Ostsol

You can only ally with other civs whose relation to you is rated as "Close". When you get to that point, you can ask them to ally with you in the diplomacy screen.

Where was the planet in relation to that civ's influence border. I've read that an AI will sometimes start converting buildings to cultural centres if another civ's influence starts coming close to or starts eveloping the planet.

Exploration is almost always a very short period of time, in games such as these. Regarding the topic, I think that what one can see on the minimap should be tied more to espionage.

The Star Control 2 music might also be good. Here's a link that has a bunch of remixes. (Bottom of the page.) Link

Master of Orion had this, but there was plenty of warning and you could prevent it.

I found a site hosting the MoO2 soundtrack: Link

I think that it's just a different style of play from what you're used to. This isn't Master of Orion and it isn't Empire at War. It's Galactic Civilisations and this is how it plays. If you want to tone down ship range, one thing you could do is play on a huge map with a sparse number of stars. That would certainly slow down colonisation. . .

Also, reaching certain propulsion tech levels increases all ships intrinsic speed.

1. Nope. There are only a few ways to get another civ's starbases: as a gift, through diplomatic exchance, or through their surrender. 2. You can't launch empty transports or colony ships. What I do is just load it with the minimum allowable and send it off. 3. As far as I know, you can't. 4. There is a limit to the number that you can set up by yourself. Go into the Domestic Policy window and click on the Trade tab. It will indicate to you where your t

It might help if you posted your system specs.

I'm pretty sure that defense starts at 0. Otherwise a battle between 1/1 ships would never end. . .

It is possible to create your own scenario or edit the existing scenario to allow you to continue. Just take out the victory event. [EVENT] count=1 [EVENT0] type=1 race=11 outcome=1 description=Defeat the Dread Lords to win.

No, because you play a scenario to complete the objective given. Once that objective is complete there's no point continuing the scenario. If all you want to to is eliminate everyone, then don't play that scenario. Play a scenario where killing everyone is the objective, or don't play a scenario at all. It is possible to create a scenario where killing the Dreadlords does not end them game, though. . .

Makes me wish that NTFS supported symbolic links in a user friendly manner. . . If that were the case you could move the directory to wherever you want and put a symbolic link to it in the place where the game expects to find it. NTFS apparently supports this though a feature it calls "junctions", but I've never actually seen them used and have no idea how to use them. It certainly doesn't seem accesible through Explorer.

Economy is the key in this game. I was used to playing Stars!, where production and mining were everything. There really wasn't any economic model in that game. In GalCiv, you really have to build a strong economy so that you can push the industry slider toward 100%. Being able to do that means that you'll come much closer to utilitising your colonies' full production and research potential. Also, use the industry focus buttons in the colony management screen. If you have a colon

That option was you you to surrender to them. No, I know about the option on my side of the diplomacy screen, but I've also seen it on their side.

I'm pretty sure that you can ally with them in the same manner as you can ally with major civs. When your relations are "close" you can ask them to ally with you. With such relations it may also be possible to ask them to surrender to you. I've had that option before, but never decided to use it.

You could, but except for the purpose of relieving population pressure, there's not much point. Unlike many other games in the genre, GalCiv2 has a flat population growth rate, affected only by morale.

I'm no expert, but here's how I understand it: Research centres produce research points, where are automatically spent on whatever research you are doing. The more labs you have, the more research points you can potentially produce. It does cost money to use those research points, though, so the more money you have allocated to research, the closer to your maximum research potential you will be. It's the same with factories, too

Another try! This time I was able to manage my economy such that I never had to buy a colony ship. I did end up dropping my industry slider for a while toward the end of the initial colony development phase, though the lowest it got was around 35, I think. I also tried setting a couple planets aside for economic support . Both planets were far enough back in my territory that it would take about four or five turns for them to reinforce my

Has anyone ever turned an entire planet into a population-farm to simply produce a heck of alot of tax revenue? Basically just max out the population capacity with food production and entertainment centres to keep them happy. Perhaps put the economic capital there, too.

It might be difficult to do really well, such that you don't end up with many really obvious connections. The best way I can think of would be for the ship-design part to define a skeleton and for the game to procedurally generate a skin around it to give it a smoother, blended look.

Heheh. . . I certainly did get pretty lucky in my colonies. The map in general seemed to have much more habitable worlds than I usually see, with my settings -- at least for the Drengin and me.

It used to happen to me, too. I did a few things, but don't know what ultimately fixed the problem. I turned off anti-aliasing, updated my video drivers, and increased the size of my swap file. Now my swap file starts at 1.5 GB instead of 768 MB and maxes out at 2 GB instead of 1.5 GB. The game generally caused my swap file to peak at 1.1 to 1.2 GB anyway, so I figured that I might as well have it set to above that by default.

Based on what I've read in other threads, the the social projects slider is very important. Any money allocated to social projects when none are being built is apparently wasted. As such, when you're really needing to ramp up the war machine, dumping the social projects slider down to nil may really help research and ship production. Something that rea