Help me like Gal Civ 2

what difficult level are you playing at? i find it almost impossible to out-colonize the AI at the highest difficulty levels. at crippling i can usually manage to come out more or less equal, but i quickly jump ahead due to my ability to better plan research and develop my planets.

my piece of advise is to be more pro-active. GO TO WAR! or better yet, bait a nearby enemy into declaring war on you. even if you think you might be ready for it. taking a passive approach can leave the game feeling very tedious.

as for war stories. well, i've got a couple. lemme see...

a long while back i had a pretty interesting game going. i was playing as the Yor. i wasn't very experienced at that time, and i'd recently started playing at a higher difficulty level on a huge or gigantic map (i can't honestly remember). through a stroke of luck on their part, the Torians had managed to secure and develop about 5 influence resources. even with the Yor's major loyalty bonus, they were causing my planets to rebel. i didn't have any option but to go to war. so to war i went!

i didn't by any means feel ready for this war. the torians had started the game as one of two civs on the northern part of the map. they didn't colonize everything. the other 7 civs had colonized planets through that region of space, but in a scattered way. the torians had already flipped most of these planets and had become huge. i didn't have much of an edge technologically, either. i hadn't even fully explored their part of the map! so my first goal was to take a few of the planets whose influence was threating my own. these weren't easy battles. my logistics and miniaturization weren't very high at that point in the game, and i hadn't researched very much engine technology either. taking those first few planets was a heavy cost, but my ships seemed to be coming out of battles more often than theirs at least. so with the first phase of the war successful, i started sending raiding fleets into their space to destablize their military forces as well as scount things out. i then started discovering their influence mining starbases. these became my next military targets.

i managed to take about a quarter of their planets, but saw that my overall military and technology ratings were falling behind the norm. my economy was also suffering, as i didn't have much in the way of population. i signed a peace treaty with them and managed to snag most of their influence resources shortly thereafter. but the postwar reconstruction was slow going. meanwhile my influence was increasing substantially, and i started flipping planets of a few neighbors with powerful militaries. they didn't like that much at all. the drengin and arceans declared war on me within a month of on another, and the korx folllowed suit soon after. that was a problem, since the korx were in the newly conquored part of my empire. luckily my economy had been picking up again. i focused my forces on stopping transport ships and tried to bide my time, researching more advanced technologies for my military. i paid a couple civs to go to war with my enemies, hoping to distract them a bit. after that the tides again turned to my favor, but exactly how the rest of the game unfolded escapes my memory at the moment.

it was a really engaging game, but mostly because i was forced to act before i felt ready. the point is, if you sit back and just let the game happen, yes, it's pretty boring. but if you make things happen, you might find a great deal more suspense than you have so far.

good hunting!

Hmm ...

The 2 hour mark is a rather short period of time to get to the point of having nothing to do but hit multiple end turns. For me it's probably just the opposite where it takes me 2 hours of play to get to the point of being *able* to hit end turn and then once I do having to do another 2 hours of stuff before I can hit end turn again.

However it does depend on the size of the game you play as well as your chosen strategy. I play gigantic all abundant type games and clearly mid game you get into some very long turns. Two hours per turn may be a bit of an exaggeration but not by all that much.

The other main thing is your strategy. There are at least 5 major methods of play and potentially infinite gradiations between them. Some strategies concentrate on diplomancy and basically don't bother to compete in the colony rush. However while that's a perfectly valid way to play, I think the first strategy that everyone should master is the old fashioned method of winning by out colonizing the AI and by developing your planets faster and better than the AI.

This method is basic to any 4X type game which is what I refer to as a "resource allocation" game. Basically the game starts out with very low levels of income, research and production. As you gain more resources the level of your income, research and production grows. As these grow this allows you to expand even faster. Basically you're on an exponential growth curve. It's the *rate* of growth and development that's important.

Anyway to accomplish this you absolutely have to compete for greater than your share of the galaxies planets and resources. You do need to start out at a relatively low level. Make sure you out colonize all of the AI's. When you can do this consistently then increase your difficulty level and keep increasing it until you can no longer keep up.

The AI does an excellent job of colonization and as you're beginning it's very hard to believe the AI isn't cheating to be able to colonize so quickly but they're not. They do a lot of different things to do this. They rush buy some ships to get "out" there quickly. They will colonize with low numbers of colonists and then later bus in more pop. They will "leap frog" by colonizing a planet, rush buying a Starport and another colony ship, fill it up with most of the pop used to colonize the planet and continue "onward and outward" the very next turn.

Size of galaxy matters a lot. In smaller galaxies you can mostly deficit spend to quickly build colony ships, get your share of planets and the colony rush is over very quickly. In this case speed is of the essence. In a larger galaxy it's not so much speed but the *rate* at which you can produce colony ships that's important. At a minimum being able to build one colony ship every other turn is required. To actually out colonize the AI at higher difficulty levels requires being able to produce a colony ship per turn for extended periods of time.

Again there are far too many ways to accomplish these thing to go into all of the in one shot, but here are a couple of pointers. Upgrading a ship costs noticably less than rush buying a ship. So instead of rush buying a complete colony ship directly you can rush buy a bare cargo hull and then next turn upgrade it to a colony ship. Or better yet you can produce the cargo hull using your industry and then use cash to upgrade to a full colony ship. Or if you can figure out a way to get sufficient levels of production from your home planet it shouldn't take you very many turns to build enough factories to produce a colony ship every other turn without buying anything.

Another point is what to build on your colonies once you colonize them. My opinion is that a lot of the time the best thing to build in *nothing*. There's not much point in building factories on a newly colonized planet that can't support itself. You're better off waiting until the planet's population builds up. Or if you absolutely feel that you should be building something consider a economic building or a pop growth enhancement building (or a fertitily clinic that's a bit of both).

Anyway as you can tell there's a lot to discuss here and this is merely the tip of the iceberg. It takes quite awhile to master this game but if you're only getting to 2 hours into the game before you're hitting end turn then you're not competing effectively because if you were you'd find there is no shortage of things to do pretty much every turn.

in TA the recruitment center is an amazing blessing, providing bonuses to both population growth and planetary economy, it doesn't take long to build, and it requires only minimal support.

All,

Thanks for the replies. I am going to start a new game and try to take some of the advice you offered - particulary to bring myself to the game, rather than wait for the game to come to me.

On medium or large maps you could easily stagnate if you don't initiate some action and just chug along researching/building up/turtling.  If you've defended yourself (kept military power up) you could easily be avoiding wars.

In some matches you might get mega events that shake things up but it dosn't always happen or you don't the devastaging events.

So - this means you're empire is stable and it's time to work on winning.  Gear up for war, start pushing influence - something other than build up.

Once you have a feel for the game play on "tough" (closest thing to an even match) or higher otherwise the AI isn't at full potential.

I'm still new to this game (although I've played GalCiv I years ago....) but having a blast. What I like about GalCivII is that every game is truely unique. I've started my first game on the biggest map available in Twilight last weekend after having played small and medium maps before and it's awesome...

I'm in the southern tip of the map and the Krynn was bullying me for money, they are the military superpower in the game. At that time I had already conquered the Drengin North of me and culturally assimulated the Drath empire to the Northwest of me (but the Drath still have colonies in the far Northwest of the map). The Krynn empire was in the far north tip of the map together with the Torians and between us from the Western till the Eastern tip were the Korx, Korath Clan and Iconians. As they were so far away I didn't see them as a threat and ignored their increasing demands... then due to a (mega?) event every ship had unlimited range and life support was no longer needed... suddenly I was in reach of their armada and it didn't take all that many turns before the Krynn declared war on me and invaded the former Drengin empire with an impressive amount of fleets....

My old Drengin war veteran ships were no match to them...especially not because the Krynn also found a Arnor Ranger (also the Korath Clan and Iconians had a Ranger.... so 3 rangers in this game) which was cutting through my old ships like a warm knife through butter. I saved the game and thought about my strategy overnight.

The next morning I woke up with a great idea.... I had some money on my account, approx 30k bc and opened a channel with the Korath Clan to see if they wanted to sell me their Ranger, in exchange for some trade goods and about 8k bc they were willing to part with their Ranger! Done deal.... the only problem turned out to be that the Ranger was far away and needed 30 turns to get to the front....

I went into the shipyard and designed a small fighter, luckily I researched the correct weapon line to which the Krynn had no defense, as I had the speed bonus ability I created a small hulled fighter without engine and defense loaded with weapons... my miniaturization was at medium level and my logistics was high enough to fleet 14 of these babies together.

All my production centres started cranking out the new fighters and I've spend my remaining cash on rush buying them. This turned out to be the key... once the Krynn were finally getting close to my main base I had 2 fleets ready and countered there small fleets easily.... replacing my lost fighters with fresh ones on the go... The Krynn had captured the former Drengin homeworld, but I was fighting my way back north, slowly repelling the invaders. I took back the planet and drove the Krynn out of my territory.

During this time my bought Ranger had destroyed the Krynn ranger... unfortunately I lost mine in the battle as well. Funny sidenote is that the Korath Clan surrendered to the Korx 1 turn after I had purchased their Ranger!

Meanwhile I was flanking a small fleet of transports and fighters to the northwest corner where the Krynn had 2 PQ 20+ planets... needless to say I conquered both two worlds.

The war was going on...and 3,5 years into the war I had developed some large hulled fleet command battleships, loaded with defenses against their missiles and a fleet support module that would give me extra attack power... one of those bundled with my 11 fighters was defeating every Krynn fleet without losses! And I had 3 of such fleets about.... 1 of them progressing north into their territory and the other 2 fleets defending.

Then it happened.... pirate mega event! i love this stuff... pirates everywhere. The only problem... they were using beam weapons and I hadn't researched shield technology. It turned out that my fleets were strong enough to repell the pirates nonetheless. Although I endured some losses, nothing too serious. The Torians and Drath however quickly lost all of their ships and both of them surrendered a few turns after the pirates appeared. The Torians surrendered to the Krynn and the Drath surrendered to me...giving me some nice juicy planets close to the two planets I conquered earlier from the Krynn, so that would be a good point for a new front and production base against the Krynn.

Leaving only me (Terrans), Korx, Iconians and Krynn in the game (as well as the Arcaneans actually...but they only have 2 planets in the far far north east of the map). Before the pirates attacked the Krynn were still about twice as powerful in military rank as me, 2 turns after the pirates I was twice as powerful as them .

And that's where I am now.... I have defeated all the pirate fleets in my territory (but still many out there) and I'm using this quiet period to build up my economy and research more techs.... I'm also preparing to invade the Krynn homeworld as I'm building up forces at the new front that was given to me by my Drath friends. I'm in an alliance with the iconians, but they are not in war with the Krynn, we allied during the war and I cannot get them to attach the Krynn as they have some treaties with them... During the pirate invasion the Korx declared war on the Iconians, so I'm now at war with both the Krynn and Korx... Some interesting future lies ahead of me for this game

Man,

That was an awesome story. It would seem that in part I'm just not waiting long enough.

Here is a intresting story I had with my current play.  Im playing as the humans, and so far Im pretty much dominating(im playing on normal).  I have a massive military, and have about half the galaxys population.  I found a few planets controled by the drengin(the klingon like folk) and decided to spare some of my ships, I would pay the drengin to go to war with the Drath in exchange for money, and a few weapon techs I had that I could already counter.  They happily agreed and off to war they went.  A few other races declared war on the drengin, and I moved my fleets by the drengin's planets.  (Maybe they thought I would help them? Idiots) anyways, they send off there war ships to fight the drath, and with there planets mostly unprotected I invade and wipe them out.  They then completmented me on my trickery and surrendered to me. 

Classic strategy. It's unfortunate that the AI doesn't see this happening.

Lets just pretend they thought I had there back, like they relised I didnt want a alliance, because of how the rest of the races would look at me for siding with a evil race. 

I think thats one thing that I find really fun about this game, and any RPG or civilization type game, is creating your own story/dialogue as the game goes along.