CraigHB

Hey Kat, did pretty good on my last game. Moved us up one rank. Playing Crippling this time, should do even better.

Yea, that was a significant error and a source of confusion for me. I understand the formula now. They simply went from ^.5 (square root) to ^.4 which results in a smaller number. I understand the forum is probably more of a nuisance to Stardock than anything else, but if they *are* going to post information, they should take some care in making sure it's correct.

That forumla calculates my metaverse score exactly. Somewhat of a difference (between number of games ^.4) and (number of games ^.5) which, as originally stated, would simply be the square root. Seems like an odd thing to change. I think it would have been better left at .5 because it makes an already complicated formula more confusing. Square root is easy to get a hold of in your head, throwing around numbers with odd fractional exponents is not. I wonder if that's an error in their scorin

Nice trick, have to try that one.

Dealing with ships can be confusing at first, but you settle into a strategy pretty quick once you've played a few games. Great tips in the previous posts. Main thing is to outpace the other races then you have the resources to build bigger ships with more weapons. As stated earlier, specialize in one line of weaponry at first. I like missles myself. Do well in the initial planet grab. Once you've beat the AI there, you've got a good chance of winning. Your fleets will generally be more p

I've been using most of those tactics except I never give up planets. Mainly watch the forgein relations and when one starts cooling down I might give them stuff to get my relations up. Simply buying their techs seems to help so I do that first. Setting up trade routes with the more hostile races seems to help. Keeping your military up is key. For instance, the Yor and Drengin will attack if you look weak to them. They usually give you some warning with a demand for cash or tech so if that

The best situation is in the corner with a lot of stars close by. Easy to defend and you can get a jump on the planet grab. I don't usually play the first setup handed to me. I Ctrl-N until I get one I like. But, playing off a bad start does present a challenge. I'll have to try it sometime.

I noticed that in the full version as well. It is a small detail with no real impact on game quality, but it would be nice if the tile descriptions were correct. One of those things they overlooked I guess.

Always 1 farm and 2 approval buildings per planet. Settles in at 81 to 89 per planet once I have advanced farming and virtual reality centers. That's with 80% taxes and 100% spending which I set and forget as soon as I can. Toward the end of a game, I may switch to 1 virtual reality center and 4 stock markets for 69 to 75 approval per planet. I usually have a few funky planets, like lower class ones that can't support a higher population but still need a virtual reality center. Those may si

Been playing long games on Gigantic. Currently at Painful difficulty. I restart until I get a favorable setup, for instance, in a good gathering of star systems with a bonus or two on my homeworld. Then I race to get stongest in the various areas, reasearch, production, economy, etc. I form no lasting alliances and use diplomacy to keep other races at bay. Once I've got the tech tree finished and everything built up, I go in for the kill, picking off weak races first. It takes a long time t

One thing that's kind of consfusing for new players, previously designed ships don't display until you have the techs you built them with. Leads you to believe the game didn't same them, but they are there. They show up when they qualify. Personally, I flush my ships every game. It really doesn't save any work for me to use old ones so I'd rather just start clean. The definition files are in; Documents and Settings\{login name}\My Documents\My Games\GalCiv2\Ships

Yea, I got a good laugh the first time the Snathi popped in. Read their bio, it's hilarious. Would be cool if they were a major. I get a kick out of the Yor. I'm always amuzed by their dialog about talking meat and carbon based life forms. As far as who does well in the game, it seems the Drengin are most often my best competitors. The Torians and Altarians do well, but since I always play good and they are "good" races, all it takes is a little bit of diplomacy to keep them at bay. Those

There are lots of factors involved in surrender, it's not "real life" at all. I just think of it as creative license on the designer's part. But, you can work the game so things go in your favor. A race may not surrender to you when you beat them in war, but you can get a race to surrender to you when they lose to another race. It's pretty cool really and I like working the diplomacy to my advantage. The Hall of Empathy does seem to work. Once I obtain that achievment, I form alliances wit

Re the comment about the forum crashing my IE browser, I cleared all the files in my Temporary Internet Files folder and that seems to have solved the problem. Might have had a corrupt cache file, not the first that's happened.

A couple updates to this list. Made a few RTFM errors. Disregard the comment about zooming the main view. I discovered the hot keys, but my failure to realize that does support my comment about having a hot keys tab in the options menu. Disgregard the comment about disabling the skip button. If ships would always remember their modes and never drop out of autopilot on their own, the way things work there would be perfect. Regarding the comment about the shi

1) The leader name can be changed to whatever is desired during game setup. So, in whatever person you like to talk to yourself, set the leader name appropriately. 2) Didn't know about the orbital terraformer. That's a nasty one I find unacceptable. 3) The privateer does protect my routes, but does not protect other race's routes to me. They get killed just the same with or without it. 4) Whether it works or not, Galactic Travel Guide is pretty worthless for m

I've been playing with everything unchecked, conquest victory only. I think that offers the most challenge and yields the highest scores. I've won games through the other methods, but get the most satisfaction from a conquest win. I have tech trading checked because sometimes that can give you an edge. When a minor steals techs from a major, you can trade for them without giving the majors any advantage. Even when going for the conquest, you still have to use diplomacy quite a bit. For ins

I'm having a problem where the forum crashes my browser a lot. I'm using Internet Explorer 6 SP1 and Windows 2000 SP4. I thought maybe my Java installation was the problem so I updated to the latest version, but no difference. What I would like to see is better forum software. Something like phpBB is open source and doesn't cosy anything (www.phpbb.com). It has tons of features and can be easily customized. Since the software is open source you guys *are* developers, you should b

Started out playing on normal/large and won pretty easily. Last win was on tough/gigantic and was challenged by the AI in pace, but beat the AI with some margin in conquest. I'll try painful next game. May get beat a few times before I can score a win on that level. May have to go back to tough. We'll see.

To Stardock, Been enjoying the game greatly. Thanks for all that you've put into it. There's no search function here so I don't have an easy way to look and see if these issues have been posted. Sorry if any of this is a repeat. Have an issue with the dropdowns that appear in the right margin of the screen. When you have a list of new ships that exceeds the height of the screen, that feature gets confused. It works for what's shown but then loses track of the

Would really like to understand that formula. Can you please provide an example calculation. Thanks.

I like them too. I don't always read them, but I've been amuzed by some of them.

Man, I really like this forum, please don't kill it. That would be dissapointing. If you don't want to deal with the physical overhead, maybe you can find a new host for an "official forum". Just leave the "forums.galciv2.com" address intact. There are lots of forum hosts around with pretty slick software and using one would off-load your overhead. My only complaint about this forum is the interface is lacking a few features compared to other systems (like message search), but that could be

Why is there no Reply or Quote button on the first post in a thread? Why does the first post reappear on every single page? Better yet, why does Stardock use its own custom built forum software when there is full-featured forum software available for free on the internet, with loads of features that this forum software lacks? Inquiring mind

Never had the game crash the computer, using Athlon 64 processor, nVidia 7900 GT GPU with latest drivers. I've had the game itself crash a few times. Happens pretty rarely, but annoying if I lose gameplay. A couple times I've had the game go screwy on me. Both times I got a window saying the Altarian leader was killed and the new one declared war on me. This is with close relations and no provocation, then the universe filled up with like 10,000 Altarian battleships. I reverted back to a s