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So that's why my wonder/trade good builds kept disappearing on me.
SirOscar, I wasn't sure of it myself until that one hit me right between the eyes.
One nasty trick I learned to boost trade is while you are at peace with someone, bribe everyone to declare war on him. Since you're the only person he can trade with, when all his trade routes go away, he'll reestablish them all with you. Helps if you just happen to have a few freighters in your home system to give him. In fact, I once got everyone to declare war against everyone else, and included as most of the payment, 10 freighters parked near Sol :). Hopefully, the wars wont last too lo
SirOscar, I assure you I would have seen that anomoly that popped up right next to Sol had it been there the whole time :)
If you liked Alpha Centari, you'll probably like Galactic Civilizations. GC doesn't allow you to design your own craft like AC does, but other than that and the setting, the two are very similar. Several people here have called GC the best 4x TBS since AC, and they consider that high praise. I enjoyed AC too, FWIW, though I haven't played it in a long time (replaced my game machine and never got around to reinstalling, as I was primarily focused on other games at the time). T
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 t
I've played two games with random alignments turned on, and in boht cases, it didn't generate a single good AI race. First game was 1 Neutral, 2 Chaotic Evils, and 2 Pure Evils, the second game was 2 Neutrals and 3 Pure Evils. Is this just a fluke, or are other people seeing this. FYI, the first game I decided to out-evil them all, the second game, I'm already chaotic good, and I think I'll shoot for pure good for the challenge. :)
Vorlin, I agree with Phaedyme. By the time I get that far, I usually don't worry about social spending, since I've got all the wonders and trade goods I can get, all my planets are fully developed, and I'm really not creating many new colonies. Terraforming all by itself is a major project, and those add-ons are even more severe. I keep thinking I want to install those, but I never remember.
Dave, good way of saying it, I always thought of nerf'ing in that respect, and yes, the +15% PQ was the hardwood baseball bat with several big, nasty nails sticking out of it, and if you played with the number of inhabitable planets set low, even came with built-in chainsaw. The 5% PQ pick is still a bargain at 3 points, but at least that one factor by itself doesn't make the game easy.
I found it useful in my latest game on gigantic. Told me exactly how many colony ships I needed to send off towards distant clusters in order to grab the entire cluster in one shot. Normally, I just research it because it's one more tech that I can sell without any reason not to sell it.
I know that some of the +starship bonuses work, but not all of them. I've seen times where two planets were pushing out dreadnoughts that, except for a 2 point bonus in defense, were identical, even though one planet had better than +100% starship bonuses over the other one (+57% from an event, the rest from social upgrades). Very confusing.
I have to disagree, Avatars are underrated, especially now that dreadnoughts cost more (480? haven't made it that far in my 1.03 game) in 1.03 than they used to. They don't outrank dreadnoughts the way Overlords outrank them, but I think we all realize that Overlords are a serious step up. Two Avatars are worth more than three dreadnoughts and cost less to maintain, so I certainly think they can turn the tide. Sure, the changes in the stats look minor, but play around with the combat
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While I agree with most of Frogboy's decisions, this one rubs me wrong. The whole argument about having to support workers who aren't doing anything doesn't wash, as there are already major exceptions to that in the game. Grab the funding slider and drop it to 0%. Congrats, you just laid off an entire empire, and don't have to pay anyone anything. Grab the social slider and drop it to 0%. Congrats, you just retrained every non-military factory worker to be either a researcher or mil
I would like, in addition to some of the other suggestions: 1) for auto-combat ships to not bother me until they run out of galaxy-wide targets. Currently, they pop up asking for me to confirm that I still want them in auto-combat mode every time some other ship destroys their intended target, and sometimes even when they destroy their intended target. 2) If I click on an alien ship/starbase, I do *NOT* want to be instantly taken to my next ship needing orders. I clicked on i
I don't think he has. It's not as bad as it sounds, once you get used to the game. While the AI is very good, you should still be able to outthink it, and if you follow this kind of pattern, you'll even be outproducing the AI early on on the easier difficulty levels.
thongor is right. My typical start (on large or larger, on normal and lower you need a quick colony rush rather than a sustained one) is to: 1) turn the taxes up as high as you can keeping morale at 100% (80% later). I used to suggest 80% from the get-go, but early on you need the pop growth that 100% morale gets you. 2) turn social spending down to 0% I usually keep miltary and research balanced early on, because there are places in the tech tree I want to reach before any
I've managed to convert I-Leagues planets :) That was a major sense of acomplishment the first time it happened, those buggers are strong in that respect.
Odd, considering that the production bonuses don't seem to affect your production. Anyone want to run a test to see if they're reversed?
Getting back to the original question, you'll find that for every Planet Class from 14-19, +5% PQ combined with SE and/or HI will result in a Planet Class one higher than the same planet with only SE and/or HI. Not as wild as +15% PQ, but still worth it, IMO.
I'll miss +15% PQ, but I also think that it was overpowered. You could drop a colony on a PQ 12 planet, buy Soil Enrichment, and have it PQ 15 the very next turn. And if/when the AI took the planet back, they suddenly had an overcrowded planet, because the planet would turn into a PQ 13. I like the Metaverse, and think that it should be an even playing field. Like it or not, a +15% PQ isn't going to be a level playing field, because even if they AI takes it, it still means inflated
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Basically, Brad said that none of the solutions proposed would work, so he unstickied it to let it die. Or at least that was my interpretation of what he said. I disagree with his reasoning, but I'll respect his opinion.
Yet another customer quite happy with SDC. Out of curiosity (someone had claimed that SDC was slow and nasty to use, and I said it was quick and simple once you got it to work), I timed the 1.02.049 upgrade. From the time I clicked the start button to launch SDC to the time I clicked it again to launch GalCiv, 65 seconds. I've never seen stand-alone patches that quick to find, grab, and install. Code Monkey, not all of us Vegas residents feel that physical violence is a proper debati
As is, the Phoenix is really only good as a commerce raider, and I think it's stealth ability would need to be improved in order for it to work *WELL* in that role, but since I've never seen the AI build one, I haven't seen how it works. Its stats compare to the submarine in Civ3, so I suspect that it is the game's submarine counterpart. I've built starhawks on large and larger maps, but more to grab all the little bonuses than to try to build them up into big nasty combat ships. Usua
Actually, for every planet class from 14 through 19, +5% PQ gains you nothing at first, but gains you 1 point of PQ over no bonus as soon as you add Soil Enrichment and/or Habitat Improvement, so it isn't useless at all. Starting at PQ 20, you get one level right off the bat. I've got a page with a chart on it demonstrating this at http://geekzilla.org/galciv/pq.html if anyone wants to see it for themselves. So, did they change the price of the 5% PQ bonus, or is it still 3 points?
miclogic: There's several changes that are going to have serious effects on my strategy. Problem is, as near as I can tell, you can't roll back to a previous release. You can roll back to the current release from a beta, but hasn't 1.03 been released? I really want to try 1.03 to find out how much it affects my strategy (mostly early on due to SB maintenance fees, I can usually grab 4 resources on a large or larger map long before 20BC/turn isn't a major burden. Then again,