Morale is the most common factor in pop growth rate. There are also three techs and two trade goods that increase pop growth rate. Finally, there are ability picks you can take at the start of the game to boost your pop growth rate.
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While I'll admit that I got more points for it than I should have, since I wasn't taking the military approach until the very end, it wasn't as dramatically easier as you'd think. YIN, how would you suggest fixing the scoring system? Serious question. I don't see any way to evenly and fairly adjust for good/bad starting positions. What you think of as a good position, I may think of as a bad position, and visa versa. I know a lot of people hate starting in the corner, but as long as
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Most certainly did, though the long turn times got to be a bit of a drag. Until I tried a Gigantic map, I never thought I'd be tempted to upgrade my game machine (AMD 1500+, 512MB RAM, GF3 TI200 video with 64MB RAM) just to play GalCiv, it had always been so snappy before :) Must admit that if I weren't so much of a non-agressive type, military resources would be my favorite resources. As is, econ are my favorite, but there were only four of them on the entire map, and I never did gra
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I usually get the first war declared on me either right when, or just before, I get tech to build Battle Hammers. I like playing on large and larger maps, so that may have some effect on it. Then again, I'm trading fast and furious from the word go, so I might be getting to Battle Hammers sooner, or I may just be establishing better relations. This is with AIs set to bright, also.
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Off the top of my head, the Dreadnought and Battle Hammer pages would have changed (Dreadnought more expensive, BH lower maintenance). I can't think of any others that changed, but If I think of any more, I'll let you know.
So, any of you people that like aiming for "Pure Evil" ever name your empire "8th dimension"? I know, bad reference, but I had to ask, the question went romping through my mind, and it's not like this forum isn't full of references to just about everything else.
There's an entire thread on early game military campaigns over in the strategies forum, and the common consensus there as I read it is that the early campaign is mostly useful for destroying colony ships and constructors to keep that AI from expanding so that you can colonize more planets and capture more resources. personally, I wouldn't consider trying to capture a system until frigates/battlehammers are available.
Keith: Actually, just making it so that only the best starbase bonus available has effect would eliminate almost the entire problem, though it might bring on problems of its own. The maintenance fee, however, botches up using starbases to boost trade routes, unless you were going to have a starbase there anyway. Think about it. A good starting trade route will bring in what, 13BC/turn? A starbase that adds 50% to that would add 6 BC, but then cost 5BC. Sounds like you're still doin
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Gigantic map, Sol all the way to the left, centered in height. nothing spectacular to see in the first month. However, I very quickly learned that Sol had 4 military resources within two sectors of itself, two more farther up/down the map, and one about a third of the way across the bottom of the map. By the time I reached Battle Hammers (didn't bother to build any military prior to that), I was sitting on 8 military resources, and my BHs had stats that looked like Overlords :) However, I'm
Hmmm.... The problem with the diplo rating cut is that noone in an alliance will want to be first to accept peace. There has to be some way of either getting peace from the entire alliance at the same time, or saying "this deal is tentative on peace deals with everyone at war with me with an alliance with you," otherwise it just gets icky. I've been in this position as well, the Arceans were allied with the Torians and Altarians, and only the Arceans wanted the war.
I'm not good at being evil. My last game (the one that the metaverse shows as 0 points but was actually 9784, more than all my other games put together) is listed as Pure Evil, but I was actually Pure Good for most of the game until I finished researching all the good and neutral techs, as there were no good races to buy them from (my random alignment generator has a love of evil). I then had to go pure evil in order to get the best of the evil techs, since the Pure Evil races had been conquer
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Frogboy, if this is the Apolyton thread that I think it is, I'm the Eric S that posted in that thread, so you know my opinion :) Basically, I thought that whats-his-name was twisting facts to support his theory because he was married to his theory rather than to reality. Personally, I'm a programmer, and I've never seen a fellow programmer that could leave a program he cared about alone, and it's pretty obvious your team cares about GalCiv.
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Originally, the speed modifier was a %, if I remember correcty. However, since everything was adding 10%, it almost never changed anything. If they had made everything add 50% instead, the first level still wouldn't help the movement-1 ships, but it would add a point to the movement2/3 ships, so that might have worked better, until you get to the very fast ships like the Excalibur.
Well, I just finished my first game 1.03 game, and my comments concerning the SB maintenance fee was right on, in my opinion. It caused serious economic problems early on, even though I wasn't doing more than dropping starbases on resources, but by the end of the game, I could have afforded a 144-SB slingshot barely noticing the maintenance cost.
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Frogboy, are you interested in the saved game?
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Quite possibly the reloading. I normally don't get CTDs more than once, maybe twice a game. But I found that the game, on my otherwise stable machine, just didn't want to stay up for more than 6-8 hours at a time with a gigantic map, sometimes not even that. This is on an AMD 1500+ with 512MB RAM and a 64MB GF3 TI200 video card. I also had serious problems with invisible ships during this game, so there may have been some corruption issues. One other thing that might have tr
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Oh, forgot to mention: This was with 1.03.054, bonus pack 1.006, multimedia package 1.007, no MODs installed. I reloaded an autosave and saved it in case anyone wants to take a look at it. I think I need to take a break now. This is only a game, something like this shouldn't ruin my weekend. (yeah, I know, it's monday, but I took the day off, and no, not just to play GalCiv, though it was the major reason I didn't get as much done over the weekend as I wanted to :-)
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I spent 4 days playing a gigantic map, pulling every legitimate stunt I could think of to get a high score. I even managed to research all of the good and evil techs by taking creative, going good first, then swinging evil after I was done with good. I didn't cheat, I didn't even use cheese. No multi-colonization to swing my morality score, etc. The only reloading was due to CTDs (I had a lot more problems with this game than my previous games, probably due to the map size and the fa
1.03 isn't available as a patch yet, only as a download through StarDockCentral. Upgrading through SDC is great if your game machine is online. Easy enough that I start up SDC to check for updates every time I sit down to play. Out of curiosity I timed it once. From the time I clicked the start button to launch SDC to the time I clicked the start button to launch GalCiv itself, 65 seconds, and that was with a version upgrade. If you didn't install SDC first, you probably wil
Roberto, I've seen that problem with ship creations not sticking, and every time it's been because I already had 16 ships in orbit. That wasn't your problem, was it?
Morpork... Morpork.... That's what we need, a system with one planet sitting on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a giant sea turtle :) How's that for a random event? Sorry, your name connected a few odd threads running through my mind. This isn't the first time I've thought of Terry Pratchett's Disc World and GalCiv in the same thought. Be afraid.
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coffeefreak, I played my first 4 games without using the govenors, but now I can't imagine playing without them. Other than this one issue (which I now know how to avoid), they've definitely improved my play level, since I don't have to remember everything I want to add at each planet, and I also don't have to go to each planet every time a new social project is available.
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MadMaz, depends on the Palm PDA. Some go as high as 320x480, and 320x320 is fairly common now, though not predominant. Oh, and JavaScout's site has been updated with the 1.03.51 data, if you want to pull it down and update your html.
Asmodean: True, I don't know how long it was there and I missed it because it wasn't there at first, so I stopped looking for it. For those that have also missed it, at the top of the rankings list, enter your name (or part of it) and hit enter or click on "Go".
Actually, I play on larger maps, and StarHawk tech usually comes available just about the time I'm ready to build some more survey-capable craft to more quickly grab all the anomolies. I'm going to need them in my current game, as I've located 9 resources and none of them are econ resources, so every little econ boost will help. On the other hand, 5 of them are military resources, so I'm gonna go on a rampage at some point just for the fun of it :) If only I had taken the War Party.