CraigHB

Reply to Hello from a new player. in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

WOW! CraigHB, how did you manage that? The maintanence costs would be off the map. Your population would be drained, and as I saw in the screenshot, none of your planets are defended. Just WOW! Your(no pun intended) Combined Navy into one Armada! Yes, that is the key, you need the economy to support that many fleets. Planets get a lot of stock markets. There's also a trick to load that many transports without draining your population. As far as defenses, I don'

Reply to Hello from a new player. in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Hey PeskyFly, check it out, the last push with the killer offense. All the ships in those lines are maxed out fleets. Every transport fleet has 11 transports and each transport has 1000 colos. Every fighter fleet has specs shown in the main control window. This is one of my favorite parts of the game. Image Link Click on the image for the full size view so you can read all the text.

Reply to Hello from a new player. in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Welcome PeskyFly, One of the many things that's great about GC2 is there are lots of ways to play the game successfully. To give you a different perspective, here's how I've been playing Dread Lords lately and why (I'm still learning Dark Avatar). Race: Yor (max population bonus, max morale bonus, federalist party) Galaxy Size: Gigantic Tech rate: Very fast Stars/Planets/Anomalies: all abundant All races enabled Everything goes into offense. The old a

Reply to What the stupidest thing you ever saw the AI do? in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

Yea, hehe, minors are cannon fodder. I laugh when they declare war on me. Stupidist thing in my current game, Thalans declared war on me for no apparent reason while my military was about 10 times stronger. I wiped them out in about 3 turns. It's funny when they say they'll crush me like a bug with ships of 2 hit points halfway accross the map. I've also seen the AI put things like stock markets on 800% manufacturing bonus tiles, but as stated in the OP, this thread is not supposed to be ab

Reply to What happens if your money goes into the red? in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

If my economy is strong enough, I'll somtimes go deeply into the red to do something like a fleet wide upgrade. Takes some dead turns to get back in the black, but I've never had anything nasty happen because of it. Of course, you have to careful. You could end up in a bind if you need production or cash right away. I usually only do it later in the game when I'm making big money.

Reply to getting blood from a stone (or revitalizing an older computer) in Off-Topic GalCiv2 Forums

Problem with upgrading is they change stuff so much, an older computer has very limited options. You can find compatible peformance parts on eBay pretty cheap, but eventually, you have to change your platform. I upgrade my system about once a year and it seems I always have to replace most of the parts. Sometimes I think they change stuff just for the sake of changing stuff. I spent a bunch of money on my current build, but didn't get a justifiable performance improvement from last year's bu

Reply to Playing Dl or DA? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Yea, DA does have some nice features, but after playing the two side by side, I can appreciate some things about DL. I'm glad the option is there. I'll probably be playing both, DL for metaverse and DA for smaller, shorter games. Kind of makes me wish I had splurged for the big-gun processor on my current system build. Most games just need a powerful video card, DA needs a powerful CPU as well. BTW, CD drives are quite cheap. Check out newegg.com. I recently got a replacement for an old c

Reply to Playing Dl or DA? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

There are some known performance issues with earlier versions of DA, try updating and see what happens? There are allot of past threads on this issue. I did a clean install last week so I'm pretty sure all versions are the latest. I'm about 5 years into a maxed-out Dread Lords game and am not experiencing any peformance issues. I am getting a little bit of slow-down, but nothing more than before and nothing like Dark Avatar. I don't have a particularly fa

Reply to Playing Dl or DA? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Thanks for the replies. Looks like I might be playing Dread Lords instead of Dark Avatar. I tried playing a maxed out DA game and I started having problems about 5 years into it. Things kept getting slower and slower then the game started crashing. I couldn't play it anymore. I don't know what the deal is because I actually have a faster computer than before when I was playing maxed out games on DL 1.4. Is it just me, or does DA have a hard time with this?

Reply to Playing Dl or DA? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Hey Mumblefratz, Good to see a familiar handle. I totally understand about SDC. I have the same feelings about not wanting to install any more software than absolutely necessary. My main concern is software that installs startup items or user level drivers that can slow down my system or worse, interfere with important software. I also don't like the way some software installations replace shared .dll files without the user's knowledge. That said, I did have to brea

Playing Dl or DA? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I haven't played GC2 since 1.4. I received an email about the expansion pack bundle and thought, "what a deal," so I went for it. After a clean install, I was surprised to find both Dark Avatar and Dread Lords available. I was expecting DA to overwrite the original Dread Lords version. So, I was wondering what people are playing. Do you play DL, DA, or both? Also, what's your favorite race to play in Dark Avatar. In DL, mine was the Yor, but DA is different.

Reply to Dark Avatar Download SLOW in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

Same here, I just bought the expansion bundle and put it on a new computer. Downloading the whole ball of wax took quite a while. The DA download ran at only 25KB/sec. Everything else ran at 325KB/sec. Seems a bit odd.

Reply to Does the Metaverse need people who don't care about scores? in Metaverse GalCiv2 Forums

Thats BS. I can't take these constant radical changes to the game anymore. It's just too irritating. Sorry, but you lost me on that one. Yep, that was me. I haven't even looked at that thread for fear of the blazing inferno directed at me. I'm sorry I made that post. But, in my defense, I was really pissed about them removing the morale bonus

Reply to Does the Metaverse need people who don't care about scores? in Metaverse GalCiv2 Forums

I like playing the Metaverse a lot. It gives me something to shoot for, individual game score, rank. It gives me a reason to improve my game. I have a game I finished a week or so ago that was one of the best games I've played. Unfortunately, the Metaverse will not let me post it. For some strange reason, I started getting an error stating my application serial doesn't match the serial on the server. However, I can still log-in and use my characters to start a Metaverse game. I wo

Reply to The best tactic in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

Speed Speed Speed

Reply to Troop Carriers in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

Cargo hull, one advanced troop carrier, 2 life support, the rest engines. I like to invade with the lower number so I can switch tactics as the planet's population drops. Plus, the higher speed is helpful. I can park them further behind the front line to keep them out of harm's way.

Reply to Planet specialization strategies? in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

I have a simple convention I use for determining how I'm going to build a planet. If I can get enough manufacturing points out of it, I'll dedicate it to building ships by putting mostly factories on it. Planets that don't build ships get a couple three factories with a mix of labs and markets. I like to put markets on low PQ planets because they don't have enough horsepower to build much and I don't need labs after I finish the tech tree. So, I can put markets on them and forget them. <br/

Reply to WHAT AM I REALLY WORTH? in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Extreme cooling is good for overclocking, but I'm not going there anymore. I was running my system overclocked and it was stable, but I got some data corruption because of it, so no more. If it's say, a dedicated gaming maching that does nothing else, who cares, but I won't risk my important data on that. Though, overclocking did make a noticable difference in performance.

Reply to how to get a 'balanced' game? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Yea, same here. They either totally overpower me or I do it to them. I think balancing that is a fine edge that's pretty hard to find. Personally, I've been playing with each race intelligence individually to find it. However, it's all good either way. I still enjoy the game whether I get smoked or I do the smoking.

Reply to Generating large incomes in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

The highest I've ever grossed without the economic event is around 300k bc per turn after I dropped the treasury down below 20k just to see how high the gross would go. That was at the end of a gigantic/abundant game with most of the planets fully developed. The majority of them were full of stock exchanges. Taxes at 80%. I owned all the galaxy's economic resources and they were fully developed as well. Without the economic event, there's no way to see something like 500k bc per turn until

Reply to Generating large incomes in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

You really need to look at gross income, not net income because net income can fluctuate wildly depending on what you're doing. With a couple hundred planets populated liberaly with stock exhcanges and some fully developed morale and economic resources, gross income can approach 6 digits. How much of that you see as cash depends on spending. There are lots of places for it to go. If you're spending it and not seeing huge profit, you're probably doing things right. You don't necessarily want

Reply to Strategy? in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

I think the game is mostly about the colony rush, which is good because it's my favorite part of the game. As you get better at it, the dificulty level at which you can beat the AI will increase. Try playing a medium galaxy with 2 or 3 races. That will actually be an easier game since there will be more planets available to colonize and will provide more opportunity to out-pace the AI. Also, take advantage of anomolies. Set your flagship to auto-survey first thing and build a few survey shi

Reply to Class 30 planet, I'm so proud. in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I guess gigantic/abundant is pretty popular. I though us gigantic/abundant players were kind of the oddballs. It's such a management mess, I figured most people wouldn't like to play it. I can understand the draw playing smaller games. It's totally different. In that case, how you develop each planet is really important. When you have a large number planets, you can pretty much do what you feel like doing with them.

Reply to Are the major bugs fixed? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I've been very pleased with the resolution of game bugs over the releases. The game feels well refined as far as stability and operational function. Stardock does seem to do a good job with that. They're not perfect (who is?), but they do seem to put more than the usual effort into the quality of their product.

Reply to Disable surrendering in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

It seems the Drengin almost never surrender. They fight to the last planet. Other races seem to surrender as soon as they think they're beat, like the Drath. I've seen races surrender with twenty or thirty planets. Who they surrender to can have a noteable impact on the game. For instance, if you are at war with a race and another race surrenders a relatively large number of planets to them. When playing Neutral, it seems races almost never surrender to me. When playing Good alignment, it