Good Starter Tactics

Wurdtoyer,

there's some info that is needed to best help you. Are you playing Dread Lords, Dark Avatar, or Twilight?

So take this with a grain of salt, but this is a very basic starting point for DL and DA.

Race stats/abilities

Terrans DL
Morale +10
Research +10
Trade +25
Diplomacy +25
Hit Points +10%
Trade Routes +1
Logistics +6

3 remaining customization points

Suggestions: De-select Hit Points, Research, and Trade Routes in the Ability Menu (adds 6 ability points for a total of 9). Select 30% Econ, 30% Pop. Growth, and 20% Morale. Go with Federalist Party (+20% Econ). This set up will give you enough economic power to compete with the AI. Use your Diplomacy to stay out of war or to start wars among the AI (if they're busy with each other, they'll avoid you).

Terrans DA
Morale +10
Research +10
Trade +25
Diplomacy +25
Trade Routes +1
Logistics +6

10 remaining customization points

Suggestions: Put 4pts in Economics (+30), 1 in Morale (+10, for 20 total), 1 in Luck (better anomalies and changes attack dynamic to your benefit), 4 in Mil. Production (+50)

Select Federalists.

Again use your Diplomacy skill, now coupled with Super Diplomat, to stay out of war and to get what you want from the AI such as ships, money, and technology.


Starting Out

Turn One

Just close the research screen when it opens, you'll be back to it in just a moment.

Once HW screen opens, check over your bonus tiles. This will dictate your early moves. If you have a bonus tile that is greater than 100% (such as a Precursor Mine/Library or the 200/300 tiles) but NOT a farm/morale/influence tile then go ahead and rush buy on the lowest base cost that structure.

Close the HW world screen and open up the Domestic screen. Set your industrial capacity to 100% and your taxes as high as you can that you still have at least 80% morale (prolly around 35-45%).

Open up the Research Screen. Select either Adv. Propulsion techniques, Universal Translator, Xeno Research, or Galactic Warfare.

use Colony ship to colonize secondary system world, unless a higher PQ is DIRECTLY visible in your line of sight (don't go searching for one, but if you can see it right away, just grab it). Send your Survey Ship on auto-explore. Set Space Miner on auto-mining. Make sure your asteroids are supplying your HW not your secondary.

End Turn One.

Don't rush buy your ships, or, if you are, make sure you Lease them. Even with a 33% production slider, with the 50% (60% with Gal Warfare) mil prod. bonus you should be able to kick out a colony ship ever few turns.

Also, suggest getting the Sensor tech early so that you can send out more Survey Ships. More survey ships means more anomalies, and more anomalies means more money, tech, and various bonuses.


All in all, rush buying vs building depends on what kind of game you are playing and what difficulty level. In my longer Gigantic map games, I hardly rush buy anything early in the game because I don't have to worry about meeting the AI that soon. In my 0yr games I rush buy every single item (both ships and buildings) but I suffer massive debt because of it too.

Go ahead and start a game and post updates roughly every 12 turns. That way we can see what you are doing and give you pointers as you go along.

Best of luck mate!

Don't forget to sent your colony ship back to your homeworld to maximise your number of colonist. I will even use colony ships to transfer populations until eveyone has at least 2 billion. remember that tax levels do not come from total population, but come from population on each planet individually. I don't know what the exact numbers for the sweet spot of where the population starts to make you money and where higher population stopps doing any good is, but that is the key.

Scincerely,

[email protected]

well higher population on any world will bring you more income; I think what Scintor means is the point that it becomes not economically viable anymore. In DA this is at the 20 Billion mark as above 20B you have to more VRCs (Virtual Reality Centers) and lose on GSE (Galactic Stock Exchanges) where its not worth it (added maintenance and loss of econ boost). This is because morale drops SIGNIFICANTLY after a world hits 21B no matter what kind of morale bonuses you may have.

Most player worlds in DA are put at the 13B limit (one advanced farm), but if you have a 100% farm tile and a morale bonus tile on a world thats a possible candidate for the 20 Billion population level.

Nah, I believe he was talking about getting your newly colonized planets to the ~2billion mark so they will then hold their own from maintenance vs tax income. That sweet-spot by the way has a few factors: +economy skill, Good alignment (if picked up while still under the # of planet limit for free maintenance) and any building beyond the colony.

If you have planets still gaining population and others capped at their max, you are wasting those capped planets' population growth. Move people onto the growing planets so you get as many planets as you can to keep the population growing.

I would tweak the above strat by setting your taxes to as low as they can go to get 100% morale. Having your morale at that level doubles the rate of population growth. And the more people you have the more money you have. Do that for many, many weeks and then flip it back only when you really need the cash.

That one trick alone changed my entire game for the better.

Good stuff cheers guys. I particularly like the bit about shuttling population from one colony to another to maximize growth.

When I am starting how how should I queue my buildings on my home planet? I usually just chuck down a couple of factories followed by a couple of labs followed by a couple of econ boosters.

you're better off designating worlds for a specific purpose. So World A will be just factories, World B just labs, and World C just econ buildings. You'll get more bang for your buck this way. Let the bonus tiles dictate what that world is going to be.

Also don't be in a rush to heavily upgrade your buildings. Some of the very high end structures only give a small benefit compared to their maintenance cost and you would be better off just sticking with the lower level structure. For example, I won't research Industrial Sectors until I am showing a healthy income like 5000BC or higher.

Yeah, as much as increased manufacturing sounds great (so you can crank those warships out that much faster) those fancy factories are expensive. Pace yourself with your manufacturing upgrades.

In the beginning I tend to specialize some worlds but they are all pretty balanced. Once I get some planets under my belt and have established the core worlds of my empire, I will begin to specialize. I'll convert outer planets into ship producing worlds and inner planets into research and economic powerhouses.

But all that nitty gritty stuff is just a matter of play style. Once you get some new techniques worked out (shuttling colonists is another great idea and will only help keep your morale high and your worlds growing at a constant rate) you can tweak what you like and don't like.

Oh, and as far as starting buildings, in the initial stage of the game, I put down:

Factory (maybe two for my first world or two)
If there are any research or manufacturing bonus tiles put a lab or factory
Two or three economy buildings
And then I'll fill it up with labs

As your worlds expand convert those extra labs into farms and morale buildings.

Oh, and oftentimes I don't even bother with a starport on most of my initial colonies. And my PQ4 planet will get all factories and a starport. As I move up the terraforming branch it becomes my world that builds all of my galactic achievements.

That's about as basic as I can put my beginning strategy. BTW, since strategy has so much to do with my settings, I'll share what I play. I play Tough or Painful on Large and Huge maps with maximum AIs, adundant anomolies, and random everything else.

I actually have a building cue and prefer to make generic worlds. I like long empire building games and often turn off most victory conditions in order to prolong the game.

My building cue goes as follows:
Factory
Starport
Economic
2nd Factory
Research
Morale
3rd Factory
Influence
Food
4th Factory
2nd Economic
2nd Influence
2nd Research
3rd Economic
3rd Influence
3rd Research
4th Economic
4th Influence
4th Research
5th Factory
5th Economic
5th Influence
5th Research
and so on
This makes every world fairly balanced for an overall empire
The major variable here is bonus tiles. Bonus tiles always get their appropriate building and count as the number of buildings that are equal to the bonus (100% = 2 buildings, 300% = 4 buildings, 700% = 8 buildings) therefore if I get a 300% manufacturing bonus I only build one factory until I am ready to build the 5th Factory.

Scincerely,

Scintor

Hiyas, I just got Galactic Civ II a few days and have a few starter questions. They’re so basic that I almost don’t want to ask:

Don't forget to sent your colony ship back to your homeworld to maximise your number of colonist.

End of quote

Q: How do you do that? My colony ships vanish after creating a colony.

I particularly like the bit about shuttling population from one colony to another to maximize growth.

End of quote

Q: How do you do this? - using new colony ships or some other ship type like transports?

Thanks in advance for any help on this!

Each colony ship is a 1 time shot, IF YOU USE IT TO MAKE A NEW COLONY. Consider it being broken down for parts to create the new colony, if you like. If you use it as a shuttle between existing colonies, it will not disappear.


Good luck and good hunting!

Answer Q1: before you use the first colony ship click back on your homeworld to land the colonists that were on it to start, then relaunch it with max colonists. The initial colony ship does not start with max colonists on board.

Answere Q2: you can use either a transport or a colony ship to move people between two already colonized worlds. Just launch with max pop from one, and land on the low pop planet. Next launch from the low pop planet w/ 1 colonist on board (won't launch w/ 0), and return to the high pop donor planet to repeat.

In #2's question, make sure you have the planet's launch direction set in the direction it'll be traveling towards. Launching a ship from a planet doesn't take a movement point.

I use that to it's fullest advantage especially when those planets are only 1 parsec apart. You could then move people from one plant to the other w/o using 1 movement point. That same goes for landing at any planets along the way in ferrying people, it'll save you 2 movement points.

Great info, thank you Dax99, Ragnar1, and Loupdinour (rhymes with soup du jour??)! This is really going to change how I play. Shesh - I wonder how many other basic functions I don't know yet, and don't even know that I don't know yet! Lol!

You guys are fast - this is a great board. I have another question. I've been reading up on colonizing un-colonizable worlds. I thought they would remain so, but I'm seeing that there are techs that wil let me colonize them if I research them. Just want to confirm - this is true for DL? or only for other versions?

Btw - I'm playing my first game of Gal Civ II DL right now. I have familiarity with the genre from playing MOO and MOOII. (MOOIII was pretty much a bust for me.)

In DL, there are no techs to open up new planets.

In DA/TA there are techs to allow colonization on extreme environments (toxic, radioactive, heavy gravity, barren etc). In MOO you needed modules on the ship to colonize such worlds, in galciv2 DA/TA you only need to learn the tech.

Check out this guy's DA guide to know more about what I was talking about. This link will take you right to the extreme planets section of it:
http://www.jeffpinard.com/extreme_planets.htm

*edit*
And ya...sorta like soup du jour. Proper spelling for what I was shooting for is Loup du Noir back in the time of Diablo I on battle.net, the proper spelling was taken, so I went with this ever since for my online handles.

Wow, thanks again. Shame about DL not letting me research techs to colonize the initially ucolonizable - that would have been cool. I have the Gold Edition of Galctic Civ II and I *think* it's supposed to include DA, but I don't see the option whe I launch the game. I'll just stick with DL for now.

I also played DII a while back. OMG I can't even count the hours I spent doing Hell Meph runs, Cows, Baal runs etc so I could amass SOJs. Had a 98 light sorc and 96 FW FO sorc with all the bells and whistles.  

Cheers!

*edit - i just realized you mentioned DI not DII - that;s old school, man. That was awesome at the time, too! FRESH MEAT!! Used to sweat when I heard that ;)

If you loaded the Gold Edition, when you start the game theres a button on the bottom of that first screen that says "switch chapters". Push that button. It switches you between DL and DA.

oops ... um, i just checked and I don't have gold, just DL. scanning the manual again i saw nothing about miners, so i assume that's in DA only. is DA the later version?

yes DA is the first expansion pack

I've played a few games now. I am addicted. The governors are very useful when the empire becomes huge.

BIG QUESTION: In DL, can I upgrade all ships of one specific design at once? Like, can I upgrade all my Wasp 1's to Wasp 2's without clicking on each and every one of them? Please say yes and tell me how! In my current game I'm going with swarms of small and tiny.

Thanks again, all   

When you go into the upgrade screen right above the design choices to upgrade to is a little box you can X that says upgrade all ships of this type and gives you in perenthesis how many you have of that type to upgrade.

You just saved me a ton of clicking, my friend.   

Wow, my game is going great! My vast empire is massive, but i can control all starport production, planet rally points, and ship upgrades very nicely with the way this game was built. Also, this forum helps a lot too I ran across another couple of things are puzzling.

Why do I still have a Trade Good even after I traded it to someone else? And what do the brackets around my military and social production numbers in my colonies list mean?

A Trade Good is there to "Trade" - you own it, rather like a copyright on software. Someone wants to use your software, they pay, someone wants to use your Trade Good they pay for it. Like the software, you still own the Trade Good.

The brackets mean that planet currently has no military or social production on the go, the figures inside them are the levels of production being wasted because of it. Its a king size hint for you to go look at the Planet and do something about it to prevent wasted resource.

Regards
Zy