EtherMage

Reply to Problems with population growth? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

More specifically, population growth is double at 100% morale, normal at 54-99% morale, and either zero or negative below 54 morale, on a per-planet basis. So, you want a 98%+ approval rating to max your pop. growth if you can survive the near-term costs of such a low tax rate. What I like to do is make sure my lowest-morale couple planets are one growth-class lower than everyone else, so their overpopulation doesn't worsen so much. If I'm keeping most of my empire at 100% for max gro

Reply to GalCiv AI question in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Short answer: no, the amount of money the player makes and the amount of money the AI makes are totally independant at all difficulty levels. (With exceptions due to trade and the like, but I digress...) Economically, what the difficulty levels do is change the AI's money-making potential. On "Intelligent" (2 levels above the default "Normal" setting), if you and an AI race have 2 identical planets and identical tax rates, etc, you'll make the same amount. Below "Intelligent", the AI

Reply to Is it just me, or are the Yor almost constantly destitute? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Hehe, it's really odd. I keep hearing about how bad the Torians usually do, but in my games they're usually doing just fine. If I'm a bit slow on the uptake with getting my fleet of star fighters online, they'll be right in line behind the Drengins demanding tribute, and sometimes ahead if I meet them first. I think I have to revise the "keep everyone happy" characterization. They try and make nice with whoever's strong, and are very hostile to anyone they think is even marginally we

Preferred degree of scattering? in Strategies Stardock Forums

What do you choose for the degree of scattering for your galaxies? Do you choose differently for different galaxy sizes? I tend to choose "Scattered". My reasoning is this: in a scattered abundant galaxy, nearly every sector has at least one habitable planet. This means range really isn't a consideration. Thus, with speed bonuses, I'm basically guaranteed a bigger portion of the galaxy, and I don't have to worry about hitting a range roadblock and needing to rush for gravity techs b

Reply to Destablization in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Re: the "no effect" after sustained destabilization... I thought this was occurring when I first tried out mass-scale destabilization against the Torians in one game. However, even though their morale was pretty high (80%+) after the destabilization effort, when planets started flipping to me I noticed something -- all of them had EVERY SINGLE morale improvement the Torians could build...and they still weren't spending as much as I could have with that many planets. What happe

Reply to 1.04.59 or later bug reports in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I just noticed something on 1.05.071: If you give the AI several things in a turn and cause the "Oh thank you more presents." message, your gifts do not actually transfer ownership. It seems that once this message comes up, you have to make an actual trade before you can give the AI anything further. -EtherMage ~SDC~

Reply to King of the Losers in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Re: the AI not needing to scout... If you REALLY want to compensate for this, a rather cheap way to do it is to save the game at the very start and rush-reasearch to stellar cartography. Pull up the tactical map and hit "print screen" to copy a screenshot to the clipboard. Paste this into Paint or something, and load your original game back up in GalCiv. Now start the game and play as you like, but refer to your screeshot for the locations of all the habitable planets. Now you have

Reply to Help: Diplomacy & Trading in Strategies Stardock Forums

Ahh, my bad. I didn't actually think to add everything up in my head -- for some reason I "remembered" that value from somewhere...odd. Of course, the point obviously stands: dominating resource ownership can make up for any number of other handicaps. Of course, if you have the free resources to a) research all the techs to access the mining modules and b) produce enough constructors to fully mine reasources while c) not falling behind militarily, then you're probably doing pretty wel

Reply to Keeping Tax Rate at 20%??? in Strategies Stardock Forums

[quote]Anyone here know of any tax (etc.) scheme where you can have spending set at 100%? Even with that high tax, I would have lost thousands of BC per turn with 100% spending had I not sold a lot of tech, which I understand is unprofitable at high difficulty.[/quote] Easily. Keep in mind that the more manufacturing/research capability you have, the more you have to spend to USE it. As an experiment, try this sometime: don't build ANY manufacturing improvements, anywhere. Build bank

Reply to uncolonizable stars/planets in Strategies Stardock Forums

Perhaps a separate advancement past artificial satellites other than Terror Stars - "Colonization Bases" or some such. Starbases with lots of extra modules required, same as TS's, and an even higher at-completion monetary cost. You can (eventually) move these over any star, and the effect is to deconstruct the starbase and create a low-level (possibly class 12 or 13) habitable planet with colony orbiting that star. Something that could just barely be enhanced to livability with the right impr

Reply to Help: Diplomacy & Trading in Strategies Stardock Forums

Most of this has been said, but I'm gonna put it in a quick Q&A: 1. I can't seem to get races to like me - they always demand stuff and when I deny them, the relations go down the toliet. How can I get them to like me? I give them some money and influence points, even a technology or two but they still don't warm up. Unless you plan to initiate a war, build lots of Star Fighters and Corvettes early on...make sure your military might graph is always at least 3/4ths of the top

Reply to Having Trouble At "Normal" Difficulty in Strategies Stardock Forums

Def Zep, I have to disagree with you about MFC's being a "core" building. In my games, I generally don't build them on planets below class 20 (w/both PQ enh's, of course). Simply put, you almost always can't USE enough of the additional manufacturing capacity to make it worth the maintenance to build them. -EtherMage ~SDC~

Reply to Having Trouble At "Normal" Difficulty in Strategies Stardock Forums

I don't follow a lot of this advice. Important notes on some of the above strats: * Tech trading won't be close to even unless you have a TON of diplo bonuses. But it doesn't need to be. As long as you make yourself the "hub" of tech-trading, you can pull yourself ahead despite the disadvantage per-trade. Also keep in mind that some techs are WAY overvalued...don't bother trying to trade for them. Examples: ship techs (esp. deflectors), govt techs. If you beat the AI to these tech

Reply to Newbie in Crises in Strategies Stardock Forums

Well, it's really simple - you just let your colonies build colony ships the "slow way". Some important facts you IMHO have to know to succeed at this game: 1. Per-colony, population growth stops below 54 morale, and doubles at 100 morale. 2. Each government level boosts your tax income greatly, but you'll probably have to lower the tax rate some because it's harder to maintain morale at higher government levels. Do upgrade when you can though! 3. You have to PAY for 2/3's

Reply to Getting my owned by the other races on NORMAL. in Strategies Stardock Forums

1. I set my spending to 100% but that does not last long. It generally doesn't. 2. Military spending is set to 75% while research is set to 25% so I can do some research. I prefer to to 100% military and let the tech just wither until I've hit other civs. Then I rush for phasers and build a star-fighter army to scare them out of demanding tribute or starting a war. I try to settle as many planets as I can. In a large galaxy game when does the coloniza

Reply to New Political Parties in Mods Stardock Forums

You're definitely right. They didn't work in-game, but subtracting 100 from each ID worked fine. Thanks for the tip! -EtherMage ~SDC~

Reply to New Political Parties in Mods Stardock Forums

Really? Interesting. They show up fine in the creation screen. I'll edit my file. I can't edit my initial post anymore, so I won't fix them there. Anyone trying these will have to remember to adjust the ID's. -EtherMage ~SDC~

Reply to Galactic Civilizations: Most Mod-able Game Ever! in Mods Stardock Forums

skywalker: bah! Notepad OWNS YOU! Seriously though...if Stardock didn't need an special editor for this stuff to MAKE the game, I'm not gonna ask for one so I can MOD it. (So says the person who always codes his HTML by hand and finds GUI tools without scripting for a well-defined data format frustrating more often than not. If *I* can't decide to write a better editor if I feel like it, I tend to complain more about what I'm given. :P) -EtherMage ~SDC~

Reply to New Political Parties in Mods Stardock Forums

Oh, and I would seriously suggest that you not submit games using these parties to the Metaverse if you'd like to keep your account. I certainly won't be submitting my test games unless someone at Stardock gives the OK. (I wish I could start a game, and then twiddle the political party/picks at the start without affecting anything else, so I could get a fair test of the balance between the parties' abilities. I'd need the picks as well as the parties because you would of course choose

New Political Parties in Mods Stardock Forums

I've made up a file with a set of alternate political parties. These certainly need tuning (I haven't yet played a game with any of them), but I thought I'd post it here for anyone who might be interested. More may be on the way as I come up with them, and I'd LOVE some custom party icons if anyone halfway decent at art is interested enough. The parties are the Environmentalists, the Hyper Engineers, the Survivalists, and the Matchmakers. Just copy the text below the line and stick it in a n

Reply to Constructors/Starbases are killing my enthusiasm for this game in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I've found that production-boosting starbases usually hurt me more than they help, because they just make my less-useful planets totally useless while making my best planets far better than I need them to be. Once I've fully harvested all available resources I tend to flip production to capital ships, and use what contructors I do make for resource-camp duty, adding defenses to resources, or culturally pushing alien planets already in my sectors over the edge into my lap. -EtherMage<br

Reply to Just a small, newbie question... in Strategies Stardock Forums

Well, as you crank up the difficulty the AI gets much quicker at snapping up planets. Even with +speed, 100% spending, and the VERY occasional colony-ship buy, once in a while an AI at Intelligent will end up with more/better worlds than me. So, at least as far as that "snapping up a few extra systems" goes -- there won't be any unless they're insulated from everybody else's range by your territory. -EtherMage ~SDC~

Reply to Feature Request: Park a Constructor! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Although you can use the hotkeys to set guard and sentry modes, they seem to "snap out of it" whether or not there are any other ships in the area. Plus, with Eyes and a sensor pick, sensor range is very wide, and so "Sentry" mode is practically useless because there are ships passing in and out of range all the time. I'd like a "Parked" mode that: a) doesn't use up movement points. IE, whenever the ship is unparked it can move immediately. b) doesn't prompt the player, ever.<

Reply to 1.04.59 or later bug reports in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Another UI crash bug in 1.05. On the espionage window w/advanced knowledge, there's a button that says "total routes"...I clicked on it and the game CTD'd. There are lots of these in debug.err, nothing else suspicious: "ASSERT ERROR in file G:\PROJECTS\pear\SOURCE\MWIN.CPP at line 397." -EtherMage ~SDC~

Reply to is this game REALLY hard or is it just me? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Re: raising taxes... Make sure you look at my post on pop. trouble in the Strat forum. Keep in mind that the higher you set taxes, the fewer planets have 100% morale, the slower your population (and thus your taxpayer base) grows. It's definitely a tradeoff. I like to keep any planet with base PQ 18+ at 100% unless I'm leading the population curve. The really vital things are tech trading and the early-game landgrabs. Master those and you'll be in a much better posi