Hopeless noob needs help with the basics

That doesn't sound like normal difficulty, Sound more like Suicidal.
(er... no offense)

If you start with stellar Cartography (If you don't, get it as fast as humanly possible (considering the humans are the only ones that start without it)) buy a couple colony ships and send about one to each of the spots on the mini-map that have really tight clusters of dots. And put some factories on your homeworld so you can build more colony ships later. Put some Economy, and happy centers on your homeworld too. And I'd suggest that you send your survey ship toward the stars with only one or two planets around them to make sure you don't miss any colonizable worlds, also make sure you try to get the best (highest class) planets possible, first.

I was a noob once too, I might still be.

The only sad part is I had the game for a year and I only started using my stardock.net acount a month ago.  

Another tip, I try to give my planets really good infrastructor, as long as you have better production & research than the enemy, you will win.

Also, even though I'm not in their empire, the resistance is an empire for noobs like you, so check it out.

Their is another thread, with a similar problem i would suggest you check it out,
https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=357&aid=156809, you could also check this very good FAQ which helped me out when I first started.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/925349/41935

Here is my formula.

1. Buy a factory. Start building a colony ship.
2. Que up another factory, then farm, then either lab or entertainment.
3. Send your existing colony ship to the nearest star. Ignore the low PQ world in your own system for now.
4. Send you flagship exploring, especially for anomolies.
5. Research engine techs to Impulse 1, then upgrade you colony ships to better speed.
6. Research techs (no particular order) that improve your production.

You should be able to get out a new colony ship each 8 turns or so. I use the following formula for determinging a planets use: PQ 7 or lower - research only, no port, PQ 8 or higher - factories only (use good common sense with the bonus tiles).

Depending on the map, you should be able to get 8 or so colony ships out of your homeworld the first year. Wise use of the colonies should get you an extra 8 or so (total 16 colonies the first year). Only grab the high PQ worlds the first 2 years. Play a balanced approach and you should dominate the AI with little effort.

Whatever works, but if you are building colony ships, you will be continually depleting your population. I recommend building farms later because you won't utilize them until your population starts building up.

Bring your difficulty level down to Easy or Simple, its by far the best way to learn the game.

Calkwalk is pointless, the AI just dribbles at the mouth and says ga ga every now and then at that level.

By reducing the level to Easy or Simple, you will learn the game much faster as you will not get run over by the AI in your first few games, and you get a chance to get a feel for it and experiment. At those levels the game is very forgiving, and you get a chance to explore it and find out what its all about.

You will find your strategies will alter slightly as you progress through the levels in order to keep pace with the game. Dont assume what strategy works at one level, will work with the next, buy in large they dont.

Another way is to play a couple with the Cheat Codes enabled, that way when you are learning, if you make a massive mistake, you can enable a cheat and play on thus not wasting the time invested in the current game to date. You need to be wary using the cheat codes that you dont learn bad lessons, but otherwise its a good way to start to learn the game.

The key thing at the start of playing GalCiv is dont be too ambitious, normally be the opposite, keep the difficulty level down so you get chance to learn it. Some people have started by going straight in at a high difficulty level, but they are the exceptions, start low and work up - in the long run its quicker that way for most people.

Regards
Zy

Rule 1: don't start off on a large map. I suggest starting off on a small or medium map with two other races: one (like the altarians) whome you can ally with and one (like the Drengins) whom you can fight.

The first rule for the first year is this: your focus is on establishing colonies, claiming territory, not on building up said territory. I usually don't build more than maybe a starport and a couple of factories to start out, until that planet's population reaches at least one billion, at which point I start sending out colony ships from there. Focus on techs that improve vehicle speed: drives, etc. Planetary Improvement is nice for the straight 10% all around upgrade. Sensors are good if you've got a lot of anomalies sitting around, so you can crank out a couple of survey scouts to pick them up for nice bonuses.

Do not upgrade your research facilities and/or factories more than one step at a time unless your economy is stable: remember that better labs and factories cost more.

Upgrading your market centers, on the other hand, is generally a good idea.

Don't research planetary invasion until you've established enough labs and such to get it within ten weeks or so, build up your infrastructure until then. In the meantime, build a bunch of small or tiny-class fighters to stand around and look kinda scary and discourage people from attacking you.

Don't scout with scouts. Upgrade your colony ships to impulse drive and use them instead, so they can colonize planets immediately upon finding them.

Learn to adapt. For example, if you start off right next to the Drengin, you may want to cut your colony rush a bit short and work on improving your military and making some friends first. If you start off backed in the corner with the Iconians and Altarians and Arceans surrounding you, you may want to focus on allying with them as a nice cushion against the scary Drengin and Yor. If you're smack-dab in the middle, start expanding outwards in all directions as fast as possible to build up a nice little home for yourself in the center of the map.

Don't research or build farms until you've gotten to at least multimedia centers and everyone is deliriously happy.

Ok my turn now.

Hope all this isnt too much all at once. I guess you can see that everyone has a slightly different way of playing.

I buy my first factory and colony ship. my secong building is a market. third is either another factory another market or a lab.

I never go for any tech thats going to take more than 5 weeks or so. At leastat the beginning when you pretrty much want all of them. You may get impulse drive and see the next speed tech will take like 12 weeks. If so, move onto something that will take less time. Of course some techs that take only 1 week can wait. like ship defenses. When you click on a tech look at the description on the right and see what immediate bonuses or new structures you will get. Even planetary Improvements is worth a few extra weeks.


I keep things balanced at the beginiing and only really make major adjustments to focus when i want sopmething fast and after a turn or 2 ill put them back. The exception is militarty spending after i feel i have enough shipos for the time being and im getting flooded in constructors.

One thing I meant to mention and forgot....

There is no "Silver Bullet" in Galciv. It is a balanced game (ie advantages gained in actions are always counter balanced by difficulties or more work to achieve others) which means many strategies are just as viable as another. There is no "guaranteed" "correct" strategy, you need to develop your own style of play, what works for some does not work for others as it does not suit their play style.

Therefore when reading through the experiences of others, dont look for the "magic solution" or "the perfect strategy" (there is no such beast). You should read the posts in the guise of learning techniques, some of which will work for you, some will not as you will like to play differently (more/less agressive, friendly type etc etc). A strategy that "feels right" to you, is in general probably right for you. Dont grasp at one just searching for a "solution", because there are no "solutions".

There are of course some big no-no's particularly to do with the economy, many outlined above - those "no-no's" should be taken aboard and followed. Overall try to understand the logic behind whatever is being suggested, dont apply it verbatem, adapt them to your play style and the game will after five games or so suddenly start to open up for you.

There are no prizes for completing suicidal on your first game, and equally none for trying 20 disasterous games at suicidal, rather than taking it slow and logical through the levels. If you dont take it through the levels slowly, GalCiv has a habit of shoving the stress level through the roof, punishing you for trying to go too far too fast - the only outcome of that, and the attendent head banging and yelling, is a headache and a sore throat, and not one jot closer to a happy game.

Regards
Zy

I've taken a few of these suggestions and they seem to work for me (granted, on the beginner level):

1. Create your own colony ship with sensors to explore and colonize at the same time.
2. Skip the 4 PQ Planet next to your main planet and look for something better.
3. Play with the Large or Huge maps to give yourself some time to build up an infrastructure.
4. Specialize your planets if possible for the best return. I.E. make some planets pure (well, mostly pure) research planets and others production planets.

My additional suggestions:

5. Don't forget you can upgrade existing improvements to another type. I start with 2x or more factories on each planet regardless of what I'm going to use it for. They will help with the production of whatever else I'm going to build. Then if/when they're no longer needed, I "upgrade" them to research facilities or whatever.

6. I've found that for my style of play, I do the best with a customer race that specializes in diplomacy. That way I can trade for the techs I need when I need them. Seems to work for me.

-Don

Some really good suggestions here.

I disagree with using large or huge maps. While in the short run it gives you a buffer, in the long run, handling such a large empire will be bad for a newbie. Stick with a smaller map that you play the entire game through without being overwhelmed by logistics and number of planets. A lot of planets can be hard to micromanage for the beginner.

You can also set a lower number of planets, right now I play on gigantic and my civ only has a dozen planets or so, being the largest already. Depends on how you like it.

Look at the bonuses of your race. They should define your tactics. I generally choose a rather even mix of economic and domestic stuff, industrial and economic (+20%), morale (+10%), pop growth (+5-10%) research (+10%), luck (+25%) etc. Including party effects of course. A good economy is fundamental, and I didn't choose combat bonuses (except luck) so far. If you get your economy running, you have won the game.

The goal is: Spam colony ships. Design them to be at least speed 3. Have your expenses at 100%. The idea is to get out as many colony ships as possible while just skirting bankruptcy. To that end, don't fill your colony ships up to the max, but only put 100-250 mil into thém, not 500. Tax the populace to the hilt (40-50 approval), you don't need happiness you need planets. Planets Planets Planets.

Put a mix of buidlings on the home planet, factories should be first, the rest economy and research.

If you choose different bonuses you need different tactics. If you have a huge pop growth bonus you need to have your approval high to really benefit, at 100% your planets grow twice as fast. That means you can put more people on the colonies, and your tax income will soar after a short while. Don't forget approval bonuses too.

Think about where you send your colony ships. Chose their courses in a way to uncover as many solar systems as possible in the least time. Remember you only need to uncover the sun, not all planets, click on it and see how many habitables are present, if none, move on to the next system.

After you have your first 2 or 3 colony ships on the run (ion drive), ramp up your research spending. Research cartography, trade, xeno-economics up to where you get the better economy building, and space militarization and some weapon tech. Get all of this as quickly as possible, then lower your research spending again and go for social and military production again. Build your labs and econ buildings on the colonies and the home world quickly. After you get trade, gift it to the other civs for free, and if they already have it, a low amount of money. Show them you like them, and they will want to be your friend. Some are bad people though, and you need to deter them.

After you have no more planets to colonize immediately, build some small defenders, ships with no drive and a single small weapon. Build one for each colony, and park it in orbit. The other civs are disencouraged to attack when they see you have armed ships and are not a total pushover. I made the mistake in the beginning to, thought I don't need a navy, but then some evil minor race attacked me and I couldn't stand up to them!

Then build some freighters and send them to your neighbors. They like that.

If you are really friendly to other races, it might even happen that there's no war at all. In my current game the only evil dudes are the Drengin, and they lucked out in the colony race, so they don't really dare to attack their neighbors.

That strategy generally works on maps with a fairly large number of planets to colonize. In other situations, you may need to step down the colony rush and switch to constructors while you research up extreme colonization, or you may not even bother and go for planetary invasions instead. Adapting to the situation is extremely important especially if you play with blind exploration.

To be honest, I'm not good at the colony rush, so I usually cut it short after about six months to focus on reinforcing my military and economic strength and filling in the PQ 4 worlds I skipped over, and then resume once I've stabilized my civ.

Yeah, he's playing DL, so no extreme colonization. In my current (first) DA game I did the same, and faced total bankruptcy with the changed rules, so I needed to cut down spending to zero I could research the colonization techs to get all the >4 extreme planets too afterwards anyway. That's on normal though.

One of the problems with the colony rush is imo that you don't generally end up with a coherent territory, making your frontline very large in a war.

These are all awesome tips, thanks for sharing, everyone. Been playing for quite awhile now, but there are some tactics listed here that I haven't tried...gotta love the replayability of this game

A couple other things I would add.

There are some really great advanced strategies out there, like the factory only strategy with research being done through focus. Absolutely avoid these until you can pump out a victory on normal or better with a standard type of strategy. I suspect the other strategies would prove frustrating until then. Once you have that down, then try out some of the other stuff. It will be fun, not frustrating, at that point.

Under DL, trade with the AI! If there are four or more races around, you can pick up almost everything they have by trading techs to all of them. There are a whole bunch of tricks to help around this, but at least start experimenting with it...

I think I might have learned to play the difficult way (according to some theories) but i learned and won anyway on beginner, gigantic, all nine AIs, and a custom race and this is how i did it...

try to get a map where your in a bit of an isolated corner (but not really small) and have a race seperate you and everyone else, like a wall, then colonize some if you want and make sure you stay on everyones good side. just play the way you want but try to balance it out and if you did it right you should be like the mold in a basement that everyone thought wouldn't be a problem. Then, when you feel ready, send out your undisturbed forces against the shocked enemy, ecspecially if they fought eachother you should be able to beat them all like they're nothing.

also if you do this your abiliteis should get some permenant bonuses or that was a glitch and i got lucky. you could also try turning off cpu alithograms (however its spelled) that way they dont learn from you. hope that can help.