HighWater

It sure is! Enjoy.

I have little experience with the campaign game (I pretty much only play sandbox), but it is usually a bad idea to sell off your only military advantage. If you are bleeding money, you can try to fix your economy, or you can instead focus on getting the job done while the money runs out (completing the mission objective). Getting the resource crystals may be a boost, but reading your statement I'd say they are instead a waste of time (as they don't fix the problem) and instead a terri

I wouldn't call it dead. The place seems a bit more lively than it was a while back and you usually get your answer the same day...

As others said before, there are ways to beat the pirates or even use them in your favour. Getting them in pretty much your first game is kinda hardcore though. They, like all other mega events, weren't really meant for the first playthrough, but were added to shake the game up and make it more challenging for more experienced players. You can turn mega events off when you start a new game, if you want.

As far as I know, there really isn't. You can cheat to make the DreadLords appear a bit earlier, but it sounds to me like you either need to implement one of the two extensive mods that improve balance, or just need to ramp the difficulty up. What may also help is setting yourself a target to beat: i.e. conquer the map in 5 years, winning without firing a shot, etc. You can also play around with galaxy size and other settings to find something that is more to your liking. (i.e. a

The terms "early", "mid" and "late" game are very loose terms to give a general idea of timing in the game. Therefore it is difficult to connect them with certain techs, as everyone uses different techorders to get ahead and i.e. galaxy size and tech speed also has an impact. That said, here's my approximation: "early" game = during the colonization wave and the second colonization wave (the extreme planets), warships are small hulls in small fleets with weapons up to harp

It's what they get for being Drengin. You can't rush the Drengin without chewing up some corvettes (or avoiding them). The corvettes are "minions" coming to drengin aid. Basically just bad guys that owe the Drengin a favour, hope to profit from Drengin rule or simply enjoy a good fight...

I'd probably enjoy the JK if it functioned properly. However, the JK are really hurt by their minor race status (exclusion from the culture game and voting), their economical and military impotence, their inability to play enemies against eachother... basically, while they appear intended to give you a real challenge as the New Big Bad, they end up instead being "take back your planets (and those of others too), gaining tech and (re)gaining territory without real resistance".

You have to create different versions yourself. There is an autocreate mode, but handcrafted ships are almost always superior.

Hilarious. :)

Your population looks rather big, compared to your expenses. What kind of population are your worlds at? You can always try to get your hands on morale resourses and build some morale structures on your planets. And never give up. The greatest games are the ones you eventually pull out of the fire. ;)

Whenever the enemy gets a ship like this that you simply cannot beat, you have to find a workaround. Straight up buying it is a bit too gamey for me, but avoiding it in combat and opening more fronts of warfare can do the job. :)

I guess you play Good civilizations? That would confirm this old post: https://forums.stardock.com/166601/page/2/#1535225 (I almost always play neutral and never saw this change in an update log...)

[quote who="qrtxian" reply="8" id="3165984"]From what I and others have determined by testing, the Dread Lords seem to be a genuinely random event. They do, however, rarely show up before the late game, and they won't show up if you've explored the entire galaxy.[/quote] The "big dog" thesis of Bork603 would've made sense for me, as I prefer to set things up so I stay the underdog for almost the entire duration of the game (get bored otherwise). But if that doesn&#39

Not that I recall, no...

You can "upgrade" your flagship to a warship. In order to do this, you need to research medium hulls. If you then design a warship with a medium hull, you can upgrade your warship by selecting it and then selecting "upgrade" and the ship you want it to turn into (that is also based on a medium hull). However, it will lose every feature it has (survey module, decent engines, sensors, range) unless these are present on your new design. Personally, I have never upgraded my flagship to a

Ascension works through collecting ascension points. Each turn you hold one ascension crystal, gives one point. If I recall correctly, you need (the insane) 1000 points to actually win. That means that if you have one crystal, you need to wait 1000 turns ("weeks") before your ascension is complete. If you hold two, you "only" need 500 turns. If you hold all 5, it still takes 200 turns to win the game through ascension. So basically, the Iconians may have gotten a crystal first, but because th

The Krynn are rather good at culture flipping in ToA. They, however, are also very fond of declaring war, so it's not that visible.

It was removed in the ToA expansion, one of the reasons being that the AI tended to go after indestructible freighters forever... The Korx still have a building that does almost the same thing, though.

In the many games that I've played, I've NEVER encountered the Dread Lords. To my great annoyance, I might add. What is it you guys do, that makes the game decide you need some Dread Lords to spice things up?... I'm seriously considering enabling cheats for my next game, so that I can introduce them myself...

They'll also spawn "we know what you're doing" if your influence is threatening their planetary possessions.

[quote who="vince0018" reply="11" id="3156515"] Well they could make it simultaneously turn based.[/quote] That only fixes part of the problem, as those with bigger empires simply have more to do. You could implement a timer, but that would handicap the bigger player (though perhaps he/she should be handicapped). I've seen it done in Civ, where a single pop-up dialogue can mean you lost the battle you would've won, because the other guy got to click first. ;) <

Multiplayer would have been nice, and I think it could've worked in DL and DA, as the races are still very similar there, but in ToA there are just too many differences, making one race definitely not equal to the next. Another big problem is the time it takes to play a GalCiv game: it simply lasts waaaay to many turns, imagine having to wait for other players to finish theirs before you can do one more turn... You can already play hotseat, the how-to can be found on this forum. N

Rest assured, the game hasn't been patched in those 5 months and creativity hasn't been nerfed since then. It's just that during the beta I recall it being even more awesome than it is now. ;) Using creativity to get to the end of short tech trees with high cost (just as terror stars) can be a bit cheesy. Problem with games like these, and especially rather complex ones like GalCiv2 is that balance inevitably becomes an issue. As you are only playing against the AI, you ca

Losing by Ascension is generally not an issue as it takes forever to ascend, even when the enemy AI has all five crystals (200 weeks of King of the Hill, almost 5 gameyears, seriously, if any race can hold all 5 crystals for all that time, they deserve the win.). Also it doesn't really matter that much if you blow up their base 400 weeks before they ascend, or just 20 weeks, getting closer to ascension offers no bonus whatsoever and it annoys other AI...