InfernalRS

I took a somewhat different approach to this problem- Instead of designing ships per se, I created empty hulls, just the hull and whatever extra components I wanted. I used these basic ship templates to produce all my "production" ships, since they would appear the moment the hull became available, regardless of my weapons or defense technology. Adding the functional parts takes far less time than creating the look I wanted, so having the look ready to go with no tech requirements

Team is a level beyond Allied, and it can only be set before the game starts . It can never be broken. If you're seeing it, you're probably in the campaign.

This is why you want to keep bribing the AI to go to war, and get started on it early. They won't be making alliances if they're too busy smashing each other's faces.

[quote who="Myrkator" reply="5" id="2034738"] I just want to be sure that the driver isn't going to foul up my laptop.[/quote] That's a good concern to have, even with normal updates. Create a system restore point just before you install the driver, install it, and try out a few programs that use it (GCII being one of them). If it works, hurray! If not, well, you've got a restore point to revert to.

Don't underestimate the Cargo hull. It has something few other ships have at the very start- space. You can load one up with a ton of cannons to jump-start your military progress, attach a bunch of engines to get absurd speed for a scout/explorer, or put a popgun on your speed design to make an exceptional early-game interceptor. Were it not for the cargo hull, the DL campaign would have been a lot tougher for me.

Zoom out to tactical level, and the lag goes away. I've seen such ship bursts before, but I've never been the recipient. The ships themselves are nearly useless, really only serving to be a major pain to chew through, or a potential hazard to my precious resource starbases. Were I to get one, I'd more than likely just decomission the lot for cash, and rush-buy a good ship. It really depends on the point when it happens.

If you're building up hefty sums of money for the AI to demand, your economy is out of balance. I usually have an operational deficit for a long, long time, running my spending off of the fruits of my exploration ships. Yes, ships, plural. I try to get a bunch of them cranked out even as the colony rush is still underway, simply because getting those anomalies is that important. Rush-buying them is acceptable, as they can easily pay for themselves several time

Ah, the popularity graph. It is, indeed, a measure of how well liked each race is. If you have a mostly peaceful galaxy, then bribe a whole bunch of races to go to war, you can see their popularity drop like a rock while yours skyrockets. It basically assigns a value to each relation level (At War, Hostile, Wary, Cool, Neutral, Warm, Friendly, Close, Ally, Team) and totals them up to get the popularity values. I don't know if minors are included in the calculation, or

Tarnation, I heard my PM doohicky ringing but by the time I got to hobble over you had already gone and joined us! I'm a bit green around the gills myself, but I suppose I can welcome you just as well as any other good fellow. Always good to have another southern gentleman about, as my paticular bit of country would have preferred to stay with the yankees. We spent most of the war giving both sides a sound thrashing, and we were dang good at it! We're not ca

Yeah, this is actually a feature. Any ships you have on autopilot will start moving when you click on the turn button, and if one of them reaches their destination with movement to spare, the game will pause so you can use that extra movement. Just click on "Find" to center on the ship in question and give it whatever orders you want. You can even go into your various management screens and do more adjustments, as your turn isn't over until all ships are done moving.

Population growth is tied to both your population growth bonus, and more importantly your moral. If moral is very low, your population won't grow, and if you get it up to 100% for that planet it can double growth, or more. Read the GalCiv Wiki Population Entry for the full number set.

You've found what I call the diplomatic tech trade "cap". There are certain points where the AI won't offer more credits for a tech, though this calculation is dependent on the tech in question, how much cash the other race has, and your diplomatic ability relative to theirs. I believe it works in a fashion similar to the moral penalty for raising taxes, and the requirements to push a value higher have sudden "jumps" where a 1 bc change tacks on a huge penalty. 347bc seems t

Courage has no effect on land battles- it gets used for ship combat from what debug.err dissections have revealed. As to what, exactly, that effect is, nobody's quite sure.

The Timeline screen in the Civilization manager will keep a count of exactly how many turns have passed. Each turn is one week, so the math is fairly simple. It does sound like you're far enough in to start finding Rangers, and it also sounds like nobody's been researching very well. Treat those rangers like Dread Lords, and don't try to outfight them- just outrun them until you can get some decent weapons researched. Better yet, bribe the AIs with the rangers to go to

Sounds normal-ish. Even if you stack up ships, every ship is still displayed at the same level of detail you see in the ship designer (or at maximum zoom). This gets very resource intensive once your numbers start building up. I find a good medium is to adjust the tactical zoom level down, and just zoom in further to keep seeing fully detailed ships. Tactical view lets me get the big picture, the minimap keeps me alerted to what's going on where, and the norma

I'll have to second Eyes of the Universe. It's just plain handy for locating all those wayward enemy fleets, not to mention that it effectively turns every ship into a maxed scout. Close behind it, at least for the DL campaign, would be the Galactic Privateer because it really helps the cash flow, plus it's funny to watch the Dread Lords muck about trying to blow up invincible freighters.

It may be worth doing a bit of testing to see if the MV is fully functioning for empires now- the join issue I had has successfully resolved, and the score for the Gerontocracy changed so something updated. Could a few more experienced fellows confirm if things are functioning again?

And the good Mr. Marquis pulls through to get my Email info up-to-date. Not only that, but some fellow finally managed to get the paperwork filed, so I am now proudly an official member of the Gerontocracy!

I find the art style rather appealing and well-suited to the subject matter. It actualy makes me want to try the game, simply because it looks so whimsy- it looks like the sort of world that Alice fell into after ducking into the rabbit hole, and I always did want to play in Wonderland.

[quote who="Chibiabos" reply="12" id="2012443"]Ummm, if the labs are 8rp and the RCC is 10.5, aren't you ahed with the RCC?[/quote] That's the base production, not what you actually get from a lab on the planet, which is 16.8 after the already-existing bonuses. The key is that it's a cost of opportunity situation- you can't get everything due to a limited number of land plots, so you need to balance your gains such that you get as much as possible out of the planet. If we

Actually, the "share starbases with allies" idea is already in the game- it pops up randomly as a U.P. issue, though there's no option for "renting" out assistance. It's a straight share/don't share vote, and obviously doesn't apply to Influence starbases (or rather, they have no options that would contribute to anything besides their influence generation, which can't be given to any other race).

Well, I think I've figured out this crazy contraption. The empire is set to Invite-only, by accident or design, at the moment, correct? If so, my invite got black-holed because the Email provider I used back when I made this account suspended all Email services quite some time ago. Time to finally bother the fellows about that at [email protected]...

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="5" id="2009034"]Beg pardon, but I just gotta say that this one still seems like a bug to me. I never do it because it just *feels* wrong. If your troops don't have the tech to do even 50% physical work on the world, just how are they supposed to be able to kill all those defenders? Seems like at the minimum, invading a world without the right enviro tech should give you a very large combat penalty.[/quote] There are methods, but these ideas ar

However, that high taxation still comes at a price, in population growth. With an Imperial system, that's the main reason you have for not jacking taxes all the way to 100%, as you'll start losing 10% of your population per planet per turn once plantary moral drops below 20%. There's also a risk of a revolution event wresting away several of your unhappy planets. This caught the AI in one of my last games, and it nearly chopped the Dengrin in half, much to my amusement.

Hmm, maybe it's just my eyes, but looking over the Metaverse I still don't see myself as officially in. My join request is still shown as pending from the empire stats, and my account info screen still shows me as unaffiliated. Is there something I need to poke at with my walking stick?