The Great Swindle

A couple more things...

Forgot to mention that vs 7 AI on Masochistic I owned 70% of the planets in the first year. And won influence before 2nd. Very important is the survey ships. I rush to them with every race I play. Just upgrade it to a colony or constuctor if there is too good an opportunity to pass up or wait for. If money is coming in good, I build 50% of my ships as survey ships. then just up them as needed. 2 impulse 2 engines, survey, sensor 1, and 3 life support on a cargo, with basic miniturization. Talk about a colony rush, 7 speed gets you around the map nice early.

About the planet swindle... I tried it and it took a loooong time to flip back even with a influence SB overhead. Other than that, very useful!

You didn't happen to have the Mind Control Center built did you? It does the opposite of what the description says. It, in fact, makes flipping planets much harder.

Lovely. Is there a way to mod it back to what it is supposed to do? I decided to play an "Evil Influence" game where I'm playing an evil race but I will never declare war, I want to win via flipping. I'm an evil pacifist, my evil is more subtle than brute force, I'll convert you to my decadent way of life via your own free will making me even more evil. So of course I went and got the MCC built quickly to help out. This explains why planets where I I'm showing 12+ on the influence didn't flip even after months of being ready to flip and they don't have the, dang it forget the name, the dealy that prevents flipping built on them.

Oh well if I do an evil influence game again I'll remember to not build that. I'm play DA v 1.8g if that matters. I don't want a huge deal but just wondering if there is a quick way to fix that.

AFAIK it's been like that for a long time. Maybe some of the players that have been around longer than me can shed some additional light on this. I suppose the way to look at it is, you have to sacrifice flipping planets for the 100% civilization-wide economy bonus it gives you.

The MCC has always been broken. It gives a 100% economy bonus, and prevents planets from flipping, rather than making them flip faster. A 100% econ bonus is far superior to what it was originally intended to do. This is one of reasons why a lot of the experienced players play evil nearly exclusively.

Sentient species taste better...

Planet Swindle can be done in more ways than one, with Super Diplomats at least.

Whenever an AI race acquires a new planet, whether from colonization, invasion, spore, culture or a surrender, they are always willing to sell that planet on the same turn or a few turns afterwards for dirt-cheap prices ranging from ~1500-2500 bc depending on diplomacy rating, and completely irrespective of the new planet's population or infrastructure. After that critical buy-time though, the AI inflates the price to "you'll have to compensate us" levels scaling with population/infrastructure, or simply refuses to sell at all.

In a recent game as the Terrans, I had bribed the Altarians, Drengin and Arceans to attack the Drath as part of my usual war-inciting routine. Of course, the Drath got their already-weak military crushed, and so they surrendered to the Yor. Just after I got the surrender message from Draken, I got N-1 on the Universal Translator and bought up all the key pre-built, pre-populated former-Drath worlds for ~1500 bc apiece, with their "homeworld" of Dratha going for ~1800 bc. Since the purchased planets all had 5-15 billion population on them, the minor worlds soon flipped for free.

In fact, as a Super Diplomat, it's rather pointless to invoke a war and go running around with troop transports of your own to pick up planets. Just let the AI invade and take over worlds, and keep buying them up. The cost of planets is less than the combined cost of invasion technologies + transport ships + troops + invasion tactics, and there is far less micromanagement and hassle involved. And you have no need to risk a war yourself and get tangled up with a Secret Meeting event or the victim's Allies.

The same thing can be done for the colony rush, and I've so far done it thrice as the Terrans. I colonized planets in my own star cluster and made them economy worlds with morale at 100%, unless they have a bonus tile in which case they become production worlds. Then I watched as the AI colonized by tracking the change of cultural influence, and kept buying up planets for low price while I myself researched economic/diplomacy/high-priced techs. Trash technologies like Sensors or General Life Support, or Space Mining would fly off the shelves with AIs paying through their noses in the form of planets and money and/or scouts & miners. If I ran short of money/junk-tech, I'd contact a Minor Race and get some more money or a useless Armor Theory or something.

Eventually I'd end up with planets all over the map and a sum total of influence high enough to block any flip threats. Only once did I ever get caught in a crappy deal - when the Yor sold me a Class 2 Barren World. Too bad, that after all Terraforming had been done, it turned out to be a Class 23... and later proved central to a cultural assault which brought down the Yor themselves.

This is the central premise of my economic victory strategy, AKA buy the galaxy. Sell everything to everyone and buy planets. In my experience it leads to such eeasy influence victories that I turn that condition off.

I hadn't realized that planets were available after conquest.

The one thing that I would add is that empires refuse to sell planets when they have three or less planets reguardless of the circumstances and it becomes 5 times harder to culture flip a planet when an empire has this few planets.

Scincerely,

[email protected]

Very interesting PeskyFly. I'll be sure to test this out in my next game. I wonder if it works at higher difficulty levels.

Sentient species taste better...

I tried the colony-rush swindles on Painful. On higher levels(up to Maso so far), where the AI demands bigger prices, I've so far found it simpler to just do a normal colony rush.

The war-invoked invasion-swindle can be done on any difficulty level as long as you can buy the necessary wars and keep them running until invasions begin taking place. This is indeed a form of "buying the galaxy".

Yeah, this doesn't seem to work all that well at anything past Painful, in my experience. The AI's start demanding an arm and a leg, in the Drengin's case, literally!