Juice

engaging a battle where the enemy gets the first shot is always painful with equal fleets, you always lose like 2 or 3 ships more just because of that first shot

all you need to do is sending a troop transport to that planet...it's required that you research planetary invasions first...

Every game that i played so far anything but neutral gets destroyed und then i sit there getting bored due to being neutral myself

I think the problem is that you depend on your population due to taxes, there is actually no drawback in having lots of planets colonized, you get more money, you can have more research and more production since there is more space for those buildings, it's all about colonizing the most planets so your econ gets boosted beyond morality, the problem is that you cannot sit back and try to get ahead in research or influence since research only works with

ok that's all great but somehow the AI buys lots of colonyships, also gets some constructors, which are more expensive and is most times way ahead in research, a thing that i don't understand, when they spend all their money on colony ships, also when you don't have enough money to buy factories at the start, the development of your colonies will take quite a while, i'm able to keep up with AI at grabbing planets but not at the same time re

When i started playing gc2 i used to go the peaceful way against normal AIs on a huge map, getting as much planets as possible in the beginning, then going after economy and influence/diplomacy techs, my population, economy, production and research was way ahead of the other races, but i always got listed at very low ranks in overall comparison to the other races because i had absolutly no military, i could have conquered the whole galaxy without build

Somehow the approval bonus seems to be broken, i have researched and built about everything that increases morale(in my last game), so i ended up with about 120 % morale bonus empire wide, then i built some buildings to increase the morale even further, about 60 - 100 %, but some planets only have an approval of about 40%, when i look at the explanation it says: -77 % from population, -33% from taxes, +17 from buildings, +13 from native ability and +10 from high quality planet so ser