Edward Wilensky

Pong. Those bitmapped cubes give me nightmares...

1.3 is HARD. And I love it.

Played the first mission of the Campaign and started the second, in the meantime I started a Sandbox game, and frankly, never went back... ooops. Myabe I'll try mission 2 this weekend...

I agree - a hotseat mode would be wonderful. I remember many evenings and nights spent playing Warlords III: DLR in hotseat mode. This game, being so complex, would a delight to play. Oh well. Finally figured out to get my old Warlords DLR to work in XP...

There are no blank tiles -- the basic colony took the open one... But shed the tear now -- wave after wave of Torians went after the planet and I have used all my defenses to protect it. Now that my other planets are open they are systematically dismantling my empire. Still, I think I might be able to rally with this one planet alone... And this is why Gal Civ 2 is one of the best game I've played in ages...

I find the 700% Research bonus tile every few games but for some reason I find the 700% Production bonus tile every game. Actually have a planet in the game I'm playing right now with 2 300% Production bonus tiles, the 700% Production bonus tile and a 100% Producition bonus tile. The kicker -- its a PQ5 planet... ARRGH!

Agreed with Reply #1. You have WARP engines researched, the first weapon techs up the Beam/Missle/Mass Driver branch as well as the first defenses up the Shield/Point Defense/Armor branch. I think a few other techs are in there as well. I tried a game playing this a few days ago and found that it: 1.) Would only allow me to play a game with all races (I could not decrease or increase the number of opponents) 2.) Nor could I go in and manually se

Funny. I never spend too much time making my ships look good. I select a hull, double click engines, double click sensors, and then double click weapons and defenses... I often get a ship with weapons on the back and engines on the front and a sensor node hanging off the side... but I've seen some of those mod ships people have made -- great looking stuff... For me it doesn't need to look pretty -- it just needs to get the job done.

A good strategy I use in almost all my games is to research up the Mass Driver Tree until I get NANORIPPERS (I think this is around Singularity Driver IV) -- one of the more powerful weapons in the game. Then I design a small ship with 2 or 3 of these weapons, no engines, no shields and use these to defend my planets -- one or two per planet will protect them while I research up the Beam Weapon Tree and Engine Tree. Once I get some fast enough engines, I'll start designing ships t

I always give away the Trade techs. In the end, it helps you out as they will start sending freighters your way before you can even build a freighter to send out. Money is money and I always need it early on. In one game, losing badly to the Torians, I gave them Industrial Sectors (I think they had Enhanced Factories at the time) and it essentially stalled them (and ruined their economy) for the 20 or so turns it took me to get my defenses together and muster an offense.

As with me as well. I'm playing on 1.2. Of course, Xeno Ethics and NLC's are some of the first things I research once Xeno Ethics gets to around 20 turns...

Captain Ken, I too have had the game for about a week now. I started with the Campaign. It is not so bad and I had a good time playing through the first few missions. I would suggest playing it at "Normal" or above because stuff actually happens then... My first few missions I played at "Beginner" and it was a snooze fest. That said, this weekend I started my first "sandbox" game and I must say I enjoyed this experience much much more. The AI really has the opportunity to shine and I found