Murgatroyd

This can also help keep other more populated planets from flipping your new empty planet. Very good when a minor quits and gives you its last planet next to a very high influence AI player. It can also help you sneak low pop planets away from allied AI when you research techs that let you claim toxic, water, etc. type planets. Plant an extra farm on a high pop planet and use the planet's big population explosion to load a colony ship every few turns. Keep multiple ships going back

Yeah that was the one. I was confused whether that would be something like a 5% loss to diplomacy, but it sounds more like what you see in that "report" section of the foreign relations tab, where you see the +'s and -'s that make your standing with a particular race go up or down, like trade, alignment, etc. Either way, it seemed like a very drastic result for doing something neutral, which you'd think would have the least result of all.

I definitely keep my eye even more keenly on my surveyor now and switch to the research project with the longest build time when I see a spaceship graveyard coming up. By the way, I got a Lucky Ranger the other day when doing very little military production. But that was in a game I won by doing next to zero military production all game, winning mostly through diplomacy and influence. The other game where I was building military like crazy in a prolonged scramble to fight back the Dre

I have seen in a few of my ToA 1.96 games(new to the game, haven't really played that many yet!) that the arrows on the end of the sliders in the window you use to adjust military, production, and research for your civ can get stuck. If I recall correctly, it has usually been the middle slider, the production one. Anyway, the arrows on either side of the afflicted slider darken, as if they are greyed out, and you can no longer move the slider either by clicking the arrows or

Agreed that these things are ridiculously powerful. I don't mind a bit of randomness, but randomness should not be game-changing in a strategy game. It's like the difference between playing poker and roulette. A little bit of gamble is fine, but too much and the gamble becomes the essence of the game itself.

This happens to me too once in a while, though I only play medium and large maps. I think it is due to various problems though. Sometimes it's because my wireless mouse is sending messages to the screen, which try to pop up over other windows and sometimes do and sometimes don't succeed. Even with fresh batteries once in a while it will send a message about a bad connection or bad batteries, whatever. Grrr. Other times I wouldn't be surprised if it's something stupid like Quicktime

Yep ship movement makes it happen for me too. Your surveyors and miners are generally the ships most likely to be moving, so check them first. This used to frustrate me and worry me a good bit, but now I find that clicking on a ship and then on its destination works every time. Still a bug, but not one to worry about.

I recently got an event in which one of the choices would result in a loss of prestige. I did a search on the strat, galciv2, and twilight or the arnor forums here for prestige and it came up blank. So I thought I'd come here. I'd like to know why I'd choose or not choose prestige, so I guess that's a strat question as well as a definition question. I think the event gave me something like -5 or -10 to prestige, probably the former. If it's anything like influence

So maybe this is totally wrong, but anyway, I notice I tend to make my lucky research breakthroughs -- not counting finding anomalies -- when I am concentrating mostly on research, and get Lucky Rangers or Precursor Rangers when my production is heavily tilted toward military.

The thing is, to get to planetary improvement, you have to do artificial gravity which gives +5 to population growth too. And I can do that in I think 5 or 6 turns from the start of the game. Would perhaps the ideal sequence then be Artificial Gravity, Galactic Warfare, and then Space Militarization? That way you are racing for both improvements to population growth. Cost is 50 + 100 + 200.

By which I mean, the tech "Planetary Improvements," not just improving your planet, of course. As opposed to researching space warfare etc to get to recruiting centers.

That's interesting. The ones I've gotten so far have been quite fast, at least by my standards. I'm only up to warp drive though.

What do you guys think about building planetary improvements first? That leads to +10 in extra production, military, and research right away. And especially right in the beginning, you need all of them and pretty badly. Is the recruiting center's boost to population -- which could amount to, what, 20% improved growth rate of almost NO population in the first place on a new planet, really a better bargain?

Well the scaling is still weird regardless of resolution. I found it confusing and a bit irritating and frustrating that I can't read full descriptions and text at the resolution I've been playing at. It never occurred to me that the text was formatted only to display in full at higher resolutions; I thought it was just a more ordinary bug or programmer's laziness. Now I'll go home and try to up my screen rez. No idea what I'm running at now.

I got a precursor ranger for the first time yesterday (newbie here) and it had 90 hitpoints. Nice, but better for wiping out mines and planets with one or two small ships circling them than anything else at the time. My drengin enemy was throwing battleships and such at me by that point, and I needed something with ridiculous armor and/or hitpoints by then. Luckily I have 4 Lucky Rangers, one with over 200 hitpoints from so many kills and a couple almost at 200. They get wiped out by

I'm a newbie too, and not too good yet (only played challenging twice) but I have gotten more than 500 on just medium maps. So I wonder why you haven't passed that much. Did you put more than one stock market or racial equivalent on each planet, or designate any as an economic capital? Here are some other newbie thoughts: Do you keep your slider very high on ships much? That will cripple your initial momentum, it seems to me. I like that productivity directed to my initial

Stayed up until 3 a.m. playing last night. Doh!

Nice reviews, better than the usual fare.

Hi all, I'm a newbie and only just finished by second game in the Dreadlords campaign yesterday; haven't played any sandbox games yet. I flipped an enemy planet yesterday with an influence starbase that I piled construction ships into until I used up everything from the main mining line. It was great having good morale again! Mine was ridiculously low, I guess because of high population. Anyway, soon my enemy, the Drengin, came calling and was defeated, and the AI didn't seem to re

NOTE: There is a sticky here that looks like it talks about this issue, but the question is answered with a dead link, so I'm stuck. I've done almost an hour of searching but now I've just swallowed my pride and decided to ask. Anyway, Hi, I'm new here and just bought all Dreadlords, DA and Twilight of the Arnor. The first two as the gold edition box from a store. Twilight of course as a download from Stardock Central. I dowloaded Twilight and all the rece