JMiddleton

Your likelihood of experiencing a particular mega event also seems to depend on your style of play. If you play a defensive strategy - pursuing a non-conquest victory, you'll see the Jagged Knife or the mega-spy event quite often. Aggressive players pursuing a conquest victory seem more likely to encounter pirates or peacekeepers. If you are working hard for the win at your current difficulty level, by all means turn the mega events off - the game is, after all, supposed to be fun. If you are co

I start building freighters on my home world as soon as the initial colony rush winds down. I'll send 5 to the home worlds of the 5 closest AI (Trade level 1). This is the point in the game where my economy is struggling and the growing trade revenue really helps. I also assume the improved relations with the AI is one of the reasons I never seem to get involved in an early war. By the time all 5 routes are established my weekly trade income more than justifies the cost of building the freighter

Also check to make sure the card isn't overheating. I had a very similar problem when I installed the game and it turned out to be a defective fan on my Sapphire Radeon X1600. No problem running Windows - including Vista Aero - but as soon as GalCiv2 started exercising the card it overheated and eventually shut down.

While the newer threads deal with the expansion packs, there are older threads for DL. Also, most of the information on the Wiki site is for DL. If you were able to register your serial number you can download the latest patch for DL. You can also purchase and download the expansion packs online. Big changes are the colony rush - DL doesn't have extreme planets that require research before they can be colonized. As mentioned the combat model has also changed. Ships can engage multiple targets un

If your style of play is to pursue non-military victory, trade routes can last the entire game and generate a phenomenal amount of income, not to mention improving relations with your trade partners making it easier to avoid war. If you are usually at war, your trade ships will be blasted unless you have built Galactic Privateer. Even then, you lose the routes with anyone you are at war with. I can understand if those aiming for a conquest victory have little use for trade routes, they're unlike

[quote] Let us know if you need anything.[/quote] Since you ask ... Imagine integrating the new Fantasy game or GalCiv3 with Dreamscapes 2. The running game as active wallpaper! I'm not sure if it's practical but it certainly would be cool. Add back some of the WOW! Microsoft left out of Vista.

I research beam because it is the fastest and cheapest branch of the weapons tree and I research missile defense, primarily to get hyper computers, but at least one of my potential late game adversaries will be researching missiles. In late game combat the AI will optimize against whatever I have chosen but the AI tends to mix its fleets - a dreadnought or two, a couple of battleships and a handful of smaller ships - so my fleets with 5 dreadnoughts can destroy them without getting seriously hur

Sometimes time is more valuable than money. I recall a game where I had a fleet of "Lucky Rangers" and lots of cash in the bank so I upgraded the Rangers to state of the art Dreadnoughts at a cost of roughly 15,000bc each. Point is, I got that fleet 20-30 turns faster than I could have built it which is about the length of time it took the fleet to reduce my opponents navy from the strongest in the galaxy to the weakest. One more point on choice of weapon: Positronic torpedo 2 offers th

I played several games using all-X factories and it works, but not noticeably better than balanced. In the early game research is probably a little faster then balanced - late game I found it slower. Now I sometimes run all-x for the first few turns if my homeworld has bonus tiles that make me want to develop it as my manufacturing or research capital but otherwise, I play balanced. Specializing your colonies is important to get maximum value from projects like power plants and research

From a purely economic perspective in DA it costs 49025 RP to research Laser 1 through Doom Ray. 65775 RP to research Miniballs 1 through Black Hole Gun and 74150 RP to research Stinger 1 through Blackhole Eruptor. Put another way, you can be equipping your fleet with Doom Rays while your opponent is still researching Quantum Torpedo 3. While it is true that the best offense is the one your opponent has no defense against, it isn't always obvious who that opponent will be when you pick the bran

Click lookup serial numbers in Stardock Central and it will email you your serial numbers. Then you can copy and paste the serial number from the email. In Gold, the serial number for the game and the expansion are the same.

Play a few games at beginner difficulty level in small/medium maps. If you're unsure of something simply quicksave the game and try it. If it blows up in your face, reload the game using the quicksave file and try something else. Spend some time looking through the Wiki. Also read the strategy and AAR sections of this forum. When you master the AI and long for a human opponent check out Stardock's latest game Sins of a Solar Empire.

Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that you did not build a farm on each planet to increase population. Population impacts tax, tourism and trade revenue; it also impacts your influence. A farm, entertainment building and economy building on each planet should have you rolling in cash by mid game. I build a second entertainment building if population will exceed 16b. Try not to go over 20b or you will have approval problems. Build more economy buildings on high population planets because th

I set my initial tax rate at 49% and forget about it until mid game. I find that I can establish 12-15 colonies, build a couple of constructors and usually a freighter or two before I am forced to scale back production to roughly 40% to keep my economy in the black. By this point my tax base is expanding at a reasonable rate and I can advance the production slider by 2%-3% per turn, restoring full production within 20-25 turns. I do play with abundant anomalies and figure I'd have to scale back

Consider the situation of a fleet of (World War I) destroyers attacking a battleship. The battleship gets a 1 shot kill against the destroyers and their shells simply bounce off the battleship armor unless they survive to get close enough to launch their torpedoes. None of the weapons are particularly accurate or reliable so there is a reasonable chance that little damage gets done on either side. Fast forward 300 years and I suspect the issues of accuracy and reliability will be solved but the

Having fun should be the most important consideration in any game but in my experience a mixed fleet is weak and the AI will exploit that weakness. Small ships escorting large ships is a fairly recent innovation in naval warfare. The escorts are purpose designed for air or submarine defense because the capital ships are vulnerable to these threats. Combat in GalCiv II more closely resembles a slugfest between "ships of the line" from the Jutland era. Small ships have no business anywher

The enemy wins because he attacks your ships one at a time and is powerful enough that each shot kills one of your ships while your shots are partly deflected by his defenses causing minor damage. You run out of ships before he runs out of hit points.

Build queues are of questionable value in a game where you can (and should) update your ship designs as you research new technologies. Queuing ships for production means you would often be building older designs that don't make full use of the technology you have available. While the benefit of constant design updates is obvious for warships I can attest from experience that there are few things more frustrating than having the AI beat me to a colony or resource by a single turn because

Having recently passed through the phase you are in I can sympathize. Some things I learned during my first month with the game: - This is a strategy game - if your strategy isn't working discard the game and try again. If you find a map you really like save it early and replay it until you find the combination that works. - if the AI is too strong give yourself an extra bonus. use CTRL N to regenerate the map until you get a 300% or 700% manufacturing or research bonus tile on

If you create an image with ghost then Explorer - the same version or newer - can be used to extract files. Just run ghostexp.exe from Windows (no install required) and point it to your image.gho file. It will let you extract individual files and/or folders from the image.

If you want some mega events but not others you can simply quit the game without saving when an unwanted event occurs and reload from the autosave. You will lose some turns but, most of the time, the event will not recur.

You can also use Ghost Explorer to extract individual files/folders from your ghost image. If it is just a registry key system restore may work.

My mental image of a robot civilization is greatly influenced by James Hogan's novel "Code of the Lifemaker" - the only novel I know where robot evolution to sentience is central to the story and approached in a believably scientific way. All robots, including the Yor, have an environmental range where they can function - as do we. We and they can extend that range using protective coverings, vehicles and structures. I don't think it is reasonable to assume the Yor can simply redesign t

Without a magnetic field there would be no protection from solar radiation and that nuclear radiation is extremely hostile to life as we know it. The magnetic field does occasionally reverse - most recently the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal is believed to have occurred roughly 750,000 years ago. In classical theory (i.e. Einstein) the speed of light is a property of space and there is no way around it. That hasn't stopped science fiction authors (and game designers) from providing the techn

When you upgrade a ship class, give it a new name - i.e. Fighter Mk1, Fighter Mk2, etc... otherwise you'll end up with a mess! Some people use complex naming conventions that include attack/defense/speed ratings for the class.