Bankrupt

Be more carefull in your spending.
Be more carefull in your colonizing.
Be more carefull in your ratio's.

If you hit turn, turn, turn and nothing changes - it is because you hit turn, turn, turn without changing anything.

It's definately not a game glitch. I have doen this once. Mainly If you build ships rather than buying them - except for maybe your first colonizer then you should be fine. The only time this happened to me is when I bought to many colony ships at the beginning of the game as a result colonized too many locations without building my economy. Keep in mind you have plenty of time its not an RTS. I am still having trouble remembering I dont need to rush.

I love this game got nothing done this week since getting it.

Try to get your population up as soon as possible!
More people = more taxes, this means that lowering your taxes at the start will get you more taxes in the future. (The higher the tax, the lower the pop growth, always try to keep approval above 71%, or, ideally at 100% for an extra boost)
Also, don't shy away from building economy buildings, researching the economy tech branch, researching one or two approval/morale techs and even diplomacy can come in handy because it allows you to get a better price when you sell stuff to Minor Races.

The one tip I found is do not build buildings until you have let you new planets get a high population. Then they will pay for the buildings.

Population, population, population. All they are good for is taxes. If you can get a 100% approval rate for a few turns, you will see your pop grow extremely fast. Any money you lose by lowering your tax rate will eventually be restored when your pop gets back up.

Be careful during your initial rush. Sure you want all the planets you see on the map, but it just is not going to happen. (Unless it is a small map with uncommon or less colonizable planets.) Most colony ships in the beginning of the game can only hold one colony module. That is only 250m people. When you colonize a new planet, there are just not enough people to keep your finances in the positive. You will have to devise your own strategy (or read a bunch of forums) that goes something like, rush, grow, rush, grow, rush, until all the planets are colonized.

Finally, don't buy all your buildings at once. I try to at least get my first factory on each world so I can get their production started. Since I play the Iconians, I am building Factories and not Basic Factories and I find that I can usually finance the first 5 or so before I just have to leave planets to grow on their own.

If you don't rush too fast, you may find yourself in the red for a little while, but not so badly that you can't get back into the black. It took me a few restarts to figure out how much I had to restrain myself to get a good balance between rushing and getting my economy going.

Not only shouldn't you buy buildings on your colonies you don't have to start building on them immediately either. If you aren't actively building on a planet it costs you far less money. Let the planet sit a bit increasing it's pop until it can afford to support itself before being in such a rush to put a bunch of factories on a brand new planet. If you're feel you have to be building something at all times try building one or two economic buildings first. While it's true that the benefit of economic buildings are rather limited when you have a low pop it does help out a lot once the pop starts growing plus economic buildings don't require any maintenance costs. Less is more. There's a lot you can do with just an initial colony building. The 12 bc maintenance is rather steep but it takes awhile before you can build a building that gives you better than the 12 production and 12 research of an initial colony. I just colonize and set the focus of the planet to research and take the 4 or 5 RP's a turn the planet produces and go get the next colony and do the same thing. Try building nothing for awhile. Sometimes nothing is the best thing you can build.

Wow, thanks for all the advice, I'll certainly apply it! It does seem that this game gives you the time to actually evolve a civilization before you find yourself engaged in warfare.

Makes sense, Mumblefratz, I'll try that out!

I do have one more question though. I can keep evolving a civilization and yet the sip sizes never seem to increase. Lately I've resorted to upgrading frighters to war vessels.   Is there another way around this, or is it because it takes more time to reach that technology?


I like this game too! I know a lot of people are saying that it beats MOO3, but I dunno, I think MOO3 wasn't as bad as people said. It just needed a little more to do, but I liked the music and the look of the alien races better than GC2. I do like that there is more freedom though.

For your ship size question, there are two routes. The miniaturization tech line give each hull more points worth of space, allowing more stuff to be crammed onto your ship. The hull size tech line gives access to bigger ship types (medium, large, huge) and some nice passive HP bonuses to increase the damage each ship can take.

Miniaturization is found after the Xeno Research tech. Hull size branches off the logistics techs.

That said, there's nothing stopping you from utilising BOTH routes of course
Improving your weapons will also result in a higher punch-per-equipment-point, (same goes for engines) so if you look at it that way, there's three ways...

But to purely increase the size of the ships (HP wise), hull research is the only way to go.

I think it's common for newer players to put too much emphasis on building right out of the gate (I know I did at first). I really don't hit the social production hard until the latter half of the game. Until then, I'm mostly running on the output from initial colonies. In the early game, getting more planets is much more of a priority for me than building the ones I have.

Give it some more time to grow on you. This games kills MOO3. I was an avid MOO2 player and *this* game is what I've been waiting for as its heir.

its best to just make a tech that gives you alot of money but be sure to make the AI value really low or everyone ealse will research it.

One of the opportunities I neglected at first is when you are in the transition from 'very early game' (colony rush) to 'early game' (start developing planets and military), you can get great benefits by grabbing treaties with the other factions as soon as possible. Sometimes its possible to get one-sided treaties where you get money and research in exchange for a one-time money/tech offer.

Thanks for the help.   

Yeah it does seem like a good game. I guess there's just more to learn. That was one thing that worked for me in MOO3; Diplomacy. I found it easy to master, and I could grab up all kinds of technologies that way. With GC2 I'm still working it out.