Mismatched

I play on large galaxies on painful and there is generally a period in the early game, after the colony rush, where I have to set my spending slider to less than 100% for a while - sometimes as low as 50%. Generally this is because I have at least one factory on too many planets with no financial infrastructure to support the spending. However, you need a factory on a planet to do the social building so this result seems inevitable. On a good game it might only take me a couple months to recover

Hmmmm, I am usually on the bottom of the population pile for much of the game, at least until I have conquered another civ or two. However, I am always on the top of the manufacturing pile. Late game I will take planets and they are so poorly built that is it easy to see why the AI can't compete. Truely, if they would just fix this one aspect of the AI, this game would be unbeatable on the hardest levels. But when I can have a planet putting out 200 military points and the AI can't manage much m

I had a planet with 2 precursor mines and a rare elements tile. I had a manufacturing capitol half built on another planet when I found this. Needless to say I abandoned that one and built one here.

I play on anywhere between Painful and Suicidal and almost always win. It just depends on if I want to work at it or just roll thru a game on what level I play at. I don't use any exploits but I will start a new game if I am in an untenable position at the start. I don't think the AI is too easy, I think the AI needs to get better at some things, most of which have been detailed by Tiger8 above and others that have been discussed elsewhere. I certainly appreciate the game as it is, but I see so

I still feel that Civ4 has a better AI than GC2. If they can get the AI to build good planets in this game it might become the best, but right now it just doesn't use it's resources well enough. The game that provided the best challenge was Kohan 2. While the AIs that came with the game weren't very good, the community built some that were using the latest strategies and provided an outstanding game - almost as good as playing multi.

I usually play on a large galaxy with a custom race with Ion Drive as a starting tech on Masochistic. I put my production slider at 100% and make it 60% research, 5% military and the rest social. It takes 5 or 6 turns to research Impulse Drive. I buy a factory or two and a morale building on my home world. Once I have Impulse I build fast colony ships. I buy as many as I can afford. My survey ship does some scouting of very close star systems but grabs all anomolies on the way. As soon as I am p

For me, Stardock Central thinks it has an update for itself but then hangs.

I am playing 2 levels above Tough (whatever it's called) and I also notice that planets are poorly optimized. This is THE one thing I would like to see fixed. I see manuf. capitols on planets with no factories and financial capitols on planets with no banks. Add in the fact that most AI planets are barely developed at all, and that they misuse bonus tiles and it is easy to see why the AI has a hard time competing. Imagine if all the AI's planets were well developed, this game would be HARD. I kn

At almost every new research level I redesign my ships with the new tech. I then obsolete the older design but leave the existing fleet alone (maybe to get upgraded later). After a few games of doing this with a civ, you have all the ship designs you can use and you can keep the buildable list small by continuing to obsolete anything that you will no longer build.

100% growth is way too much. It almost makes keeping approval at 100% mandatory in the early parts of the game and that isn't what I prefer in a strategy game. I want choices that make sense. Maybe a simple scale of pop growth vs approval would work better as opposed to 3 distinct points? All I know is this change was not effective at slowing the expansion rush in the early game,. All it did was cause a lag after that where you need to hit end turn over and over waiting for your approval and eco

I have to agree that 1.1 seems buggier. I never crashed prior to 1.1 and usually crash once a session now. Often it is quite early in the game so it doesn't seem to be memory errors. Still, it's not bad enough to complain about. However, that isn't the point of this post. I agree with almost everything pointed out so far, but for me the one important aspect of the game that needs fixing first is to get the AIs to build decent planets. If they can get this right, the AIs will have plen

If I have the money I buy the first factory. Otherwise I set the planet priority to Social and wait. Next I build a starport. I figure I might as well use the manufacturing capacity for something. If it's a big planet then I build another factory, then entertainment if I need to raise the approval, then start working on research and banks. A small planet (4-6) might only get a factory to start and then nothing but banks. Of course this all depends on bonus'. I used to let approval get down to 60

THat's a bug and a cheat in my book and I don't need or want to use it. However, if you enjoy playing that way, have at it.

Some turns take me quite a while to take, other times I might take 5 or 6 turns in a row. At some points in the late early game there isn't much to do while you wait for things to build and techs to research. All the colonies are taken, the resources are mined, and you don't really have the means to start on a navy yet.

Usually you can tell when another civ thinks you are an easy mark because they will start making demands of you. If I haven't already started building military at that point, I do start soon. I seem to quickly always take the lead in military anyway because I always have more economic and production capacity than the AIs do.

I start by researching Impulse drive. I put my sliders on 80% research, 20% social until I have it, then I start building fast (5 pc) colony ships. I never build any ships other than colony ships or contructors until all the planets are settled and all the resources I can find have been mined. Then I start building defenders while I research medium sized hulls. I buy at least a few colony ships in order to maximize my chances of claiming planets. I als

Ok, a couple of things. You can NOT increase the AI difficulty past the highest possible for the overall difficulty you are playing. So in order to get a 'genius' AI level you must play at the difficulty that allows that level. Not good! I played another game and have seen the following AI crappy building problems. In all cases there was no significant war yet. A planet with 1 factory, 6 research stations and a manufacturing capit

The core planets are actually developed pretty well, but only a couple. I didn't realize I could set the intelligence of each AI so I will try that and see if I can get a better game out of the AI. In all fairness, I come from a background of playing strategy games pretty seriously so although I haven't played this one much I have a fair bit of experience in the genre. And I am enjoying this game a lot, I was just expecting more after all the AI hype t

I am playing a game on a 'Painful' on a Huge Universe with the latest beta build. I finally do enough espionage on the Tor to see their planets and they only have 3 or 4 tiles built on planets that they have held for a long time. They are behind me in research in all but one category and they have almost no ships. What the heck have they been doing? I have almost completely developed planets btw, so they have had plenty of time to get theirs developed.

When trying to click on the corner of the map next to the top left corner of the 'next turn' button the next turn button is depressed.

On my 3rd game ever I switched up to Tough. I am still winning easily. There are many areas of the AI that need improving. Fortunately I have harder difficulties to try. And personnally, I don't care how much an AI cheats so long as there is a level where I have a hard time winning, or even better I get my butt kicked.

When you look at their planet it will tell you the IP percentage. This has to get over 4 before the planet has a chance to flip. It often takes much more than that to flip a planet though.

I think of it as the other civ has just entered a 'protectorship agreement' with the civ they surrendered to. It makes perfect sense to preserve their civilization and pi$$ you off at the same time. If you are building your fleet up and don't want to worry one of your neighbors, start giving them gifts to get your relations up to 'friendly' with them. By the same token, if you have another civ that is getting hammered by a mutual enemy give

Actually this seems to be a bug in the current version. My explorer came up with the same message. I knew there were more anomolies in an area a scout ship had explored si I moved the explorer over near the anomoly but kept getting the same message when I tried to get it to look for anomolies again. It seems that once the switch is turned off there is no way to turn it back on.

I am much more pragmatic. I name my ships like 'sm 2m 1sh lr fighter' which means it is a small ship with 2 missle attack, 1 point of shields, and is a long range fighter. I started out with the 'v2, v3, etc...' but could never remember what was what. This way I can quickly grab a ship with the specs I need without thinking about it. It keeps my mind on the more important things.