Hi.

I haven't played GalCiv2 in a while(little less than 2 months), and just got back to it with a new Terran Alliance game on DA 1.80G with the following settings:

Crippling difficulty
Huge Galaxy
Scenario: "The Tactician"

Common Stars
Rare Planets
Rare Habitables
Common Anomalies
Abundant Asteroids
Tight Clusters
Very Slow Tech
8 Minor Races

I played Tactician for the first time, that too with Very Slow Tech, just for a change from the usual Rare-everything Fast-tech Masochistic game. I got the ultimate homeworld in Earth: 1 Precursor Mine, 1 Precursor Artifacts and 1 Mystic Spring. Earth also had 3 asteroids directly next to it and was located near the center of the galaxy.

In "The Tactician", as I found out, you get some technologies from before and 20000 bc to start with, but tech progress is supposed to be very slow. So I established a Factory on the Mine, a Xeno Lab on the Artifacts, my Political Capital on the Spring, and my Economic Capital. The rest were all econ buildings, some of which would later get overbuilt by Tech and Manufacturing Capitals and magnifier buildings.  Mars was an all-econ build.

So having built my infrastructure, I took advantage of Super Diplomat and my 20000 bc and began teching up, while simultaneously executed a spectacular colony-buying rush that gave me an unassailable economic and technological lead, as well as a free Precusor Library in one Arcean deal. I ended up with the most planets and the best built planets with the most population, without ever building a colony ship. After building a modest military and starting lots of proxy wars, I got all the AIs to ally with me by 2230, except for the Drengin who I kept at Close to avoid a Diplomatic Victory. I had a nice short little quest to find the Carinoids' home planet and kill them(since they had stolen all my tech), and then remained undecided on what to do next. I waited and waited and continued researching, in hope that the Peacekeepers or Pirates or even the Jagged Knife would show up to shake things up a bit. But nothing happened. The AI races continued to kill each other, but only the Drath had been eliminated. They surrendered to the Yor, and the Yor sold me their homeworld fully built with 15000 population for ~2000 bc on the same turn.
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So I decided to leave that game saved where it was and play a conventional Maso all-Rare game with a new custom race against a bunch of custom opponents(using races which I had played in the past as well as new purpose-built opponents). Except, I kept tech speed at Very Slow. First off, I got a normal homeworld with one 100% Research tile near the southern edge of the galaxy, and got some horrible neighbors. There was the Qolventz  Republic of evil spore-wielding yet very joyous robots directly to the west, and the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax just north of them(this means !!!). The pacifist, trader, and diplomatic races were all at the other edge of the galaxy, and the Qolventz outran me to all the galactic resources, snatched several anomalies from my Flagship and even took an asteroid in my territory thanks to their speed ability. I built an extra surveyor to keep up in the anomaly race.

But 2 'bugs' occured, one of which lost the game:

1. My second planet, and my only colony apart from my homeworld, got stuck with it's population at 2.564 billion. No matter what the approval rating was, it would not go higher. This, however, was not what lost the game. I'll see if I have some screens of this.

2. The AIs appeared to be at Normal or Fast tech speed. The Armorfiends got Research Academies while my research, going at full power with 100% spending and no focuses, showed 16 turns for Research Centers. Not just them, but all the races were like this, and in just about all tech categories. I checked the Armorfiends' worlds with a spy for any Precursor Libraries, but there were none, and they had half the labs than I did(and I had Xenos and that one bonus tile). WTF! Masochistic AI does get bonuses, yes, but I've never seen them get this kind of lead.

So while I had just gotten Sparrow missiles and was going through the lower-end Stingers, the AIs were doing Stinger 4 and going on to Harpoons. Relations with the hostile aliens nearby were declining rapidly(they are supposed to do so invariably in case of the Armorfiends, but not with the others). I sent a few freighters to the Qolventz but that didn't help. So instead of sitting around trying to build some tiny interceptors while barrages of Transports and Spore Ships hurled towards me, I just surrendered to the Lentzlandians while keeping one game save just in case.

What just happened here? One game with tons of luck and absolute dominance, and another game where I get crushed by apparently freak occurances. I guess I'll have to sharpen up to Maso again and then move on to Obscene by the time Twilight releases.