P0rcup1ne

you can't go zero military. you need enough military to keep them off your back while you try other strategies. as to your tech issues, perhaps you are not building enough labs. if you don't have the research infrastructure it matters little how high you set your research priority. also remember you can buy some techs from the ai to save yourself the time of researching them yourself. that works best with the techs that you can only sell one of per trade. notice how if you try to sel

i think it would be pretty interesting to see a fantasy 4x structured much like GalCiv. a tech tree with different branches of magic, biology, metalurgy... custom units built within your tech limits. biology techs providing bodies(hulls). metalurgy for better swords. enchantment techs to enhance your offense and defense. clairvoyance tech rather than sensor tech. you could reuse a lot of code but certainly combat would be much different. you might have to make combat more tactical than it is no

how would this be functionally different from surrendering? they will defend themselves and just send you money? will you have alliance obligations toward them? can they still start wars with other ai?

with the settings available you can have as fast or as slow a game as you choose for the most part. you can have 2 hour games or 40 hour games also. map size has a profound impact on how the game plays out and what sort of strategies you need to succeed. you can adjust the tech development rate to change the pace as well. and of course you have the difficulty lvl. i have found the ai to have enough of a personality range amongst races to keep me satisifed. different races tend to concentrate on

interesting, i though you couldn't get those since 1.2

if you care to have pretty ships make templates. ships with all the jewelry installed but no functional components whatsoever. then you just upgrade the template with engines, weapons, whatnot and you have a decent looking ship with your personal stamp on it remember to save the game whenever you design a ship. if you don't save the game it wont save the ship. once saved they will keep showing

have you ever concidered that militaristic may be a trait of THAT race? i don't even notice it there, it is so ubiquitous. just treat it as and uncontrolable factor and make sure you are on par militarily with the toughest ai and you will likely be fine.

logistic techs determine how many ships you can put in a fleet

quick build factories? no, quickbuild WONDERS! snatch them out from under other civs just before they complete them. BWAHAHAHAHAHA! bottom line is that money = flexiblity. nothing expands your options the way a fat bank acct does. and ALL of the top end improvements are worthwhile, some just are not high priority. top farm tech is not a very high priority but i is much better than wasting another tile on farms to get that population. it is a matter of thinking longterm. industrial sectors are ex

take it easy on the rush buying of ships and improvements. that money has to last until you start producing income. if you get yourself in that bad a bind you need to turn down the spending slider. you see, once you go 500 or so in the red it stops spending until you get back out of it. and if you have a morale below 40% your population will not grow. that is planet morale, not overall. the number you see on the main screen is average morale for your whole civ. sounds like you jacked up taxes to

http://metaverse.galciv2.com/index.aspx?g=legend that will show you what is out there. if there is someplace to tell you how to get the ones that are not self explainitory i don't know it. the one i have, racial medal you get for winning with each race, including custom. wounded in action you get for posting a certain ammount of losses i believe. maybe i will try for that one next, lol.

i don't think there is any penalty, just a higher variance in election results.

don't get too worked up over population. you need to build it as fast as you can, but having a big population is not the best way to a fat bank acct. PQ 6-12 only build one farm, and upgrade it as needed. you should need no morale tiles to take care of these planets. above 12 put a second farm and 2 morale tiles. that will be plenty to build a monster economy. understand, this is not metaverse advice, just regular game advise. in MV population is much more important. now, put the factories, labs

how about settings like fast tech, or that one that lets ai design ships more often? and how about ai count?

hyperion shipyard can be worthwhile in very limited circumstances. all it takes is for you to get a planet with a good starship bonus. slap that shipyard down and use this planet to generate large and huge hulled warships which you only use in fleet with other warships from the same planet. toss your spin control center on the same planet for good measure. +1 is not much, but i have seen a lot of 'wish i had one more move' situations <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smiles/Wink.gif"

i have seen them overbuild with different types of building. even if they won't do this with starports i don't see how this is a viable strategy. better to build up into impregnable fortresses(all population and planetary defense) than to build them into garbage planets and just wait for the ai to take them. better even to repeatedly colonize them with 1 colonist the distroy the colony so you saddle them with useless planets than what you are suggesting i think. if you rot a planet down to size

1) don't worry too much about those ratings. military issues dominate the overall rating tho so keep that in mind. notice that littly colored strip on the left side of your readouts? just between the graph and your current research info. that is how powerful each civ is judged to be. that is what you want to keep an eye on. if you have the largest portion you don't need to worry too much about being attacked. it can happen, but you won't be surprised by an attack out of the blue. next time you b

don't be afraid to send your colony ships out to do their own scouting. many ppl don't even bother scouting with their flagship. they just set it to automatically fetch anomolies and forget about it. also note that your map size influences your colony rush strategy. on the small maps it can make sense to rush buy ships. on the larger ones it that will get you smoked real quick. larger maps think longterm. maybe buy a factory or starport here and there, but don't buy ships unless you just have to

assuming that you didn't already wipe out all his warships. try to make sure the planets you leave for that final push have plenty of defenders. if you wipe out all his ships while you wait for your transports to get into position there is a good chance he won't wait.

the learning curve for this game is a bitch, that's for certain. just make sure you don't push yourself past the point that your enjoying yourself while you learn ok, a few points few planets-trade dominates, lots of planets-taxes dominate. at least if you build you economy properly. stock exchanges are your friends. keeping them off your back is paramount. check out this t

local income has no importance afaik. all income is pooled and spent where you have the facilities for production. no need to ballance your budget planet by planet if that point is just at the end of your colony rush you are suffering from a serious population deficit. this does NOT mean you need more farms, it means your growth rate is too low for your planets to pay for themselves. put anothe

you can get higher logistics ratings, but not necessarily in a timely manner. every opponent can build a logistic center which you can grab, they will stack with yours. yor have a base logistic of 8 btw. in my experience the pirates will have one or 2 battleships, if you take those out they get MUCH easier to finish, just stick in there. don't attack until you have 2 to 3 fleets together if they are giving you that much trouble, that way you don't give them time to repair before you

transports are not especially cheap. try out the tactic and see if you find it terribly unballancing. some ai buy so many transports that you can go broke fast trying to manage them with this technique. others like thalan seem to go for fewer ships in my experience and are much more vulnerable to it. of course they are fairly passive most games so... so, if you want to complain based on the insanity of it i won't argue with you <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smiles/Wink

you need to provide some info as to map size and number of opponents, those have a big impact on what sort of strategies you need to use. gigantic is a very different game than medium.

i believe you. i am playing on medium maps now at only tough lvl, to get that racial medal knocked out. had to seriously adjust my strategies for it. got spanked hard first game trying my maso/gigantic ones, lol. map size changes the character/pacing of the game tremendously.