My favorite setting is to put habitable planets to "occasional", enable blind exploration and mega events, and set everything else to random. I never know what to expect in games like this, and it forces me to think on my feet. There can be occasional ugly results, like 9 AIs on a tiny galaxy, but even those can lead to some of my most epic games. Basically, the less I know about my galaxy before I play it, the better.

Please people, if you have any ideas for a good setup option for a scenario feel free to comments. I would like this subject to continue.

Recently, I (DA) have been playing with the largest galaxy size, all abundant, normal tech rate, all events, suicidal, max minors, and just 5 other empires.  Sometimes no megabilities, especially when I want to play Krynn.

I find that the somewhat lower number of major AIs extends the colony rush enough to be more satisfying.

My completely unscientific observation is that it seems to convert habitables to extremes.  If you jack the extremes up to frequent, there should be noticeably fewer regular planets around to grab before you need to research the colonization techs.

For me, epic means big.  I've always enjoyed the long build up more than the quick skirmish.

Galaxy size: Immense, Gigantic, or Huge.

Abundant stars, common planets, occasional habitables, occasional extremes - this combo seems to give a pretty good number and mix of planets.  Most empires can grab 15-25 planets before needing to worry.

Tech speed of slow seems to work well for the largest galaxies.  Otherwise you've got half the tech tree before you even encounter the other races.

 

I always go for max score which in DA means:

Gigantic Galaxy

No victories except total conquest

Do not disable Tech Trading

Do not enable Blind Exploration

Allow Mega Events and Super Abilities

Abundant Habital Planets

Abundant Number of Planets

Abundant Number of Stars

Scattered Star Density

(The above settings usually result in about 750 total planets)

Abundant Anomalies (Anomalies are useful)

Rare Asteroids (Asteroids are useless)

Very Fast Technology Rate

8 Minor Races

I then use ARC to confiure my own race as well as my opponent races. I configure opponent races so as to make them as powerful as possible on the basis that the quicker they can colonize and develop planets the faster I can take them away from them.

I configure all opponents as Krynn Super Breeders except for one opponent that's a Krynn Super Adapter. I use the third homeplanet trick to make sure everyone starts out with 3 habital planets in their home system. I spend my opponent ability points on an additional 30% econ ability for a total of 40% econ bonus and the 40% pop growth ability which along with the Krynn's inherent 50% morale ability and Breeder Super ability make them a colonization machine. I also max out each AI's Natural abilities, Financial Resources and CPU Usage and select Federalists for an additional 20% economic bonus.

Of course.  Why wouldn't it be?  It's a setting allowed in Galaxy Creation.

Yeah I'm not sure this really qualifies as a bug but it has existed since the introduction of DA. If you start a new game (i.e. non-metaverse) your previous Tech speed selection is remembered and retained but if it's a metaverse game it's always reset to normal. I can see how you might take that to mean that you can't set tech speed above normal but as you now know that's not the case.

Stuff like that happens all the time. Just recently I had a game with a reasonable start. I essentially completed colonization of the galaxy by September (year 0) and was on a pop growth curve that would have put me at 12T by the end of year 0 and I was at the point where I had hulls starting to reach my MSBA array when I realized that I had forgotten to create any of the military SB's for my array and when I went to create them I found out that was one thing that you can't do while bankrupt and at that point I was about 10 million bc's in debt and it would take me another couple of months before I could get out of debt.

At least you now know of a quick and easy way to improve your score.

Also regarding the point that Maiden made in the other thread. Even if there's only one Library per TA immense galaxy you can still reach comparable levels of research with two 300% research tiles or even one 300% research tile and two 100% tiles. Your research ramp up will be a turn or two slower but you can still get to the equivalent of a Precursor Library without one as long as those combinations are not ridiculously improbable as well.

Right now I play a scenario with this settings;

- galaxy size: gigantic

- habitable planet: common

- number of stars: occasional

- number of planets: common

- anomalies: rare

- tech rate: slow

- asteroid field: rare

- star density: loose cluster

- extreme planets: rare

- events: rare

- difficulty: crippling (my first time playing this difficulty)

and with mega events, blind exploration and all the victory possibilities (not ascension) enabled.

5 major races terran, toria, yor, drengin, altaria, with intelligent: genius and super abilities enabled. 2 minor races.

I play as the Arcean Empire.

What I want to find in my scenario is a epic and balanced feeling. But I find the opposite of it. The balance is really lacking by this scenario, example the terrans right now has a tech production up to 900, me and the other races have up to 100-400 tp. And the races I'm at war with (the Torians and the Yor) overwhelmes me with small star ships, even as they have almost as many planets as me. And it is just early in the game.

There is so many chooses on galciv 2 game settings, and I find it hard to figure what's the best to choose for a balanced and epic feeling. When I mean a epic and balanced feeling, I mean fair odds and challanges. At the moment of the game I probably will lose, because my military might versus the toria and yor outclasses mine.

 

Thanks for your patiance and understanding!

This is a post I almost made and I want to be in, what I do is get:

Galaxy: Largest

Planets: Medium or one above Medium

Habitibal [typo] Planets: Medium or one above Medium

Asteroids: Highest

Minor Races: Highest

Tech: Slow, wanting a challenge when meating other races, Normal to keep citizens interested, Fastest for a great advantage. You chose, I want to know.

Stars: 3/4 or Highest

Density: Packed or lowest for time and seperation to have an easy time managing your race, loose for sometimes mostly getting stucked in corners or have some brigdes of stars for trade or battles with other races, and scattered for having a hardest time.

Events: Highest

Difficulty: the wierdest thing, I had a race as normal, and another as fool, yet normal got only 2 planets from the whole game, fool had 20. I got confused. So i'm not sure.

Races: Matters on what you'll like, but i'll make Altarians and Korx my friends, unless you got a freedom fighter race, have korx enemy so you get to use battle tactics such as "destoy the korx supply line" or something.

Blind exploration on if you want to just explore or off to suddenly figure out you may create an army or a trade with the upcoming race.

Victory conditions: Matters on what you made friends or enemies, accession for a 110 weeks or over game, possibly.

Enables: Tech Trade (don't use too much or the races will hate you) Mega events, super abilities.

The number one thing to not do when creating a race is don't put the max population growth and the torians super abilities. I done it before, my race was more unhappy than my race could expand, no matter what I done, I also got a question, on the TA campaign, the mission where Tandis gave you the arnor battle cruiser, I can't beat it no matter what, please help! Also, what do I do to play the editors. I can't play the editors or use anything in the editors, its like it don't do anything. Thanks for the help and giving you help possibly.

I don't think it has anything to do with having a esponainge [typo] cause the leader visited you and he died from a worker, I must think someone in your civlization was there, to what happened, I think you had alot of fire power in your civlization that people in the place can handle weapons that don't require license, and you and arcean had hardly any defence, this happened to me before, but that happened when I had a low diplomacy against the altarians, and I just suddenly lost when I figured out they had a terror star, an army with each ship fire power beam 263, missles 157, and mass drivers 29, thats quite hard to defeat, even I had only the research weapons tech at stinger II and no other weapons nor defences, now, can I get my questions answered please, I been asking for the answers for quite awhile, not even kryo answered. Not forcing. Thank you. I think I can also tell where you were in the galaxy position, I think, its just I had a vision of the galaxy, you had around 3/9 of the galaxy, the arcean was 2/9, and the rest if there were had the rest. Don't call me a nerd please, I'm just really great at video games and cant even solve most questions, nor defeat the yor, mechanized scum. No offence. Also, did you have mega events enabled, I want to go to war with a civilization on accident from time to time in my galaxy.

What are the Super Events mentioned at the setup screen?

That's very handy to know. The Jagged Knife totally ruined one of my games...I had auto save too infrequently and just gave up.

 

On an immense map, how many years does a typical game run?