All the AI decides to declare war on me at once obliterating me quickly

Hey Kenstar,

 

  I don't think I'm qualified to help you but it might help the more knowledgeable players if you told them what Difficulty Setting you were playing on.

For one thing an AI won't generally declare war on you if your military ranking is higher than theirs. Check your military bar chart under the Stats & Graphs tab in the Civilization Manager. One of the easiest ways to avoid war is to build the Spin Control Center then put 10 cargo hulls full of the most powerful weapons you have in orbit around the planet with the SCC. This increases your military rating dramatically and you can pretty much do whatever you like and the AI will bend over backwards to accept your peace offer if you wish the war to end.

What also can happen is that you have a nice strong military but as you conquer an AI you lose ships and your military rating goes down causing another AI to declare war on you. So be sure to keep producing ships as you lose them. With the SCC as mentioned above you usually don't have this problem.

Another point is that when you conquer an opponent by actually taking their last planet (i.e. perform genocide) you get a negative relationship with the remaining AI's for "a tendency for conquering others". If you conquer enough AI's the rest will band together against you. You can avoid this by simply not taking an AI's last planet. You can sometimes offer a peace treaty and demand their last planet as part of the deal. This accomplishes the same thing except you don't get credit for committing genocide. If you can't manage this then just leave them with their last planet and move onto the next AI. Once all AI's are weakened then you can finish them off with no worry.

Isn't what the OP describes a (mega?) event? I'm pretty sure I've had that happen once or twice a long time ago, but sometimes I just imagine things instead of remembering them...

Thanks Mumblefratz,

       I think that was the problem. I kept taking their last planet, and in quick succession all the AI declared war on me after I completely took over the Arceans. Thanks for the tip, I wont take over their last planet anymore. Im not too sure about the spin center, I havent researched that far. Thats actually one of my gripes about this game, that its not easily accessible what technology leads to what improvements or ships being able to build, or the techs required to build a ship. At times, I'm just researching blindly or on a short near term focus with no long term strategy. For example I might be able to build the Paladin but for one tech, but I dont know what that tech is. Im playing the original dreadlords without any of the expansion packs. ALso sometimes when I custom build the ships, Im building totally useless ships though they have weapons on them, its not reflected in the gameplay. Is there something Im missing here?

Im playing at the difficulty setting of just before where the AI gets additional cheat bonuses, but is at its most intelligent with complicated algorithms. Im not sure what its called anymore as Im new and take my time playing games.

Having said that Im having fun playing this game, and its very solidly built indeed.

 

 

OK, if I'm remembering a real event, sounds like it's not what happened to Kenstar. I've never gone on a rampage like that, although I should have by now, according to Coach Mumble.

Can you describe this a bit more? I've had some odd behavior when I try to start a custom ship from one of the built-in designs, but I've never had a from-scratch warship that showed weapons in the Shipyard not have those weapons when an instance came out of a Starport. Custom ship designs are pretty much essential when you play at Tough (the level I like & you described).

Isn't a bit strange that you only get 'credit' for taking the last planet of a civ? Shouldn't you also get a penalty for starting any war and taking any planet from a different civ?

The built in ships are pretty useless. Just build the best ship that you can at the moment.

As far as long term strategy it is good to have one. The Spin Control Center requires Total Majesty which is at the end of the Diplomancy branch of the tech tree. There are strategic advantages to gaining a diplomatic advantage over the AI. For one it allows you to get a better deal when tech trading with the AI. I usually make the Diplomancy branch an early priorty and then use the diplomatic advantage thus gained to acquire pretty much all the other techs via trade with the AI. So I quickly rush up the diplomatic branch, build the Spin Control Center to protect me from attack and then take on the AI at my leisure.

Not quite sure what you mean by "I'm building totally useless ships though they have weapons on them, its not reflected in the gameplay". Perhaps it's that your opponents have strong defenses mounted for your particular weapons branch. Each of the three weapons types (beam, gun, missile) has associated defenses. If you have beams and your opponents have strong beam defense your weapons may be useless. If this is the case you can either continue down the same beam path and build ships with stronger beam weapons that overwhelm your opponents defenses or you can switch over to a different weapon type for which your opponent has no defense. But again I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "useless ships" and "not reflected in the gameplay".

Actually the ships always work as designed in the shipyard but they don't always "look" like the ship you designed in the shipyard. This can happen when you reuse ship names from one game to the next. For example if you created a Fighter I in a previous game then if you create a different Fighter I in the current game it *may* end up looking like the old design even though in fact it will have all currently designed attack, defense, speed and range values. The reason for this is that the GalCiv2/Ships directory (and GalCiv2/Metaverse/Ships directory if a metaverse game) contain the old designed ship files. To avoid this just delete the contents of these tow directories between games.

One of the best ways to keep the AIs from declaring war on you, aside from having a larger military rating, is to keep them all at war with each other.  I like to ensure that each AI is always at war with at least two others, and I always look for when they get econ or tech treaties with each other, and break those up by making them declare war.  This prevents any alliances from forming, and the AIs are always "too busy" to declare war on you.  Also, I like to have the empires that are at war with each other be as far from their foes in the galaxy as possible.  So they'll spend lots of resources making war, but accomplish very little.

Sentient species taste better...

 

Now THAT's an idea I have not heard of before.

Pretty comeon used though

 

But do that with Drath and you are going to get alot of money from war profiting = that excess money can save you ass

Kenstar, here's my take on the issues.

 

"All of the AI declares war on you" is a sign of your success.   I now plan on this event to occur.

 

What's the key to victory in such a situation? In Dark Avatar, it is military starbases. However, these have been moved to a very high technological expense in Arnor and therefore the starbase strategy is basically (unfortunately) removed from the game (anyone else have this feeling?). What to do in its place? Well, the defense technologies are much cheaper than the offense technology. Take a look at your biggest and baddest expected enemy. They have lasers? Make yourself shields, barriers, force fields. Up to about force field 1 is very doable. Imagine your 20 hp ship with 10 attack and 30 defense. I have decided defense technologies are the key to offensive victory for a number of reasons, including low cost of technology and low loss of ships. Just for calibration, I always play on IMMENSE maps with ULTRASLOW technology.

 

Furthermore, since you know the AI is going to declare war on you, sensors IV with Eyes of the Universe is an absolute must. This keeps the AI from sneaking up on you and you can deploy your ships most effectively to obliterate any AI that dares to come near you. Good news is that the AI doesn't seem to know that it's best strategy for conquering you is to prevent you from gettings Eyes of the Universe by building it itself.

 

I must say that I like Arnor but I'm disappointed that hte only reasonable strategy to victory is CONQUER & KILL. Espionage is semi-broken as pointed out in other posts (i.e., tons of money and very little chance to steal technology); it is excellent though for placing on farms before you invade; if espionage were working better, you could imagine overwhelming your enemy, stealing all tech, both based on a strong economy. Influence (even with Krynn) almost works; I have conquered a number of planets with constructor-influence attacks; but eventually AI decides to declare war on me and I don't have a strong enough military. Acension is one strategy I have not tried, just for personal taste (not too interesting to me). Technological victory is another I have never tried simply for personal interest.

 

Good gaming!