win every time

How about an immobile starbase? (a ship with movement 0)
The starbase would have some basic combat value, and would be comparable cheap (no FTL drive required).
To make a blitz even less likely to succeed, have every home system contain one at the beginning.
At least in small galaxies the enemy won't have defense ships in time to prevent a blitz. And even in the biggest setting, you can take out at least two computer player without trouble.
btw, does a ship require an attack value to prevent invasion? Else a colony ship (defense 1) could be used to defend the system, at least until combat ships become available.

well, even taking the time to research phasers and build a fighter, I was still able to blitz them.

well I went into galactic size and tried the same trick. looks like I could win if my transports would move. they are all stuck

I'm playing Size:Gigantic currently and my ships move...if you don't focus on the bugs I've encountered.

Does you debug.err say why they won't move?

Realistically the solution is to just make it so that getting to transports requires a bit more to do.

The AI also just needs to get smarter about defending itself sooner.

No, there is no hint why the ships won't move. I've had that happen a few times, too.

Well, I don't want to make the game more complicate, but what about adding some kind of ground combat value? Is you can build a colony ship, you should be able to build a troop ship. So moving that tech back, is unrealistic.
Every system would be assigned a combat value, based on population and weapon technology, and ever transporrter would have an invasion value, based on weapon tech. This would make invasions more costly, because you'd require more than one transporter, unless you have a massive weapon tech lead, or it is a very small colony. I'm not sure how that would effect the playability, but it would certainly make military conquest harder and more expensive.

I like it. say 1 transport per 2000 population. large colonies would take like 10 ships, but at the start it would take atleast 2 for an established colony. this can;t happen though until we have the ability to group ships.

Well, we still have the situation, that the invasion can fail. This wouldn't mean that they can take the same punishment again next month (It takes time to train/equip soldiers). So an invasion attempt would reduce the defensive value of the planet for say ten month (each month 10% of the lost strength regenerates), so that you could conquere the system through multiple turns.

I should mention that GalCiv will have ground combat.

Here's how it will work:

When you create a transport, you have to transfer some of YOUR population onto the transport and take it to where you're invading.

When they arrive, a ground combat dialog pops up and gives you some stats on how the battle is going. There are modifiers such as what ground defense improvements have been made and the overall techynology difference between the inhabitants and the invaders.

Sorry for not mentioning that, it was in the oS/2 version and I keep thinking eveyrone here played that one.

Yeah, a lot of us are relative newbies. I've never *used* OS/2, let alone the game, so I don't know anything about, say, "Detail dialogs".

Would someone put up somewhere any of the how to play stuff from the OS/2 version? Or some other kind of guide?

A word of advice...don't bother trying to set up OS/2. Also yea, the ground combat system was fun... It was like the action part of the game trying to get the high number Although later in the game, it was a pain to get 10 1.5k troop transports to take over a large planet.. One thing would be nice would be larger trandport ships REALLY late in the game...like when you get the Terra Stars, so it wont be as tempting

CVW - We now have Super Transports that come later on but cost far far more to make.

The new update fixes the AI to defend itself a bit better.

The AI is still pretty easy to beat but it's getting better.