dcmonkey

Disclaimer: I have never used the original GalCiv II engine. I played the campaign in the Twilight engine. "An Unexpected Visitor" was the first map I ever played. I took your 'single planet' statement a bit too literally, so I had assumed you had wasted your colony ship. Personally I colonized just like you and wondered basically the same thing. I took the time to power through select parts of the limited tech tree and figure out the game a bit before trading some of those advances for

[quote]5) Declare war on people. They only get ships upon declaring war on races (note, not getting declared war ON, you must be the aggressor).[/quote] Are you sure about this? I just declared war on the Drengin, and they certainly had a fleet of Super Dominators arrive at their planet the next turn.

In the last game I played, I noticed some strange behavior involving trades. 1) Toxic Atmosphere Reducer and Advanced Toxic Atmosphere Reducer. I was playing as the Korath. In the beginning of the game, I noticed that no AI would even give me a single BC for these techs. That made sense as there were no toxic planets on the map. However, after I conquered most of the map with spore ships, the AI was still unwilling to give anything for these techs. I finally reduced the map to one

Everyone starts out with one planet. You are the only race that starts with a colony ship. How did you get beat so bad at colonization? At this point, you can either attempt to trade for a planet from the Altarians or just launch an assault from your homeworld since there's unlimited range on that map.