Difficulty playing

Hey!

there are so many variables to give you any "right" answer.

What works on Begginer is useless on Tough, what works at tough will fail at Suicidal.

Your race set up can have a big impact in this are as well. Your choice of Political party for instance can have a huge affect on the game, as well as what racial bonuses you have picked.

What some of the basics are though is a solid economy fuelled by measured expansion and high morale.

Early game try and focus on getting you population to grow. Do this by keeping your approval rating as high as posible. 100% approval will give you a 100% bonus, but if you can keep it green as long as possible your population will increase and therefore your income.

Try and research as much as possible to attain a tech advantage. This will kepp you out of trouble should war come.

I'm sure you knew most of that but those basics are good for all levels of the game.

The main thing is everything just happens alot faster on the harder levels. the bonuses the AI get allows them to colonize faster, research faster and ultimately produce a military faster than you.

One thing i do is to only colonize a set amount of planets. That might be 10 or 30, depending on the galaxy size. Over extending yourself will hurt you.

Specialize your planets. Make your HW your Manu Cap and fill it with factories, pick another PQ 10~12 planet as another production world. Pick say 2 or 3 planets to be your research worlds and place your Tech cap on the biggest of those.

Then try and make all other planets econ worlds. Once you have the money rolling in you can do just about anything, and these core planets will fund your expansion.

Ignore the low PQ planets for the first few months. Even if the AI takes planets near your HW, you will flip them soon enough, concentrate on getting the PQ12's+ in your vacinity first. Build these planets up and then work back toward your HW grabbing everything in sight.

Enjoy!

You see, the problem is that I have basically done what you have written. Everything was solid (I would always be leading early on) until the AI decides to cheat then it's no longer a fair fight. I think hard EVERY turn, doing absolutely everything I can think of. I said in my first post too, how I had more resources than any AI yet they managed to dominate my race in about 5-7 turns. Seriously, W.T.F.

Did you use tech trading and economic / research alliances?

AI's tend to trade a lot of techs which greatly speeds up their technological advance, you should do the same except never trade away any diplomatic or military techs (except perhaps really weak weapons in a branch that you researched much further already). Especially if you say you were making more money early in the game than the AI's: if your income is positive you could pour some cash into buying techs from various AI's.

Another good way of spending "extra" cash is to rush-buy the first 1-2 manufacturing buildings on your planets: they're not that expensive and it greatly speedens up the development of that planet.

Sending trade ships and getting alliances will not only get your income and/or tech up, it will significantly improve your relations with other races. Then you could for example bribe them to attack the Thalans.

What race did you play with, which bonuses and political party did you choose? I have the impression and heard the same from many players that the different races in TA are sometimes less balanced than in DL / DA, depending on your galaxy and difficulty settings. Though for me the Torians and Krynn have been much more formidable opponents than the Thalans.

One last question (a stupid one but from time to time I find myself forgetting about this): did you put your production slider on 100% and do you actively use the other sliders instead of always leaving them at 33% each?

My guess also would be to look more closely at the sliders. Outproducing the Thalans also can be difficult, due to their Super Ability. Try playing against different opponents first, if you find you fall behind too often, or turn abilities off.

Btw. The AI does not cheat, at least at anything below challenging.

If you're building up hefty sums of money for the AI to demand, your economy is out of balance.  I usually have an operational deficit for a long, long time, running my spending off of the fruits of my exploration ships.  Yes, ships, plural.  I try to get a bunch of them cranked out even as the colony rush is still underway, simply because getting those anomalies is that important.  Rush-buying them is acceptable, as they can easily pay for themselves several times over.

As for why the AI overtakes your lead, you probably don't have as much of a lead as you think you do (Again, I'm basing this off what I assume is your large net income).  The AI was building up a massive production base at reduced spending levels, then started to tweak their sliders to generate seemingly absurd end results.  It sounds like you need to adjust your ratio of economy planets to production planets so you don't wind up with those large surpluses.  You also might want to get the AIs to do some infighting- have them gang up on the current leader, or turn it into an intergalactic free-for-all.
  Just remember to snag all those resources as the AI mining starbases get popped, and try to get the fighting started ASAP.  Once they get to friendly, it's nearly impossible to get the AI to go to war.

Some very good advice, thanks a lot guys. I am playing my latest game after my last post right now, and utterly annihilated the Thalans It would have taken much longer had I not found 2 Lucky Rangers. Those pesky Thalans fell hard from the top spot.

I completly ignore my racial disposition towards good or evil and I flat out attempt to survive early in the game.  As soon as the colony rush is ending and I have the tech for a weapon or two and some transports I head straight for the biggest manufacturing and research worlds of my nearby opponents and seize them.  I might not even keep them but it does not really matter.  I just want to wipe out the improvements and cripple them for a few dozen turns.  They won't trust you but the results are usually worth it.

Another thing to keep in mind, when playing on tougher difficulties, is to trade your influence points to the AI for gold, techs, ships, whatever you want. I usually do for the first couple years, then stop after that, once my economy is up and running. But the magic number for influence points is 999 or lower. You can easily get many many many techs the first couple years for incredibly cheap amount of IP's. Same with gold, you can take almost all the AI's BC for influence points, and reap in thousands every few turns (helps during colony rush to have that extra BC). You can trade IP's for AI's warships as well.

When trading IP's for AI's BC, best to do it in 100BC increments and repeat, they usually won't trade if the amount is over 150 or 200.

You have to try each of the AI's tech's 1 at a time, if they won't do it, just try the next tech.

For ships, do them 1 at a time as well, and repeat...

The AI places almost no value for anything above 999 influence points, so you have to have some patience with it. I do it during the first 2 years, it really helps during games at Maso, and is the only reason I am staying par with the AI at Suicidal difficulty (it was either this or the all factory, all labs approach). Something to give a try.

I'll start up a new game and try those tactics out, thanks!

Another thing to do, when you have alot of BC, to get techs or anything else (including economic and research treaties)... is to place down 999 influence points, then put down what you want from the AI (a tech or something), if they won't trade it for IP's only, then hit your BC's to see if you have enough BC to get them to trade it.

Even if it takes 8000-9000 BC, after the trade, you can then retrade your Influence points for all the BC you just gave them, thus not really losing anything important.