Arcanum3000

I'd say defenses are crucial as soon as you're dealing with enemy hulls large enough that you can't one-shot them, or when you're dealing with fleets of smaller ships. (This assumes approximate technological parity between the sides, or an advantage on your side. The Dread Lords and similar situations of overwhelming firepower are a special case.) The reason is, if you can't wipe out their ships almost immediately, they're going to get to

I had the ground combat draw thing happen to me last night. The weird thing is that a couple turns later (before I had a chance to reinvade), the planet suddenly had a population of 16000 and the red skull-and-crossbones symbol.

Empire-wide social production bonuses not being applied is a known problem due to be fixed in the next patch. No idea about the rest of it.

Huh, I've seen the radius of my bases increase from 1.1 sectors to 1.5 sectors. I don't have the slightest clue what caused it, though.

I don't think you actually win unless you survive for 10 or 20 turns.

I try to have an economy starbase covering any planets I plan on doing ship production on, and a military base on as close to every planet as possible. Protip: Upgrade starbase weapons and armor before you install other modules. You never know when you'll find yourself at war with someone.

I've noticed that most of the time if you do an "upgrade all" on a bunch of your ships, for some reason all the idle shipyards in your empire will suddenly start producing the ship you upgraded to. Really annoying, especially when you forget the bug is there.

Playing a game last night, I hit a weird bug. I tried to invade a planet, and through a quirk of luck, both the attackers and defenders lost when I skipped the battle animation. So there ended up being a planet still owned by the Arceans with no population. I don't know whether that's a bug or not. I'm pretty sure what happened next is a bug, though. After a turn or two, the planet suddenly has 16,000 population. No explanation in the e

2) The AI does not discriminate who it trades with. It's a single player game so effectively sweetheart/sweetsour deals = rand()%ulNumberofPlayers That may be the case for the "special" deals, but reading the log file it looks like the AI gleefully swap techs that they would never consider offering th

Nah, the mail system is actually pretty reliable, and "fast enough" in most cases. My box was mailed on the 27th, and it got here today. If it's anything of value, though, it's worth spending the dollar or two for insurance, and possibly tracking as well.

The only way I can think of to trick the AI would be to have one or more sacrificial ships with no defenses and some moderate attack power, and one or more ships with higher attack power and much higher defense and hit points. The idea being the AI kills off the weaker ships while the heavy ship pounds the AI into the ground. Probably not all that effective, really. That's a lot of production for little purpose other than to die.

Doh, never mind. It just arrived today via Priority Mail.

I don't usually grab it first. I've got better planets to colonize! I'll get to it eventually, or the AI will. It's not very useful anyway, so no skin off my nose. I'll just conquer it later.

I ordered a combined download and boxed copy of GalCiv2 on Friday. I've been enjoying the game from the digital download, but I'm wondering how the box is shipped, and when it usually goes out. I haven't gotten an email or anything saying it was shipped, or how it was shipped, or anything. Can anyone from Stardock shed some light on this?

While effective, that requires a significant lead in technology to pull off, I think.

Miniaturization is nice for cramming a little bit more on what you've got. If you need lots more firepower and especially durability, bigger hulls are the way to go.

I agree with Star Pilot. There's nothing wrong with using the cargo hull as a base for a sensor ship. The whole point of the "cargo" hull is that it has lots of space to put stuff, but no durability whatsoever. That's perfect for a radar ship.

A slightly annoying bug I've encountered: If you select a ship in space and hit the upgrade button, one of the options in the upgrade window will be the ship's current class, and it will have a cost associated with upgrading the ship. Not a show-stopper by any means, but still annoying.

Any chance of getting an autoupgrade option in a future patch? Just a relatively simple thing where if you're upgrading a design, the computer will automatically equip the new design with the best of all the module types it currently has. Engines, weapons, armor, etc., will all get upgraded to the best you have available. If it goes over the space limitations, it's up to the player to fix it otherwise it won't save the design. Alternative

I posted this earlier today, but it didn't go where I intended (the Bug Reports subforum), the post got generally screwed up, and I'm not sure if it was seen, so I'm trying again. When playing the game in full-screen mode on a multimonitor system the mouse cursor is not "locked" within the game. That is, you can move it outside the gameplay area on one monitor on to your computer desktop on the other monitor. If you move the mouse back into

When playing the game in full-screen mode on a multimonitor system the mouse cursor is not "locked" within the game. That is, you can move it outside the gameplay area on one monitor on to your computer desktop on the other monitor. If you move the mouse back into the game, you're fine, but if you click outside the game, the game gets minimized with an effect similar to ALT-TABing. When you switch back to the game after accidentally switch

If I go and order a boxed copy the game via Stardock today, will I still get all the Collectors Edition shinyness? The shiny box and the paper tech three and the ship jewelry and whatnot?

I bought GalCiv waaaay back near when it was first released, and enjoyed it a lot at first. After a while, though, I started getting frustrated with how dramatically the gameplay dynamic would change after some of the patches. To avoid that kind of frustration, I was wondering if GalCiv2 (in a patch, of course) could implement some kind of "classic mode" or a set of rule options to tweak. In "classic mode" the game would be set to essentia