I should clarify my post, for any planet above size 15 you get a +1 class bonus over what you'd have with just soil/habitation bonuses. For example, a class 18 is a class 21 with soil/hab, it's class 22 with +5 PQ/soil/hab.
The +5 PQ isn't bad, for any planet over size 15 you get a +1 class bonus with it, which isn't too shabby because in this game planet size is everything. Vernmeister, it really was that overpowered. I didn't use +15 PQ until my 7th game or so and when I did I was like "Wow, this is incredible". It was like I was playing in God mode or something. More money, more production, more research, 100% morale, better population growth, better max population, you get the picture. And of cours
Mostly it's a matter of positioning for the AI civs, in two ways. One, if they start in a strong (or weak) spot in the galaxy for colonizing then that will make a huge difference in their eventual strength. Two, their neighbors make a big difference. You get the Drengin stuck between the Torians and the Altarians and they don't tend to do so well. LOL And I agree with the posts above about difficulty, in my first two games at 'Fool' level the Drengin indeed mopped every other AI c
This has to be one of the silliest posts I've read in a good while. Not enough variation? This 4x game has more viable ways to play than any other one I know of. If you choose to repeat the same play style over and over until you can't stand it that's perfectly within your rights, but to act as though your limitations are the game's limitations is grossly inaccurate. Yeah, the tech tree is boring, there are only dozens of different ways it can upgrade your civ, but besides those it's
There's no need to argue complex game mechanics when it comes to the bugged social/military production, all you have to do is stick to simple practicalities: when you take a +research bonus you research faster, when you take a +military/production bonus you don't produce faster. Only someone who doesn't know this would waste precious ability points in these areas. This is, IMO, one of the worst flaws in GalCiv currently. It's a newbie-trap waiting to happen, who doesn't want better p
My manual for GalCiv is JavaScout's website, a truly awesome bit of work. After you run down the links enough you'll have them cached on your drive and then you can access them while working offline. Is it as good as a 300 page textbook-sized manual would be? In some ways no, in some ways its better, as JavaScout updates his page with each patch whereas a manual never does. If big manuals are a must for you in gaming then be prepared to stop gaming, because only the largest companies
Stardock Forums
I usually stop spending on espionage when the amount I have invested in a civ is 1800-1900 or so. That's when you get the last message informing you of your progress, and since I've never seen anything come from any further investment I save major money by stopping it at that time. I've forgotten a couple of times to stop it and had the value invested reach ungodly sums, never did anythign that I could tell.
The problem with PQ+15 is that you are really getting a whole lot of bonuses in one, because most everything in GalCiv keys off of the planet size. So when you took PQ+15 you effectively got a morale, economy, population growth, max total population, research, military production, and social production bonus all in one single package. Combine that with the ability to settle level 14 worlds as level 16 and you have something that is way overpowered. You can even make it worse by selecting rare
I found something out just now that may be causing people problems (I know it drove me nuts for a bit). If you have Internet Explorer up and have it set to work offline then GalCiv will not post your Metaverse score. I have no idea why, possibly when IE sets the 'work offline' flag it declares that there is no internet connection so GalCiv doesn't try to send, I dunno. But I do know that once I figured out what was going on and changed IE to 'work online' the game I was working on posted just
I can't help with what is or isn't a balanced event, but I can with political parties: all the political parties that shipped with the game consist of bonuses that add up to between 3-5 ability points worth. So if you make a new political party it should have no more than 5 ability points worth of bonuses in it. I definitely want Stardock to implement some sort of flag for Library mods that are deemed 'Metaverse safe'. I don't want to find out after my submission fails that the Metav
Humane, if you've found the AI to be weak at invading you then you must be playing at a fairly low AI intelligence level. At the higher levels they have no problem at all systematically killing all your defending ships and then sending endless transports until your entire empire has been smashed into little mewling pieces. Not that I've ever had that happen to -me-, of course... *whistles innocently* I very much like the split between assault and invasion craft in GalCiv, I don't wan
I've definitely noticed the difference between some of the AI choices, both in offense and defense. There is one particular AI that I think I can recognize each time it shows up, it's the 'let's build one hell of a lot of ship and beat the crap out of everyone else'. You can always tell when an AI civ has this one because their military value will start skyrocketing early and never slow down. It's the bane of peace loving tech/influence junkies like myself. :) I do think there shoul
Alverin, you're right, if it's happening frequently it's not a freighter/trade issue, they don't move that fast. But I have noted that the Research screen 'turns left' doesn't update itself properly (easy way to see this is to start the game with +70 research, you'll still see a '16 turns to go' for each tech just as if you had +0 research). Perhaps that is causing you problems when you adjust your sliders? Another thing that might do it is GalCiv's often strange (at least to me :D )
Alverin, just on a hunch, did you have starbases along your trade route with trade upgrade modules? If so then your income would go up and down as the freighters passed in and out of that sector, possibly you had freighters in the turn before leading to more income and thus discovery next turn, then next turn they left and thus you didnt' get it. I guess I've research about 800 techs so far total and the only time I didn't get a 'next turn' on the next turn was when something dropped my revenu
I don't think people who have only played 3 games on Fool AI levels should be making global comments about what should or shouldn't be nerfed in the game. LOL The AI plays its best non-cheat game at 'Intelligent', if you find a cheese strategy like that that works at that level then you might have something worth reporting.
Nasty bug bit me near the end of my game just now, an Alexian planet defected to me, but they were at war with the Yor and the Yor ships near the planet continued the attack despite the defection and as a result I had my status with the Yor set to 'War' even though it was 'Peace' before and we weren't hostile to each other (we were neutral).
Harry, did that game with the missing info in the trade screen have the UP event where tech is traded between races? I had that happen to me in my last game, all my trade goods tech (I had about 5) vanished, the slider was there but the window was empty and clicking in it did nothing. It might be a coincidence but a few turns before this happened I had one of those UP votes where tech is traded. On another note, Frictionless Clothing isn't given any morale bonus. Tested it today, 54%
Stardock Forums
Once you get up and running you can keep it pretty high if you want, but it's not like the impression some people got who were using old save files with the new patch. It's just as advertised: easier. The boom phase on a gigantic galaxy lasts a long time, it's not unusual for me to see quite a few sub-70 morale planets before I switch to teching up so I can deal with that. I normally start with a tax rate around 60, then reduce it to 50, then down to around 45-40 or so and let it stabilize t
Stardock Forums
It's not worth it, score-wise, I don't think. Even with 217 planets and 9000 billion (my first run through) I only had like 3700 (normal difficulty). Which is good, I think, because we all know how utterly annoying it was for us obsessive-compulsive types who just had to max out our scores in SMAC and Moo2. What a mind-numbing excusion into the land of tedium that was. *laugh* GalCiv seems more sane when it comes to scoring a given game. I wasn't mad, just frustrated.
Wrath, I think I know what was happening to you: you'd go into the red, with 0 expenditures you'd make just enough to go out of the red, but doing so would start your economy up at which point you'd go right back into the red again. When the amount you can make with 0 expenditures doesn't put you one full cycle of expenditures over the red limit then you need to reduce expenditures to go along with the spending freeze, then after you get the freeze lifted you can adjust your sliders accordingl
They don't start cheating at normal, cheats don't happen until you reach the levels above 'intelligent'. Yeah, I noticed the difference as well, the AIs colonize and increase their population much more effectively at 'normal' in my experience.
I finally got that huge game of mine to work without crashing. What I did was greatly lower my tax and expense levels, and instead of 100% social I split the values between social and military production. Somewhere in those changes the fix happened, because I then proceeded to play the game through with no problems whatsoever (60-80 more turns at least). So it's not the number of planets settled (217 or so) that was causing it. The Metaverse still wouldn't take the game even though t
Stardock Forums
Man, I swear somedays it just doesn't pay to get out of bed. I went back to that game, and decided before deleting any systems that I'd play with the sliders some (thinking maybe they are having overflow problems somewhere because of the large economic values of about 27000 a turn in both expenses and tax revenue). So I lower both a big chunk, and then I turn up military spending so it is 50% along with 50% social. Well, somewhere in there that fixed my crashing problem. So I'm think
Stardock Forums
Phaedyme, yeah, the problem seems to be just too many colonized planets, it's corrupting the games internal data and evidently it's causing the Metaverse not to accept the game because it thinks it's hacked. By the time I noticed the problem all my autosaves and my manual save were all too deep into the issue to help. I might try loading it later, deleting several system, then doing a save/reload and see if I can salvage it. It is around a 3700 or so score, which would be my best so far, so I
Lucky, I think then that it must be number of colonized planets that is doing it. I had far more people than you so if it was population alone I would have seen the problem probably 100-200 turns or more before I did. It's not fleet size because when I pushed the envelope I did so by having all my settled systems colonize any world in the system that was between 10 and 14 in PQ, but elsewhere my empire was quiet (the giant constructor fleets were long gone, and I had only 1 ship per system on