Turn 17: Ive now met everyone. The greys ended up being the Korx and the Iconians. I have mixed feelings about the Iconians because there happens to be 6, I repeat 6 aquatic worlds under my influence, and they are pretty good planets. Class 12, 11, 9, 7, 6, 2 to be exact. I want to grab a few of those simply because it looks like most people are going to get between 7 and 15 planets, and if I'm unable to grab 1 or 2 of those Im looking at around 9 planets, not good.

On the flip size, everyone likes me and I started by getting as many treaties topped off with cash as I could.



Altarian - swapped research treaties
Torian - got a research treaty for tech
Iconian - research treaty in exchange for xeno commun., U.T., 76 BC.
Korx - I got a planet! Class 4 only but only had to pay 1009 BC and it had a starport plus 2 factories.
Arceans - stingy buzzards wouldnt barter with me, but waaaay later I got a research treaty from them by a BUG IN THE GAME. I was half way pissed at the time, because it said 133 BC in the slider window, but it was really 1330 BC that I paid. Anyone else had this bug? It dropped the last zero in the price, I think those Arceans are more persausive than they let on, anyhow, I let it go and even took the hit when it dropped me to -100 BC, AND I was losing money.

By now my original colony ships snagged a class 11 near the Yor, and a class 9 and a class 7 in the same solar system near the middle of the map. I immediately set about building econ structures with focus on social and changed my sliders to 50 social/50 research. On my 5th planet I got a 300 percent research tile, so I did build a lab on that.

I also held off a few turns on colony ships to get freighters up and running as anomolies and selling lesser techs to minors permitted. I decided to focus on 2 races, the Altarians and the Arceans, the rest of the races will have to live without my good stuff. By this point I have decided these will be my "teammates". The Altarians are up in a corner with a pretty weak military, but Im simply using them to get wars started on a grand scale, and the Arceans are smack dab in the middle so getting them to tie up the other races warships should be pretty easy.

I havent researched xeno ethics yet, because I only got 1 ethical scenario, and I just HAD to pick evil because it was a 40 percent boost to PQ on a class 11 planet...so I have decided to go neutral, but unless I get a few more scenarios to get my alignment leaning that way I cant afford the 2500 BC cost.

Gonna cut this post off now, because the next one is gonna be quite a bit longer with more pictures when things actually get kinda exciting ( at least to me). So it might also take me a little longer to get it posted. If you actually like this so far, then Im sorry for the delay, if you dont like it...tough   

At this point I have seriously started cranking out banks ( not all have upgraded to stock markets yet), and have really upped my diplomacy and my morale resource as well as trade goods. I made it a point to put 1 farm and 1 entertainment tile on EACH planet to keep morale at a max. As a side note, Earth is always the biggest culprit for dragging down morale, so let me post a picture of what I have on my capital, its probably not what you expect   



In case you cant see the structures, I basically built any and all morale structures on Earth, Frictionless Clothing which I built later is on another planet but is galaxy wide anyhow. So Earth has a politcal capital, Zero-G, ultra spice, harmony crystal, secret police, and a counter espionage and a farm tile on a bonus population, with 100 percent morale. BIG help. Havent had to worry about Galactic Resort or upgrading the last tech for morale yet and I dont think I will have to bother unless I just want to experiment and see how high and can get my taxes.

Anyhow, back to the game. At this point I have 15 planets, with 159 total tiles.
96 are banks/stock markets...
15 farms
14 entertainments
5 factories...total
17 labs, with 3 research coordination
The rest are still open, or have various trade goods, capitals, or wonders on them.

I am banking, with 100 percent approval, over 1000 BC per turn.

I have started to buy ships from anyone who will sell, but put a premium on any ship from the Korx or the Yor. After just 1 round of buying, the stats are as follows:



My diplomacy rating is at 136%, and I need to start eliminating races I dont like. I get the wars started...easily...



Followed by this:



Basically, you can control the flow of who you want to snag planets by buying the defender's ships and gifting them to the invaders, or just keeping some for yourself. Oftentimes I could trade 1 tech for upwards of 10 to 14 ships, even heavy fighters and frigates, and they are waaaay better and technically cheaper than anything I could have built. At this point, I have started to notice that this approach would be sloooooow for a complete military victory but VERY easy for any of the other 3 victories. My biggest concern, if you really want to call it that, is starting to become spies.



Luckily, the AI, even at painful, doesnt focus on the right structures. Killing my manufacturing capital is sorta pointless, and taking out 1...or even 7 stock markets isnt really doing very much. Anyhow, it still annoys me, so i crank up espionage to get 5 spies in about 8 turns and clean it all up.

Getting back to the strat, basically continue to pay the Yor and Korx to fight the Altarians, which really means everyone else. Buy the Korx ships and give about half of them to the Altarians. Buy the Yor ships and give about half to the Arceans. At the beginning of year 3 you will have this. Notice I capitalized and took out all the Korx planets (with transports I bought from the Altarians), and I dont think exterimating them even made a difference to my other relations.



The Arceans on the other hand, REALLY stepped up military output, but notice I still lead in everything else



SO, I need to watch the Arceans, because now they are on my immediate border, as well having a huge military, funded mostly by me and they have been the most standoff-ish all game. But, I think its safe to say I have this game in hand, its just a matter of finishing it.

As to the "all econ" approach, I do think its fairly efficient, but with severe limitations. Im not sure I could have done this with another race, maybe the Drath, or a custom race with Super-Diplomat. You have to do a lot of micro managing, and observation of everyone else on top of that, which leads to a rather tedious game if you ask me. As an added level of difficulty I want to win this game without actually building any warships, or achieving a tech victory. The all econ approach would be much simpler if I just used the money not only to buy ships but to buy my own that I build and just start taking over colonies. I didnt even research space weapons, but I did research planetary invasion because it wouldnt let me invade a planet without it   

That being said, I should point out that if you go "all econ", 96 tiles out of a possible 159 is what I would call "all econ", you rely on trade more than I would have thought. So if you use that money to buy warships and invade, invade, invade, you will have to protect trade routes better, and really watch how many wars you fight all at once.

Thats enough for now, I will probably finish the remainer of the game in the next post or 2.

Nice AAR Piznit, you make it sound very easy!

Thanks for doing this, Piznit. The econ idea is interesting.   

50 percent social boost is bigger than you probably realize. I was cranking out trade centers, and Earth was just focused on military building. I dont think I actually built anything on Earth for like 10 to 12 turns. I flat out bought 3 colony ships, plus the original, then I think I bought 1 or 2 more as anomolies allowed (when I would get money). I got 2 planets in diplomatic trading, a class 4 and a class 3 I think? I only actually "built" 2 or 3 more after that, so thats how I got them so fast.

I plan on trying to post the last of the AAR today, I think I can get it all in one or 2 posts with screenshots.

Ok, to finish this bad boy up, let me start by stating a few observations about this game.

Again, this approach was sort of 2-fold. Not only did I want an All Econ approach, but I also wanted to build no military ships or win by tech. With that being said, it actually made the game rather boring, for reasons I mentioned above. I originally intended an actually military conquest, but I think I ADHD'ed out, because after eliminating the Korx I couldnt stand the thought of doing that 5 more times. Winning by diplomacy or even research would have been...and was...extremely easy.
After playing this game (my 2nd ever on Painful), I either need to move up in difficulty or the Super Diplomat ability needs to be MAJORLY changed. Hopefully its the first, because I consider myself smart enough to figure out the difficulty thing, but Super Diplomat skill is just way powerful. Basically you have the Drath, Altarian, and even the Drengin ability all wrapped into one. You can basically extort massive money from selling anything, you can EASILY start wars, and easily get people to help you in war, or avoid it. By the end of the game, I was trading things like terraforming, or galactic stock exchanges for 14 or 15 ships at a time. And good ships, with like 15 to 20 power rating on mass drivers (good being relative to this game, because that was like top tech level).
Secondly,, I think the settings, while not all, were mostly in my favor. As TP Scot mentioned, I was able to grab a lot of planets due to anomolies. It would be interesting to try this approach again with less favorable settings. There was a decent number of planets, and I had less aggressive opponents than I could have. No Korath and no Drengin did help.
Third, I firmly I could have mopped the galaxy and won militarily but I just honestly didnt want to. One thing that did annoy me was when I bought ships they were just all over the place. Getting them grouped together in fleets was a micromanagement nightmare, especially when they were "afraid of the dark" and had to return to known space. But again, with Super Diplomat, I actually ran out of ships to buy from the AI at several points. I was buyin g them faster than they could build them, and thats broken. Of course I could have built my own to speed it up, but that was against the gameplan in this set-up  



So lazy man's win, diplomatic victory! Which should be noted I did in 3 turns, I gave each race about 5000 BC, to get from friendly to close. Then when I allied they actually gave me about 700 BC back hahah.

Here's a few of the more interesting scores:





I do want to take a second to make one note here. Im not sure if its my playstyle or if I should be embarrassed about this or not. I have played close to 50 games, and a good number of those have been military conquests, but sadly this is the BEST military score I have ever had EVER. And I never built one ship, how screwed up is that? I normally play medium or smaller so military build up is not as large as it is on the bigger maps, and I also realize that the amount of time you have military ships matters. Oh well, perhaps its just another way to raise your metaverse score, just remember to buy lots of opponents ships.   



Not sure if you can see it or not, but if you look at the bottom of the percentages where my bonuses are listed, I got diplomacy up to 246%. That helped a little...

All in all, I did enjoy trying this game. Sorry if it was a disappointment in the type of victory, but rest assured military victory was easily achievable, but would have taken most likely another 2 years, which the thought of just annoyed me. My only real disappointment was that the game got boring after the first year and a half, which it usually doesn't. I'm not sure if I just needed a higher difficulty level, or if it was too much micromanagement, or the constant AI diplomacy screen,something else, but most likely was a combination of all of that. Luckily GalCiv is made so you can constantly try different things at different levels of skill so its refreshing for a long time, I look forward to doing another AAR, probably more from a actual storyline that I have in my head. Enjoy!

Good read, thnx. It would be interesting if the strategy works as well on a higher difficulty.

Hi!

It does, but not with ships, and almost never with planets. Trading tech for tech or money is still quite doable. But on suicidal and with 60%+ higher diplomatic ability (playing Torains) I was not able to buy off a single medium attack-20 ship, even when I offered EVERYTHING I had (20 techs, 50 planets, ~10000 BC).

However I remember one of my suicidal testbeds about a half a year ago, where I tried the Super Diplomat trait. There I could buy small planets from the AI, but abandoned the game after about one game-year. There was waaaaaaay too much MM involved in the constant trading with ~15 AIs, but without it I couldn't "fuel" development of my planets. A death trap.

BR, Iztok