Lore Weaver

Join Date 03/2006

The Arcaen stink

Or me playing the Arcaen stink

I've found playing Galciv2: ToA really really hard with the Arcaen race. I've been able to win with most of the other races, or at least play a competetive game.

With the Arcaens, I lag behind in research, expansion, economics, and as a result, military.

I've tried giving them a speed +1 bonus, and taken economics +30%, but this doesn't completely solve their issues (although, I at least had a marginally better game, before getting crushed by the Thalans).

I find this really annoying that I either 1) Can't figure it out, or 2) Isn't balanced quite right

The Arcaens were my favorite race in GCII vanilla, with their awesome background description and neat looking graphics.

In ToA, they are becoming annoying.

Is there some profound strategy I'm missing? Or are others having this problem (does their tree require some lovin', or perhaps their starting bonuses?)

One thing I do like is being able to use the space normally taken up by engines to put more weapons on ships, but it doesn't make their ships strong enough when my research falls behind so drastically.

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There's a defect in one of their buildings I've submitted as a bug. The "Cathedral of Valor" is supposed to give a 2% civ wide bonus to soldiering, and a 33% defense to the planet it is built on. You can build as many as you like, essentially making your soldiers invincible/planets impossible to invade.

Unfortunately if you look at the XML, the 33% to defense doesn't exist and as I just confirmed today, NO Civ wide bonuses apply on buildings that are of type "Normal" (IE: They only work if they are on super projects, Trade Goods, etc. Regular buildings cannot provide a civ wide bonus).

So, essentially this building does absolutely nothing for the time being.

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DivineWrath

Join Date 05/2006

+135

Read this guide then:

TA 101

I wrote the guide to help players to get some idea of what they might want to do when playing a civ. I try to provide 3 ideas of what to do for each (I should have that done when I'm finished my rewrite).

I find this really annoying that I either 1) Can't figure it out, or 2) Isn't balanced quite right

It could be both.

That said, I'll give you some suggestions.
-The Arceans have a weather control zenith that increases the PQ of their planets. You should be able to add 2 more planet improvements of your choice to those worlds.
-You would also want to research "Interstellar Navigation" and "Sub-Space Drive" early on, as they can provide a +3 ship speed bonus (2 passive, +1 planet improvement). Those techs take a little longer to research than researching your way to impulse drive as another civ, but they provide you with a larger speed bonus. You should be faster than the other civs for a while, including those that come with a speed bonus.

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I've been hesitant to play the Arceans for that exact reason. The minus to speed, in my mind, is a huge disadvantage. But as stated above, if they have techs that can balance it out, perhaps I will give them a try.

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They're not completely broken, but from my experience Arceans play at a disadvantage compared to most other races. The starting colony rush phase is always brutal. I suspect the harsh speed penalty in the early game exists to counter-balance Super Warrior. I've won some very lopsided wars as Arceans due to first strike capability while attacking.

One thing I've found is that you will colony rush better if you devote 100% of your resources to researching Interstellar Navigation before you do anything else. Colonize Arcea's moon Hammer to give yourself extra research. Don't build any labs unless there's a massive research modifier around, the colony centers themselves can do all the work. You should have the tech researched in 6 turns, at which point your colony ships move about on par with everyone else. Don't do this on Tiny or Small galaxies, though.

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@Lord Weaver

I played a brief game with arcean. I was having problems with the same issues as you initally, but i found out how to solve the economics problems i think. I found that the maintanence for a lot of the building are very high regardless of which type of buildings you build. So the best thing for you to do is literally only build entertainment centers, and forget about building any type of manufacute type buildings. Also, when choosing your ability, make sure you pick creatitivity. There is also an initial tech you can research for increasing creativity by 10 percent. This will help when you are researching long branch of any single one tech like miniture tech.

See, i was expanding but not very fast or slow, i thought that on tiles with manufacture bouns, it would be good idea to build well manufacture buildings on it. Well.. after they were built, my spending rocketed even though i was maintaining taxes so high that my morale drop to 50 percent. But i also built a lot of entertainment centers. So when i pushed my taxation rate to like ultra high to the point where morale is at 16 percent, but as more entertainment centers got finished, i was pushing it back up to 67 percent but without dropping down the taxes. So my high spending/maintancence cost was even out by an increasing in income to the point where the income took over the maintanece. Alas, i had the kyrnn as my neighbor, and they are a pain in the ass to deal with since i am playing on tough and they expand like a plague.

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oh yrsh, onr motr thing, i research the valor tech, it only gives like 2 percent soidiering bonus for each building built. Sooo, i think this is goood to spam built these things after you are able to research all your planetary improvement techs.

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There's a defect in one of their buildings I've submitted as a bug. The "Cathedral of Valor" is supposed to give a 2% civ wide bonus to soldiering, and a 33% defense to the planet it is built on. You can build as many as you like, essentially making your soldiers invincible/planets impossible to invade. Unfortunately if you look at the XML, the 33% to defense doesn't exist and as I just confirmed today, NO Civ wide bonuses apply on buildings that are of type "Normal" (IE: They only work if they are on super projects, Trade Goods, etc. Regular buildings cannot provide a civ wide bonus).So, essentially this building does absolutely nothing for the time being.

I would VERY much like to see an official word on this.

Not because I don't believe you, but because I do.

I'm playing a game with a custom race using the Arcean tech tree at this very moment, so I checked.

The 33% planetary bonus doesn't show anywhere other than the description.

As for the 2% civ-wide bonus, I have a soldiering stat of 85%, and if I build three more Cathedrals, it's still... 85%.

So, yay for double-checking things! I've been building these things thinking that it made my soldiers cool, when all it really does is make me poor and take up tiles. Nothing more than that.

Lovely.

Well, thanks for the heads-up. Hopefully this will get fixed in the next patch.

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My theory on this: the -1 to speed is mostly a huge negative in the early stages of the game. Later, once you have navigation centres up and running, it's not nearly so bad. It's mostly in the inital colony rush that it hurts you.

So an idea: Give the Stellar Forge a +1 to speed for ships built on that planet in addition to it's current bonuses (does the "ship quality" bonus even work?). This would offset the problem provided you rush the Forge.

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I build Nav Center immediately. (rush buy)

This means of course you'll be left with a lot less money so learn to manage your economy accordingly. Don't buy until you are ready to produce. But produce fast, build those ships

Save the Forge for your Manufacturing Capital.

Arceans are meant to have a slightly weaker colony rush (intended to be balanced by weather control, high hp ships and starbase spam) but you don't have to let it be that weak

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Yep, building the Nav Center made a huge difference. I was able to supply and defend a much larger chunk of space, and therefore sustain a higher research rate and a stronger economy.

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