WAR! huh, yeah, what's it good for?

I have, but only on one of the lower difficulty levels. I hear it's a lot harder to do on the higher difficulties, as some of the other races can get very aggressive.

And I can never hear that song any more without thinking of Jackie Chan trying to sing it in "Rush Hour."

LOL

RR

wow, not even 1 war?

thats amazing, i've never been able to avoid war, people end up teaming me if i have the most military :/

hey, what difficulty level u played on? lol

Its possible to avoid war at any difficulty, you just have to watch those relations with other races.

~SDC~

I have. Pulled off a Cultural win as Chaotic Evil in a Huge galaxy on challenging, without firing a shot, and without anyone ever declaring war on me. In fact, it wasn't until my third game that I got pulled into a war.

Norin,

Holy bejesus. Is that a score of 25473 that I see? What the heck did you do to get such a score?

How did you not trip up the cultural victory. That's usually the one cuts my larger games off.

Just remember to turn it off during game setup.

Yeah turning off the cultural victory helps a lot, as does playing with abudant planets.

~SDC~

Won my last maso/gigantic without needing to fire a single shot but just decided to end the game by wiping out the remaining 2 minors. You will find that the AI is reluctant to declare war against an enemy with a huge military superiority. Before you get to that stage of superiority, you could simply pay the AI off.

I switch off cultural win too. 1.03 is however supposed to make it tougher to expand via culture.

I was on Challenging and made sure to forklift upgrade my military whenever significant advances in military technology became available. Another thing that helped was selling my obsolete spacecraft to particularly aggressive minors in unreachable areas. It's amazing how destabilizing 40 battleaxes can be when they suddenly appear in the Drengin backyard.

AGM 84D: Obsolete my butt, I've been known to sell the best ships I had to the minors I really wanted to see the expression on the Drengin captain when a few Scottingas Avatars came out of nowhere to decimate a number of Dreadnoughts. Especially since I was the only one with the techs to make anything better than dreadnoughts. Too bad the AI didn't follow that logic. That was one of the games where I never fired a shot. My hardware did, however

I find keeping the minors in the game important to my trade income.

Just keep an eye on the militarly power graph and never let anyone get a significant lead over you. Much easier in 1.03.54 because battlehammers are now just 3 maintenance (they used to be 6), you get a lot of boost for your buck with those. Note, however, that if you turtle you run the risk of one of the other AIs going hogwild all over the map. Then you are in trouble, it's very hard to match the military output of 80% of the galaxy when you only have 20% of it to work with.

Turtling works best when none of the AI civs get eliminated, sort of a SimGalCiv sort of situation where there is give as well as take between everyone. But I've been burnt twice now because I thought I could get away with just holding the systems I had only to have one AI civ conquer the rest of the galaxy and then come for me before I could get the research victory. Lot of hours get wasted that way, so now I no longer take that chance: the best defense is to pin their freakin' ears back till they howl. Especially the Altarians and Torians, darn goody-twoshoes milksops.

Oh, almost forgot, anti-matter missiles are just 1 BC maintenance and you get a huge boost in your power rating with those as well. But watch out, they die first when your planet is attacked (not the high-defense tank ships). So if someone comes knocking, use them or lose them.

One random event can ruin the peace plan though... I've had it happen twice in one game where my allies are "visting" and someone assassiantes their ruler. Both times they made instant peace because my Emprie was badasss, but it caused havoc in trade routes!

~SDC~

Uh. that's: WAR! HUUGH! GOOD GOD Y'ALL! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR!? I'm going to go behead my cat now..

~SDC~

The random event Dearmad is taking about can be avoided by putting some of your $$ in espionage, consquently preventing the peace plan going down the drain...

A note on the turtling strategy.. One way to stop a computer player completly dominating the galaxy is to become really, really good friends with all the other races, so that they surrender to you.

Works quite well now that AI surrenders earlier than it used to.