Have you patched up yet? The diplomacy gets much harder after the more recent set of patches.

And yes, Super Diplomat really is a super ability - you can do a lot of ridiculous stuff with it.

They never easily sell their planets to me. Unless its like a class 4 in my system, then they still want 20,000BC! D:

Hi!

Yesternight I as Humans bought in a suicidal game a class 11 planet for Planetary Improvements and Advanced Trade. In fact at turn 30 a half of my ~10 planets are bought.   I'm abusing the Super Diplomat to the extent never seen in my games, and I used to do a lot of trading.   

BR, Iztok

Iztok - I'm jealous. I don't ever play with humans, but for me buying planets is tricky, and not something I can depend on yet. Are there any pointers you can pass on that I might be overlooking?

Thanks.

i've never been able to buy planets trough diplomacy no matter how much money or tech i give them, this made me think that it wasnt even possible.

Yeah, it's probably an easy way to get freshly "spored" worlds from the Korath that way, since there's pretty much no population to speak of. I've only tried getting planets as the Terran Alliance though, so I'm not certain how it would be for another civ that doesn't have Super Diplomat.

Does Super Diplomat make it easier to buy planets?
Do you have to have an overwhelming diplo ability for this to work?

I saw this strategy a couple days after it was posted and I could not believe it could happen. Immediately I started a suicidal game and tried out this strategy using the Drath. There opening Diplomacy bonus is a little bit higher, I think they get better approval also. So I thought this would help in making the planets cheaper, getting my economy out of the whole faster, and the Super Manipulator will let me make people go to war with each other while I am still building my defenses.

But low and behold when the Iconians made contact with me and I tired to buy any one of their planets it was well beyond 4500BC which is all I had. Even a class 5 with 500 million people on it.

Am I missing something about this strat?
Did the most recent patch own this strat?

Honestly the map setup I recieved with this Drath game could not be better (I am in middle of galaxy, all the rest of the races are on one side of the map, I have an 700% industry bonus tile on my home planet,and their are two class 11 and two class 12 that I colonized early).

Super diplo, diplomatic translator structure, and a number of diplo techs all help to reduce the cost. The Bazaar might help, too.

But I don't know how well this works in 1.5x DA.

Hydro

Buying the galaxy has always been extremely viable. That had been my winning Impossible strat in MOO2 so I immediately tried it on GalCvi2 the moment I played. It's viable through all versions of the game, at least at Tough difficulty or less.

Super Diplomat, Diplo Translators, and at least a three Diplo tech advantage will provide the baseline.

You'll need a large treasury. Techs are nice for buying stuff, but generally speaking, it's better to buy with money.

Population is the singlemost important variable when buying planets. That means that it's easiest and cheapest to buy planets that are in the middle of war territories or have been newly established. This strategy will necessitate that you spread yourself out throughout the galaxy. You will probably not be able to wage a war until you have the game well in hand - you're too spread out to defend yourself competently. You defend yourself with a token military presence, trade, diplomacy, and treaties.

Yes, this will often involve bending over backwards anf gifting people with tech and money. You will sometimes have to ask people to go to war for you in order to defend your planets or to provide the opportunity for "new acquisistions." Super Manipulator helps in this regard, but it doesn't help much with costing, so Super Diplomat is really better.

Populist governments together with invested point in Population Growth are best. The morale helps keep your population taxable, and making babies helps make new low-pop planets useful faster. Sometimes, I load population onto Transports, not to take over planets, but just to shift populations around so as to help new colonies on the startup.

The Populist Party also incidentally helps with Diplomacy, so that's a good thing.

I prefer focusing on Defense when I pursue this strategy. You won't have much Tech to go around so instead of investing in Logistics and Weapons, invest in hulls and Defense instead. You'll only need the most basic of weapons tech to win as long as your ship is invulnerable. Less ships saves on maintenance, and if your ships are powerful enough, one Medium ship can take out entire armadas of 10-15 high Logistics fleets (up to 24 Logistics points each).

You'll have to switch around Defense depending on who you're fighting, but generally speaking, enemy fleets tend to focus only on one kind of offense. Mixing offense types generally doesn't work since secondary offense powers aren't all that strong. Defense techs are cheap enough that you can usually trade for the base techs and work your way up to the relevant techs without too much cost.


In contrast, you will usually have the weapons tech you need because the AI doesn't prioritize Defense very much. You can even field in a 2 Beam Power weapon and still win.

Military Resources are your friend. You'll need them to save on ship and weapons/defense tech spending. Morale Resource helps, of course, but until your pop gets way up, your native Morale should be enough. Econ Resources help you acquire money, but money won't usually save you from an invading warlord. Tech Resources will probably be second only to Military Resources in terms of importance. You'll need to have some modicum of technological parity in important areas (and Diplo tech advantage) to pull this off.

Hi!

I abandoned the game after another night of playing. I just don't have the patience to do 20-30 minutes of trading each 4th turn.

BR, Iztok