drank

Build less farms. Morale falls off VERY quickly above 16B in populations. As you saw, the effectiveness of all morale buildings and your global +morale bonus is reduced for high populations - the wiki has more information if you're interested in the formula. Typically you want your planets to be either 16B (a homeworld), 15B (a colony + farm), or 8B (a colony without farm). It's not cost-effective to get much bigger than that. You will need morale buildings on the 15B-16B world

Go to the planet screen, click the Details button, then click the Governor button. This allows you to turn off auto-upgrades for that planet. Now repeat dozens and dozens of times for all your colonies! AFAIK, there's no way to do this across the board.

Personally, I really like the layout of the tight clusters immense galaxies. You almost certainly have some parts of the galaxy that are physically isolated until a high level of Range is researched. This definitely gives the game a more epic feel, and an effort to invade someone on the other side of the galaxy becomes an appropriately massive undertaking.

The whole tech-trading system is close to an exploit! Pick Terrans, pick Diplomacy bonus, tech whore for tens of thousands of BCs. It's pretty much that simple. Some of the unique racial techs ARE marked as not tradeable. IMO, this list should be greatly expanded. Or just prevent you from trading unique techs altogether. It really detracts from the uniqueness of each race when everybody in the galaxy is building Agony Arenas as their morale buildings. Turning tech trading off d

[quote] 2. When right clicking to set a destination for a ship, if it is 1.4 turns to get there, then at the end of the following turn it should select the ship and give me the remaining .6 turns with of movement. Right now almost every time I move I have to change the movement again so I don't waste my movement. [/quote] I would like to second this part of the OP. This is an annoying bit of micro-management, and I'd love it if the expansion got rid of it.

GalCiv I's tech tree was far superior. Techs were meaningful and had more than one requisite. In GalCiv II, techs are repetitive and boring. I much prefered GalCiv I's tech tree because it was a fun part of the game. But you do need the repetition in order to set the scene for the 3 weapon/defence types. The three categories idea adds tremendous depth to ship designing and combat which i feel is well worth it.

IMO, one sign of a good strategy game is that there is no "one way" to do anything. In this case, I have an entirely different opening strat that works great for me and I'm sure there are other ways to kick off a new game successfully too. Well, then I guess we have to conclude that GC2 isn't a very good strategy game. Both Iztok and Wargazmo agree on early game strategy - you need to beat the AI to as many colonies as possible without tanking

I've certainly voted with my gameplay - I probably spent 10x as many hours playing GC1 as GC2. I'd basically say it comes down to whether graphics matter to you or not. If you like the idea of designing your own starships, and seeing 3D rendered planets and fleet battles, then unquestionably you should play GC2. Me, I play ever game zoomed out to the max. I turn off the fleet combat viewer and I have no idea what my ships look like. I think you can make a pretty good case that

Apparently this is a "feature" intended to penalize the player when they accumulate a large treasury. I've seen a further crippling of income at 20,000bc. I have no idea if there are other breakpoints as well. The bottom line is that you shouldn't save up that much money, unless you're going to need it in the immediate future. The best solution is to buy/build more factories so that your spending better matches your income.

It took me a while to figure this out, as the UI is pretty obscure. When you click on a planet, there is a small icon of 9 arrows in the ship launch area. Click it, and it will let you pick which direction ships from that planet launch. I think there's also something in the options screen to let you choose every time you launch a ship. But anyhow, once you decipher the UI, it seems to work fine.

Second, how exactly do morale buildings work? A VRC, for example, adds "40%" to the morale. But 40% of what? Clearly it doesn't add 40% to the actual approval rating. It adds 40% of the planet's "base morale" to the planet's morale. You can figure out base morale as 100% - "?? from population" in the approval tooltip. For example, if the tool tip says "-60% from population" that means your base morale is 40% and a VRC will add +16% to the p

In addition to the farm tiles, I generally ignore influence tiles too. It's very rare that I'll build an influence building to begin with. I always use manufacturing bonus tiles. Generally I'll use the research ones too, even if the planet is otherwise an all-mfg world. The morale ones get used if I'm planning to build a morale building on that planet, but not otherwise.

It's not hypothetical. That is how I play. I don't build economy worlds at all, but I do build an Economy Capital; and finding a planet with a farm bonus tile + at least 1 approval bonus tile happens all the time. Usually I can find one with 2 approval squares. I build a basic farm on the 300% food bonus, Zero G's on the approval bonus squares, and an Econ capital. That's it. I don't even bother researching VRC. No more tiles get wasted on markets or

1 300% food tile + 2 100% approval tiles = your Economy Capital. Enough said. It seems like it ought to work that way, but the math just doesn't work out. 2 VRCs x 100% will give you a morale of 22% on any world with population > 25B (thanks Iztok for the updated DA numbers). If you want another 14% morale, so that your population will grow, you'd need either 4 additional VRCs or a total racial ability of around +330%. <

From what I've seen, that's not really an issue anyway. The AI seems to totally disregard any bonus tiles that are on a planet. The only ones that it seems to get right on a consistent basis are the production ones. I don't believe I've ever see it build a Farm on a food tile, it usually ends up being a Factory or Lab. I don't know for sure that I've seen it use a farm bonus, but I seem to recall seeing it at least once. It's also possible that

However, I've used a single 300% food tile on a class 12-16 planet, using about 5+ tiles for morale buildings and the remainder for stock markets. I haven't done the math on it, per se, but the planet didn't have serious morale problems. Keep in mind the 'Naturally Joyus' morale bonus, morale trade goods and maybe a morale resource. Well, that answers the question of what it "costs" to use the food bonus tile - the extra morale buildings mean

1. Have you considered that the AI traded research treaties to each other, so they were no longer available to you? You can see them on the Treaties tab of the diplomacy screen. In my experience, they don't wait very long to trade their treaties. 2. Minor races start with all the tech known by the player (or maybe the top tech race). It's supposed to make them "competitive" when they appear very late in the game. In practice, since they appear with no military and no production cap

I dunno...I do use these 300% tiles--not all the time mind you--but I do use them. What's an example of a scenario where you'd use one? The math for morale and taxes is on the wiki, and it seems like a pretty strong argument against them. Suppose you have a 300% farm bonus on your homeworld, and you've researched 1 level of farming techs. If you build on a regular square, you've a max population of 17B. Your max taxes are

Count me in the group that says the 300% food tiles should just be taken out. There's basically never a situation where you should use them - you can get plenty of population for transports with 1 farm, 100% morale and a fertility clinic. They just serve to mess up the economy of players who don't yet know to avoid them. And presumably they make the AI play worse, since I seem to regularly invade planets with tons of farms and such low morale that they'll never grow to use the food.

I'll usually start with one of the Stardock ships and upgrade it. The class then gets a roman numeral to indicate what version it is. So my first warship is almost always a Defender I class. If I later make a more powerful ship on a small hull, it becomes a Defender II and so on. The numeral makes it easy to see what you've not yet upgraded, or to guage the strength of a particular battle group. If I make several versions of a ship, usually ones with the same weapons but a

I'd certainly buy another expansion. Dark Avatar isn't perfect by any means, but IMO it's a solid improvement on the original game. I would definitely pay for another expansion or two of comparable scope. At the top of my list... 1) Redesign diplomacy, UP resolutions, tech trading (and maybe alignment) to provide a much richer diplomatic game. These areas are still pretty much as they were in GC1 and are long overdue for some updating. 2) Redesign government

It seems like there are two independent questions here: 1) Is tech trading "fair"? That is, will the AI accept similar deals from the player and from another AI. I think Hydro 's post clearly says the answer is NO. The player can't get Barren World Colonization in exchange for Xeno Factory Construction no matter how much diplomacy they have! 2) Is tech trading/tech whoring possible as a strategy? My experience with 1.5X says that it still is. You have to have a big d

I've never gotten the pirates or the peacekeepers. It seems like I get the Dread Lords and the Plague every single game. I did get the Jagged Knife once. It would be interesting to see what the triggering conditions are for the events. It seems like they do indeed track people's playstyles.

In general, I don't find them very useful on larger maps. You'd need to have some particular point in space that (a) sees a lot of combat and (b) is contested for a long time to make it worth piling on all those constructors. Generally, taking the fight to the enemy, and rolling forward as you take his planets, is a much stronger military strategy. Use the credits you'd spend on constructors and modules to make more ships! (I'm not saying I'd never use one, but I'd try mighty

I found the 1.5X AI to be unreasonable about trading colonization techs and engine tech, but otherwise a workable tech trading partner. Basically, the AI seems to either value the colonization techs at a fortune (if it owns planets of that type, or it sees uncolonized planets of the type) or at nothing (if all the planets of the type are colonized).