someone loses because a nearby wormhole popped out a zillion Drengin battle cruisers without warning. Hmm, and logistics? And don't the Drengin SA do something similar? And some mega events? This kind of argument is weak. You already have the stargates in the background story, use them. They're power hogs, that's their weakness. Use that to control them. See the lack of creativity? The new features in DA, when I said th
I'm wondering if anyone can explain the reasoning behind nerfing defense in DA. I don't really have an opinion yet either way. It seems that the majority opinion on defense in DL was that by and large it wasn't worth the cost, especially late game when attack values became ridiculously high. Since I play with tech trading off, my DL games have never lasted to the point where anyone has attained the best weapons. So my experience has been that ships with good defense dominate the AI's high at
If you were successful in Dread Lords, I don't see how the new planet types would change your basic strategy. The colony rush is probably the most important phase of the game. What you do then has a huge impact on everything later, and the AI is fairly good at the colony rush. In the beginning, you need to focus all your energy on exploring and getting colony ships out there. Some tips: 1. Use your surveyor explore star systems. You can see star systems in the mini map and once you
Only the peacekeeper event is a mega event. The other two events you mention have been around since galciv1. Although i believe the 'progressivly more powerful' event has been tweaked to be a little more significant. I remember getting the Torians getting the power artifact toward the end of a game where I was on the path to a tech victory. I wondered what it was supposed to do, since it hardly caused a blip on the power graphs, and many turns after aq
The money sink is the problem, mostly because it appears to be yet another exponential increase, like the population approval thing. This limits the number of agents you can purchase for all practical purposes to a rather small number, depending on what you consider to be acceptable spending. True, you can spend 25% of your income on agents, but who can afford to do that? And what do you get for it compared to what you can get by spending the same money on other things? This is the s
It isn't much more difficult mid game. The minors always have low advantage factors and nearly worthless fleets. But they are fun to have around. I usually don't take them over, but use them to fight proxy wars against civs I don't like, since the AI will declare war on them sooner or later. Gift them a few good ships and watch them bloody the nose of your rivals.
On the original posters points: I have mixed feelings about espionage. I'm fully prepared to believe that I simply haven't mastered it yet, but at present it seems to me that the increasing amount you spend on it would be more effective on trade, research, warships, pretty much anything. I think it might also be a case of misjudgment on my part - my hopes for espionage were for another path to victory, to compete with research, conquest, influence etc. The som
What i did, was simply accept the fact that starbase defences don't exist. There is no need to waste your time researching the technology or using the modules, just accept it is no longer part of the game and you will be much better off. What's really bad is how many constructors it takes to build up a starbase if you are foolish enough to waste effort trying. Add up what all those constructors cost, then compare that to a well armed medium or
I've been playing DA pretty intensely since I was able to download it. Just some things I have noticed in no particular order: The AI does appear to be better. I stepped down to challenging from tough, and while I am winning, the Korath are putting up a good fight. Super abilities aren't quite as super as I thought they would be, which is probably a good thing. In my current game: the Korx have a poor economy in spite of being a super trader. The Korath haven't used any spo
Another weakness I have seen in the AI using Spore ships is that it tends to rely to heavily on them ... i.e. it grabs a whole bunch of planets with spore ships but doesn't follow them up with actual transports. So the AI winds up with a bunch of planets all with zero population. Dano That's odd. I'm in a game with the Korath now and I'm not sure it has ever used one. The Altarians are their neighbors so they may have used one or two early on
I thought this thread was DOA, but now I see there have been a lot of replies. I guess I should pay better attention. Sounds like people have come up with some innovative strategies, but a lot of them seem to take advantage of the dumb computer. I've played a few tough games now without losing, but the Arceans could have beaten me in my last game if they had tried. I got away with a tech victory, which the AI seems content to let the player have without a struggle. One thing I have
As long as you are not playing Metaverse, it is very simple to edit the CustomPlanets.xml to give you (and any other race) higher PQ planets. Thanks for the suggestion, I was hoping there was something like that. I'll try it and see how it goes.
One problem I have always had with 4x games is that size matters too much. Production, research and pretty much everything is proportional to the number of cities/planets you have. Historically, this was seldom true with small, clever nations like Greece, England and Japan being vastly more powerful than poorly managed larger ones. I think this would be easy to simulate by simply allowing the home planet to have a greatly increased PQ. Right now it is always a PQ 10 if I'm not mistak
I've been playing GalCiv II for a few weeks now gradually increasing the difficulty level. One cheese tactic I have found is going straight for engine and sensor techs and building fast surveyors on cargo hulls. With three or four of those I can get the majority of anomalies on a huge map with three opponents. I'm easily winning my first game on challenging using that tactic, although I did have the number of anomalies set to common. I must have gotten close to 20,000 credits that way, which
