First Questions...

I'm sure there are plently such threads however finding them is the problem.

However one of the best sources of basic information is the GalCiv Wiki, https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Galactic_Civilizations_Wiki. If you forget the link just click on the "Databanks" button at the top left of pretty much every page on the GalCiv2 web site and you'll find the Wiki link as well as links to some other useful documentation.

There's an option to "keep building same ship" in the game options menu but usually most people keep this selected and they simply go into the planets startport build queue where you can select a new ship or "nothing" to build next. You can get into the planets starport build queue at least 4 different ways; by using the F1 planet list and click on the ship being built, by selecting the planet in the main map and then again clicking on the ship being built, from within the planet screen itself using the "build ship" button or from the colony list in the civilization manager and clicking on the ship listed in the starport column.

You can also go into the civilization manager and set all planets that are building one kind of ship to build another ship or nothing.

You're confusing asteroids with anomalies. Asteroids can only be improved by miners and then have their production output direct towards a planet which increase that planets military and/or social production. BTW asteroids are pretty much considered a waste of time and most folks simply upgrade their miner to another colony ship (costs 66bc) and colonize another early planet for cheap.

Anomalies can only be examined by survey ships and usually give some minor ability bonus, or sometimes a money bonus. Wormholes are a subset of anomalies that send your survey ship some random place in the galaxy which usually means they're out of commission until they can get back within range of your Area of Influence, this can be useful to meet far away races but usually people try to avoid them, however that can be difficult when using autosurvey and it's fairly important to use autosurvey because that allows your survey ship to go directly to the nearest anomaly even if it's obscured by the fog of war.

Finally there are also mining resources that give significant bonus to various abilities such as military (weapons and defense bonus), morale, economics, research and influence, and these can only be "mined" by using a constructor to build a "resource mining starbase" on top of the resource. You can also build other types of starbases that can be very useful pretty much anywhere subject to the limit of only having 4 per sector (resource mining SB's don't count towards this limit).

There are military starbases that can increase the attack and defense values of your ships that are within the Starbase's Area of Influence (AOI), economic starbases that can increase the value of trade or can increase the military/social production and research on planets that are within the SB's AOI, and influence SB's that increase your influence within the SB's AOI and can actually cause enemy planets to "flip" to you.

This helped me a lot when I was first starting...

 

https://forums.galciv2.com/104908

It is so scary to think all that I learned about the game in the posts above and that it probably accounts for 1% of total gameplay. Thanks for the tips, that cleared up a lot for me.  I will have to check out the build "nothing" option next time I play.  

I assume you mean build nothing in the spaceport queue. However the idea of building nothing also applies to early planet development. A lot of folks colonize their first few planets and immediately start plopping down a couple of factories and a research building or two. After all you do start with some extra cash and what else are you supposed to do to develop your new colonies?

The answer is that most often the best thing you can build on a new colony is nothing. Wait a bit with the approval set to 100% and let the planets population grow before you start putting buildings on a new colony. Don't be in such a rush to build factories that you won't be able to afford to use for quite some time. The support for your initial colony building is fairly large, wait until the planet can at least support the maintenance of that before you start adding the support costs of other buildings too.

Due to the help here, I ran a rather effective 2nd DL campaign that was not even close.  However, I found out that I needed to transport the troops to take Ixith or whatever the planet name was...

I chose traditional and saw my advantage of something like 27 to 6, then the destruction of their life bar on the right (in red).  It looked like my bar was not going down at all during the battle, then the battle kind of "froze" halfway through and I had to click CLOSE or something.  Voila, no more transport, and I didn't take the planet.  Also, the picture was of some buildings with some ships floating overhead in the far background, not the land battle video that I saw in the tutorial.

Any idea what I did?  I did not have time to build another transport and repeat the process, but I probably will tonight.  I kind of wanted to know what I did wrong before I repeated it...

Here's how an invasion normally proceeds. I've never heard of an invasion "freezing" in the middle although I suppose it could happen. It may just be that you simply lost the battle.

The first thing that happens in a invasion is the selection of tactics as shown in the following screenshot.

The first thing to note are the attacking and defending race statistics shown in the top left and right of the screen. This shows the number of troops each side has along with their "Advantage" which as far as I know is merely each races relative Soldering ability.

To figure your chances of winning the battle simply multiply your number of troops by your advantage and divide that by their number of troops multiplied by their advantage. In my case that's 1250*7/6000*4=36.5%.

Since a value of 50% would indicate that I had an even chance of winning the battle it's clear I need to do something to either increase my advantage or decrease my opponets advantage. That's what the invasion tactics are all about.

If I were to simply attack with Traditional Warfare I'd be pretty certain to lose. The battle might start out with my opponent losing troops at a faster rate than I because I do have an almost 2 to 1 Soldering advantage however there's no real doubt that I would lose.

So in this case I happen to choose Mini-Soldiers that gives me a 40% to 70% gain to my advantage factor. This changes the calculation in the worst case to 1250*7*1.4/6000*4=51% and in the best case to 1250*7*1.7/6000*4=62%. I like these odds a lot better than the original 36.5%.

There's actually another whole discussion you can have about invasion tactics. You need to be a bit careful about tactics that actually damage the PQ of the planet but Mini-Soldiers at worst destroy a building or two that in most cases can simply be rebuilt so they're pretty safe. Another thing people do that can be a more efficient utilization of their troops is to is to use a damaging tactic like Core Detonation or Mass Drivers but use fewer troops so that the first invasion will fail, but even though it fails the first invasion reduces the defending troops down to a more manageable level so that a 2nd transport can use less damaging tactics and overall you'll lose less troops. But this is best left to another discussion.

So anyway at this point you've selected your invasion tactics all you can do is to "Cancel" or "Invade". If you select Invade you might first have to get approval from the Senate first but if that passes there's nothing you can do you're basically committed to the invasion and you get to the following screen.

Before you hit the "Attack" button you'll see you and your opponents advantages ranging between their min and max values. At the point you hit the "Attack" button the exact advantage is selected and that's what's used to determine the battle. At this point the battle animation proceeds and the "Attack" button turns into a "Skip" button which allows you to skip the animation. Once you skip the animation or the battle ends then the button turns into a "Done" button and all you can do is to exit the screen. The end of the battle is indicated by one side or the other having 0 troops left and the other side doing a little dance.

The thing is if the battle does "freeze" then the battle would stop with both sides still having non zero troops left and as far as I know there is no button "Close" or otherwise that you could use to exit. Like I said it sounds like you simply lost the battle.

You may find these two links useful.  In the case of the wiki, you may want to read other sections of it at your leisure.  It can be helpful.

https://forums.stardock.com/313459  Index of Tricks

https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/General_Gameplay_Strategies

This is a TA only guide to the changes the racial-specific tech trees made to each species: TA 101

Now, go forth and conquer!  

 

 

It's worth noting that a Starport can be rushed for as little as 142 bc.  In the initial frenzy of colonisation, you can't just have one planet pumping out colony ships, so the sooner you have the Starport running the more turns it will spend building colony ships.

The initial colony itself has enough manufacturing and research facilities to start off with, but as you start to build more expensive ships and research more advanced technology, you need devote tiles to factories or labs.

Snagging every planet going will cost you in terms of just maintaining the initial colony.  Also, sending off colony ships from planets which are themselves new colonies will mean it takes longer for the population to grow to the point where the initial colony's cost is actually covered.  So you should always consider just how many worlds you need and let the other empires bear the cost of developing some new and difficult colonies.  Do you really want turns and turns of Soil Enrichment on your Social budget?  I thought not.

As a rule of thumb, you should start building some more economy buildings when the population is just over 1B.  By the time they're finished, the population should have grown enough that you'll get a net return by having those buildings on the planet (usually they incur maintenance costs).

If you need to save money during the post-colonisation phase, you can stop building ships at some of your colonies.  When money is available to build things at a colony but there is nothing being built, no money is actually spent from the budget.  This is not necessarily reflected on the colony screen, but it is reflected in your budget.  Doing this means that if you really do still need to build some ships, the colonies which you need them built at will get funding enough to roll them off the production line in a decent time.

Try to avoid having the production slider (the one under the tax slider) all the way to the left since it effectively means all your factories and labs are running at very low efficiency, giving comparatively few manufacturing or tech points for each bc of maintenance incurred.  If you can run at a deficit (spending is greater than income) for twenty turns until your population grows enough to close the gap, keep the production slider as far to the right as possible.  If you can't, consider demolishing buildings to reduce your maintenance costs.