CityMan

[quote]I'm fairly disappointed in my gig map game. I switched from my normal all factory buildup to an all econ buildup after the failed upgrade attempt. My military only reached 6.9 mil by Dec 2228, a tad short of my goal of 7 mil. That's significant, because it'll dictate how the rest of the game progresses.[/quote] Can I just say that you're crazy! How in the world do you maintain interest and sanity when faced with so much? Heh, my military is like 800 in my current game according

Heh, maybe I'm just getting old and my memory is shot...or I just drank too much in college. I immediately forget planet names and before I started naming them properly, I'd waste so much time clicking, zooming in, moving around the map and scanning hopelessly for one particular planet. Then do it again and again as I forget it a couple turns later. Maybe one difference is that I play almost exclusively in tactical view. Tactical view doesn't have planet names. It looks plain...just

Hmm...The AI isn't very good at combat, is it? In my current game, the majority of the Yor's strength is garrisoned around random planets, that I can pick off one by one. It rarely builds the fleet manager, so a big stack of much weaker fighters can take any planet. If it created fleets with most of its ships, it could easily overrun me. Instead, it seems happy to occasionally send one fleet with a transport and 2 not so strong escorts. I see it coming a mile away since I have Eye o

[quote]If you have a tech disadvantage, you can try planet exchanges. Take an enemy planet, sell it back to them, retake, etc. Repeat until you steal their high end techs.[/quote] I know that people use tactics like this in other games as well, so it's not uncommon. But it feels kinda unfair to me. I guess it still costs a transport and soldiers, but still... Heh, I don't know. I'm still playing and surviving okay. I did make a major weapon upgrade when I took some of the Y

Scintor, that is a good point about research speed. It does seem to happen very quickly, although there are plenty of times when I'm playing when I wish my research went faster. Ship designs go obsolete very quickly. In my current war, I started with small ships with 2 attack power. Now I'm using medium ships with 40 attack power. After about 12 turns, I'll be able to build ships with over 100 attack power. This is at normal tech speed and I'm not even research focused right now.<b

For bigger maps, it really does help to divide up the galaxy into areas. Let's say area 'a' is the deepest in your region. You know that enemy ships aren't going to reach it easily, so you can plan according. Another big help is when building constructors. If a base is in area 'a', then it's much more efficient for planets in the same area to feed that base. You can also build cheaper constructors because it doesn't have to travel very far. You can build tiny ships with a constru

Good point. Strike that piece of advice from my first post. It's probably better to learn how to play without MCC, because we don't know what's going to happen to it. Hopefully if it does get changed, it will be to something useful.

Few random pointers: 1) Learning how to manage your economy is perhaps one of the most important aspects. Morale is very much related to this issue, especially since morale determines population growth and population = money. 100% morale on a planet is double growth. 2) Tech to Xeno Ethics earlier and pick evil. The mind control center and artificial slave center are really helpful. The mind control center is so helpful for some people, they will buy or lease it in order to

I usually have to limit the number of races in a game because otherwise every screen is a mishmash of randomness. I try to reassign colors as very distinct primary colors. Bright yellow, bright red, bright blue, etc. That helps a lot, especially on the minimap. I always play in tactical view, even for small and tiny games, so having identifiable colors is even more important. Minor races can screw me up, but they rarely have ships flying around, so it isn't too bad. Until

I've been look at some other players' posted save games and I was surprised to see standard planet names and non descript ship names. For a massive game, I don't know how people keep track of the dozens if not hundreds of ships and planets if you don't rename them. For planets, I usually group them by location. Then rename them by purpose and planet type. So an example could be 'a Nestor II R rad'. The 'a' refers to the group of stars at a certain location.&nbs

[quote]There are many, many other approaches if that one doesn't appeal to you.[/quote] Wyndstar, I would love to hear what some of these 'many, many' approaches are. I've been tackling suicidal games lately and the only chance I have so far is using strategies I've learned from you. :) I'm in the midst of a medium/common map suicidal. The Yor had an awesome starting location and grabbed more planets than everyone else combined. I killed a couple of the AI, but the AI tech s

If I have enough credits to dump a load of spies on an AI, that probably means my economy is so good that I practically won the game already. Otherwise, I'd rather spend the credits on military/infrastructure that will definitely help me win.

Heh, what the heck is this forum spam? As for the OP, you might as well just turn on cheats because the game is going to be that easy. Well, not if it's a metaverse game though, heh. You can just have fun experimenting with different strategies or something. I once thought it would be fun to see what the highest possible research output could be from one planet. I cheated the planet to PQ36, then got a lucky event that boosted it to PQ52 or something ridiculous like that. I

I'm sure I'm not the only person around with some color blindness. I've been staring at the treaties tab of the foreign policy window for a while now trying to figure out what color all those lines are. The timeline is usually also impossible for me to tell which line is which race. I try to make my own color stand out and I only use it to see how I rank to the AI. Is there another way to tell what races have treaties, alliances, trade, etc? Especially since th

Heh, I did the same thing myself in multiple games until I really paid attention and realized the freighters just crawl along once established. For military arrays and for crazy effective planets, you can build 4 bases in the same sector. You can usually built 4 bases in many of the surrounding sectors as well. You can get some crazy research outputs if you stack economic bases heavily around a really high PQ research specialized planet. Just be careful of the costs. I'm pretty sure

In the short time I've been active on these forums, I've found a lot of really helpful and insightful posts. Everyone is really friendly and more than willing to help. Unfortunately, the information is all over the place. All of the best threads I read were linked to me by someone else. Is there such a thing as a compiled list of helpful threads/posts? I'm sure many people have a bunch of bookmarks to great AAR's and strategy posts. Unfortunately

I think the problem is that the chance of stealing a tech is extremely low. It's so low that it's really surprising when it happens. I played a game a few days ago where I was messing around. I had basically won the game already and left the final AI with a couple planets. I plastered every single tile with a spy. I had more than a dozen spies and I didn't steal any tech. I had a bunch of spies on both planets until they finally culture flipped. The AI was far ahead of me in the t

BTW, I think 'borrowing' some ideas from the Civilization series would be a good idea. One big change is to make 'tech brokering' an option at the beginning of the game. That means you cannot trade a tech that you did not research yourself. That would significantly limit the player's ability to gain huge chunks of the tech trees by trade alone.

[quote]I'm pretty happy with the way trade works now.[/quote] Zenicetus, at Tough, the AI trading feels pretty fair. I used to play Tough until a couple weeks ago. I played mostly Terran, and with Super Diplomat, you can get some really nice tech trades against diplomacy poor races like Drengin. The problem lies as you go up in difficulty. At Suicidal, you might get 100bc for a tech by selling it to one AI. Let's say you needed that same 100bc tech, you'd have to play 1000b

Thanks for the history explanation. Makes sense now why the trade system is the way it is. Unfortunately, the developers went way too far and 'nerfed' the functionality to near uselessness. I understand the need to challenge great experienced players, but that shouldn't mean the lesser skilled players should suffer. Like I said, even at painful, the AI is annoying about trades. Painful is a difficulty level that is within reach of more casual players. Oh well. Hope

Why was the trading system made to be so useless at higher levels? There are times when you can manage to do something via diplomacy like starting and ending wars and occasionally trading for research treaties. But everything else is so obscenely overpriced/underpriced that it just feels like a horribly broken aspect of the game. I just played a few Painful matches because I felt like finally posting something to the Metaverse. In Painful, the AI is already annoying in trade. It's e

I have another shortcut in my start menu under 'Stardock Games' -> 'Galactic Civilization II'. It was automatically added when I installed/updated through Stardock Central.

I recently started playing metaverse games. How do I get my metaverse ranking/info to show in my signature? Is there a setting somewhere? You can see my metaverse games if you click my profile, so I assume my forum account is properly linked to my metaverse and game accounts?

The OP doesn't want to trade the planet. He was just making an example to show how screwed up the trading system can be. The trading system is the one thing that I want fixed more than anything else. I have a feeling that the trading system is intentionally biased against the player to make the game more difficult. Maybe it's made to limit the amount of money/tech a player can gain by trading the same tech to every race. But that's how it is supposed to work. The ne

[quote]CityMan, you're not the only one around here who finds the tech trade system frustrating (or who feels awkward trying the All-X thing; I bet you might not like putting spies on farms, either).I don't know how much room for change the game will have left after TA, but Brad is on record saying that they intend to do another series of updates. If past patterns hold true, it isn't beyond hope that tech trading might get closer to "reasonable."[/quote] Just found out about the spies o