone else, but on larger maps the other races would soon be out teching and/or outproducing you as well as out expanding you and possiblely ganging up to stop your warmongering.

diplomacy only works up to an extent by itself. It needs an above average (> 100)military rating to make it work even better. True in life, true in the game. Influence rating against the target AI also helps diplomacy with that AI in the game, I think.

boring when the AI goes to war? War is the funnest part. Destroying ships and sporing entire planets is wicked fun. Influence and tech victory is boring. You just defend yourself and essentially hit next turn with tech victory. Influence victory is just constructor haven.

Sounds like the AI is giving you a run for its money. "If you don't hate the AI then the AI isn't doing its joooob" (from G4 review)

Diplomacy is the art of war, without firing the first shot.

Diplomacy only works when backed up by a big stick.

I always read these threads about the AI not doing what the player expects and wants the AI to do, and then laugh. The AI does things in this game that A human would do to you, Not as devious as a human would do, but just as unexpected. Turn the intensive processing on for the AI, and really watch the AI match skills with you, and counter your ships, and nock out your critical starbase.....

A player that does not want to research military tech, but wants to win....

a loosing way to play....in the game and in life.

Depending on your tolerance for "Cheese." Many people (not me) like to get the Spin Control Center asap and set it up on a world near their main production planet. Each ship you put in orbit of the planet with the SCC gets it's military rating multiplied by 5. So you put a bunch of cargo hulls with nothing but weapons in orbit of that planet and your military rating goes way up.

And military rating is the main thing the AI uses to decide if they should declare war. This lets you keep the AI off your back with a rather small military. If you're already researching the Diplomacy techs early, this should fit in with your overall strategy.

Even if you don't use the cheese part with all the max weapon cargo hulls, you can still put a bunch of warships in orbit and get a nice boost to your military. You don't have to have the best military, just enough of one to discourage the more opportunistic AI's.

I kind of managed to do it once with the krynn, only a couple small wars broke out while I slowly culture flipped everything. I got lucky and the plague event broke out early in the game so everyone was crippled, then further crippled by spies on their feeble attempts +morale/economy stuff. I was able to keep morale way up so I could until I researched the plague cure and still have funds to colonize a huge chunk of the map. When everything was colonized I gave anyone who got attacked a fat wad of credits and 2-3 steps of weapons tech over the attacker. I wound up picking up everything interesting by trading off plague cure later on and stuff started flipping with the AI remaining warm. The only successful war that occured was the terrans attacking the drengin and the drengin oddly surrendering to the terrans a couple turns later.

As said, you need to consider your military to be a deterrent. Why would I make friends with an Empire when I could just own it?

Yeah, looking back on my posts and the other posts, warring AIs make sense, we're just too cozy in the modern world.

The world of galciv is very much kill or be killed - the only reason they play nice is when they cant kill.