Thank goodness they haven't nerfed buying ships from other civs: when playing under blind exploration conditions, I like to buy a scout or other cheap ship from each of the other civs so that I know in general where their planets are. I don't think the AI is smart enough to follow those scouts back to my territory, although I generally don't play at the more difficult settings.
Under what circumstances will another civ sell you a planet? Whenever I try it, they want more than the entire value of my civilization (techs, trade goods, ships, every single one of my planets, etc.) I can't even trade planets with allies. And, of course, all they'll pay for planets I try to sell is a bucket full of warm spit, even when I have an overwhelming diplomatic advantage.
Lab coat ninjas will always nick the sweetest techs they can find first. Makes sense to me.
Those images look more like concept art than real ingame screenshots.
A fluke is an unexpected stroke of luck.
Something like receiving a Lucky Ranger in an otherwise unmilitarized galaxy can blow your military (and overall, for that matter) rating through the roof.
Plunging all the galaxy into War! I had it happen when one of my allies attacked another civ, and here I was, minding my own business, plodding along in my ivory tower doing research and minting cash. Pesky aliens making too much noise on my front lawn. So I bought as many of the other civs transports and combat ships as I could, just to reduce the intensity of the war.
Colonizing a gas giant just means you get to build cool floating cities in the sky with a society that has abundant access to nifty industrial gases. There, that was simple to rationalize.
Another thing that can help with ship speed is to research the Miniaturization branch, which will give your ships more room to pile on more engines. Some times I build empty hulls with just engines and life support so that they can get to their target area quickly; I then use the Upgrade feature to turn them into functioning ships for whatever task is at hand. It can be costly to do it that way, and empty hulls are vulnerable to enemy action, but I've had decent success with that strate
I've tried two different strategies with political parties so far: pick one that piles on more strength to your best attributes or pick one that compensates for weaknesses in your race's attributes. Hard to say which way is best. Hmmm.
If so, I figure planetary bases on PQ 0 planets would have a greater than normal planetary maintenance cost, due to the presumably hostile planetary environment.
I noticed today that the Terrans kept working on the technology victory track past Discovery Sphere in a game where I had turned off the technology victory condition. The only thing I can think of to use those techs for in this situation is to trade them to other civs; since they're very high up in the track, they're valued pretty highly. If the technology victory condition is turned off, I think those "extra" technologies should be seriously devalued so that the AI's won't want to res
I bribed a minor into attacking a major and they just sat there and did nothing.
A few more turns will hurt if you end up getting bedsores from sitting in front of the computer too long.
And we could tell definitively who is a Major by which civs get a vote when interstellar issues need decisions; I could see that roster of Majors change from vote to vote depending on the ebb and flow of the game.
Of course it's changeable, 10 is just a number. I'm not saying there wouldn't be significant dev effort involved, though. It would be great to blur the boundaries between major and minor races. Then, the "major" races would merely be the ones better off at the game start.
You can't do that directly but I've seen a class 26 reduced to a class 2 when the torians and the dreadlords kept attacking each other with mass drivers. You could fill a few transports with troops, conquer the planet using mass drivers, gift it back and attack again until the planet is basically useless. That's brilliant, in a hideously terrifyi
I have one problem, though: Sometimes I want to go back and change the name or description of my ships. Is there any easy way to do it? Main Menu->Options->Interface->uncheck "Remove Functional Components When Upgrading A Ship Design" Then you can Upgrade a ship type in the Shipyard by selecting it with Upgrade, then without changing anything
The balance problem is that Superior Duranthium is cheaper and smaller than Kanvium, with identical absorption. It obsoletes all three Tri-Strontium techs as well. Superior Duranthium Cost: 70 Absorption: 4 Size: 5 + 3% Hull Size Kanvium Cost: 80 Absorption: 4 Size: 6 + 3% Hull Size Version v1.3 beta 3X last updated on: Wed Aug 30 19:23:43 2006
And Tertullian has the correct answer....
There's at least one other way to do it: pursuade another civ to attack your ally, and when the ally invokes the treaty, refuse to come to their aid. It's a little more effort, but you get the benefit of "Let's You And Him Fight".
For some races, when you colonize a new planet and it asks you to name it, you get white text on a pale blue background, which is nearly unreadable because of the low contrast. The game should use black text for greater readability with pale background colors.
You could also try to sell the junk planets to the other AI's and let them be a burden to them for a change....
If you get rich enough with this strategy, you can just buy fleets from the AI's instead of building them yourself, and upgrade them as you see fit. I've been doing that with a heavy diplomacy/trade goods strategy, and pacifying AI's by buying their war fleets is working pretty well for me. Then again, I'm not playing at high difficulty levels yet.
For future reference, can GC2 handle custom maps that are larger than Gigantic (18x18)?
