wonkawonka

Reply to Military Conquest. in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Here's the gist of the problem: The actual victory type is determined only by the last turn. Which means that you are rewarded for ending the LAST TURN militarily. That's it. So you get the usual score milking strategies: - Win technologically except for resarching "beyond human". Then blow up everybody else with your uber-tech. - Win culturally until the last planet. Then send in a small fleet of 10 ships and get it. There's no reason to finish the game cultur

Reply to Galactic Civilizations 1.05 in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I have a 1.4044 game that I've been trying to finish under 1.05 to fix its multiverse score, and I get CTDs randomly. I haven't managed to get through it yet.

Reply to Is there a list or info on how older ships upgrade ? to what powers and such? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

You are confusing upgrades based on technological and manufacturing improvements, and upgrades based on new units being available. In GalCiv, you don't get upgrade paths for your units. In Civ III for example, you get among others: pikeman -> rifleman -> infantry -> MechInf In GalCiv, a BattleAxe remains a BattleAxe. You can't upgrade a battleship to a dreadnought. However, your ships can actually increase in performance due to a number of factors: - new techno

Reply to Scoring in 1.05 - we need your input in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

My 2 cents: First and foremost: The biggest factor for scoring should be the TIME TAKEN TO WIN. This is it. Everything else should be icing on the cake. This way you avoid the pop/tech milking stuff. Of course, time should be discounted by galaxy size, but that's what should be the core score. Second: I don't believe in discounting tech or cultural victories. They're very hard to achieve, and if you achieve one you can probably achieve military victory as wel

Reply to Diplomacy: does human got penalized? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

#9 fsk+, no idea if the tables exist. But they'd be obsolete very quickly. In almost every patch these AI percieved values change. Response #2 in this thread is good enough as far as I'm concerned. Those broad strokes are relatively consistent across AI patches.

Reply to Newbie Question in Strategies Stardock Forums

What's your tax rate? Make sure that the planets at the fringe of your empire have decent morale (>50%). One way to do that for those planets is to increase propaganda (in the "details" screen of a planet). With all the stuff you built you should have a strong enough culture level. One more trick is to use starbases with a strong cultural component.

Game score algorithm? in Strategies Stardock Forums

I was wondering how the game score is calculated. In looking at the metaverse scores, I see huge deltas that go quite unexplained. Most simple games are in the But then I played a beginner game, and I scored 1780 points, which is generally in the crippling range. Is it because I won an alliance victory?

Reply to How to find a planet? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Good, so I'm not too stupid. :-) How do people manage to figure out what goes where in huge maps?

Reply to omega defense, planetary defense & star system defense in Strategies Stardock Forums

Gert (#19) are you absolutely certain? That will make me completely rethink my military strategy. That clearly demands complete centralization of military shipbuilting activity.

Reply to Luck! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

IMHO PQ 7 is too expensive for what you get. PQ 5 is good, and then you can put the rest on luck and creativity. :-) It is fun to get a free 25% of research while it's taking you 27 turns to research star federation.

How to find a planet? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I must be very dense, but I can't figure out how to find a specific planet. Yesterday I got the event "The XXXX found alien artifacts that boosted their newly colonized planet YYYY to planet quality 35". Needless to say, I wanted to kind of go and knock on their door. :-) Looked forever for that planet but couldn't find it though.

Reply to omega defense, planetary defense & star system defense in Strategies Stardock Forums

Regarding #17: "Shipyards do not raise hit points - they add to the AF & DF of vessels constructed there after the improvement is completed" To make matters even more confusing, you do not know when looking at a ship what part of the AF/DF comes from those improvements. So you could have 2 ships of the same class somewhere, where one of them is 12/6/3 and the other is 4/5/3, simply due to when and where the ships were built.

Reply to Diplomacy: does human got penalized? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I use diplomacy a lot. Sometimes I use it to win (diplomatic victory). Trade properly and races become "close" to you. Offer alliances, and you're done. Most of the times I use diplomacy to generate loads of cash. But the most important thing is: Trade any technology that another race already has to any race that's willing to take it. The reasoning is that the AI players trade extensively between each other. So what you want to do is reap the rewards of the tra

Reply to Ship Hit Points in Strategies Stardock Forums

I haven't won yet using military conquest :) As Solitair said, the strategy is to actively stop those who would wage war upon you from doing it. Trade is good, bribes is good, alliances is even better. My favorite least expensive strategy is to build up defense in all my systems and sit tight. I build some battleaxes that are maxed out on defense thanks to starbases and planetary improvements, and I just wait for the enemy to come in and attack. After I've broken up his first 2 attack

Reply to Starhawks in Strategies Stardock Forums

Has anyone tried this strategy: Build massive amounts of starhawks. Build purely defensive starbases around your planets, i.e. fill up the military and defense piece of the starbase. That has got to bring the defense of the starhawks up to a point where they won't be chewed up until dreadnoughts and co. arrive, or not?

Reply to No "submit" button solution! -- use dial-up modem in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Yes, just let the thing time out and pop a window saying "you don't seem to be connected to the Internet. This feature requires a connection." Put 2 buttons "Try Again" and "Cancel" and you're done. Let the person alt-tab out of it to connect if necessary.

Reply to 1.04 AI cheats on tech tree, gets free techs from nowhere (bug?) in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Regarding the strategy of killing minors as soon as they come into the game, I've been doing the exact opposite, i.e. trade with them like crazy, using my trade goods to suck all their techs and basically using them as a tech researching center. Should I instead invade, suck what they have and build up the planet? I'm much more of a "win without shooting a bullet" kind of guy (but I'll take any strategy that works), and my last game on medium/sub-intel I scored 1780 points and won by al

Reply to Something seriously wrong with Economics in Strategies Stardock Forums

Also regarding the deficit being much higher when you change government types: make sure you look at the actual spending amounts. You will see that as you change to the better govt types, your whole economy goes up one notch. So assume you've got income of 100 and expense of 110. If you go up one level, you'd get something like income of 120 and expense of 132 (+20% on both counts). That makes your deficit "grow" from 10 to 12 and you freak out :-) All you need to d

Reply to Early game economic strategy in Strategies Stardock Forums

I just played a game where Earth was a 17. Not bad, but one of the other races had a system with 21, 19 and 19 planets! Luckily I was playing simple, and I leased 3 colony ships right away, put 200M people in them, and sent them out to colonize anything at 15 or higher. I never got anything above 16, but it gave me a good starting base. I went 0%/50%/50%, used my one survey ship to get as many free anomaly ships as possible and survived until my pop started growing faster than the r

Reply to Excalibur in Strategies Stardock Forums

I think we should have a mod based on the "Excalibur Alternative" book by David Weber. Make some Ogre-class superdreadnaughts. Could be fun!

Reply to Tell us about SHIP LEVELs, please. in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Ok here are some numbers. Only attack and defense values are modified by experience, nothing else. A corvette in one of my games: (attack/defense/experience points) Level 0: 9/6/1 Rookie Level 1: 9/6/14 Neophyte Level 7: 12/9/166 Godlike I also have a BattleAxe at level 8 (Godlike) with 290 experience points. Level 2 (tactician) is in the 20s Level 4 (veteran) is in the 70s So clearly each additional level takes more experience to get

Reply to Tell us about SHIP LEVELs, please. in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I found one good way to add levels to a ship: become technologically advanced and build a well-defendend starbase in a hot sector. Put the ships you want to grow in experience in there. See the enemy attack fruitlessly. See your ships' experience shoot up. I easily got ships at level 7. I'll try to post my stats for different levels for the same ship.

Reply to why is always the same???? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I would like to add that the original post's premise of "the only way to win is by having a big fleet that can take on any race" definitely has a lot of merit, but I think that it should be altered somewhat, to: "a big help for winning is by having a superior military, numerically or technologically" In my latest game, which I won culturally once, and after reload, technologically, my early strategy (where it counts) was to go technological as quickly as possi

Format of the Settings.sav file? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I played my first game last night (midnight to 6:30 AM...) on default settings ("easy", I think). It was a very interesting experience, as I only had 2 planets (including Earth), but I ended up winning culturally. I want to go back to a saved game from before the culture victory, and win technologically (I'm close, about 5 techs away from victory). To do that, I need to disable culture victory. I assume that the setting for that is in the Settings.sav file in the proper saved game fo