You have to lose the very first mission of the campaign in order to get the mission where you recruit the Iconians. It tells a bit about their origins and relationship with the precursors and the Yor.
Try putting less weapons and more defense on the big ships. I bet that will make a difference.
I agree with the original poster, there are a lot of turns between when I know I can't lose, and when I'm awarded a victory. If my economy, tech, and foreign relations are about on par with the top AI's, then I'm going to win. I think Apple Juice Overlord is right about the lack of attrition in combat, successful combat results in powerful snowball effect where you continually get stronger as you defeat your enemies. Mainly, offensive warfare is too easy and too profitable. If you
I think the military rating is a feature kind of like influence or the diplomacy ability; it wouldn't work against a human player, but it allows interesting strategies against the AI. It gives me the choice between building a "paper tiger" military that rates high but is useless at actual combat, or an effective navy that uses engines and military starbases but rates low, or a potential military that I won't build until I need it. You could say that the AI is playing poorly because it doesn't
On that note, how do the other races even know I'm good? Is there a universal alignment detector that lets them know the alignment of the other races? Or, do they know what actions I take for every event? If so, why do I see no benefit there? The AI always knows your alignment, and you can find their alignment in the foreign stats window under th
The AI likes to purchase colony ships at the beginning of the game, so they may create several in the first few turns. That's fast, but it's inefficient. A different way is to set your industry to 100% social production and buy and build factories until you have enough production capacity to build a colony ship every other turn. Once you've got that, switch to 100% military production to build the ships. Then after you have beaten the AI to the planets you want, you can start researching and
Also, pick your alignment to match that of your neighbors. I know that everybody thinks neutral is best, but alignment has a big effect on how much the AIs like you. Picking good or evil is worth it if it lets you avoid war with a powerful nearby civ.
It does seem to be getting worse. I just played a suicidal game on a gigantic map against all AIs with fastest tech speed and just researched my way to a tech victory bcause all the AIs only used about a quarter of their planetary tiles.
Suicidal! But unlike Vulcan2, military is the only way I can win.
I think "Moderate your own ships" means just don't build ships that you consider unrealistic or exploitive. Nobody's forcing you to make ships you don't like. Or you can ignore the point of Moosetek13's post and insult him instead for a perceived vocabulary error. IMO, xpyre's original restrictions are much too hard and much too low. There's not much point in designing your own ships if you can only put two engines on a large hull; there aren't many choices left. But I could agr
Here's how to make a booming economy. Before the game starts, put your ability points into economy, morale, and population growth, and choose the Federalists or Populists as your political party. On your home planet, buy an entertainment network and set taxes low enough so the planet has 100% approval because at 100% approval, a planet's population growth doubles. That will keep your population growing fast enough that you can spam colony ships with 500 million people on them without depleting y
I've seen this too. In a game on suicidal, most of the planets of all the AIs were like this. Here's an example: [link="http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i68/nullspace0/badplanet.gif"]http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i68/nullspace0/badplanet.gif">Link This is a planet the Terrans colonized at the beginning of the game, and they have never been at war, so they didn't sabotage themselves. It's June 2228. All AIs were set to Incredible (I checked) and they played like it, exc
I think unfair galaxies are the most interesting type. There are some civs that are major treats, and some that are just stepping stones on your way to the top. If everyone's evenly matched, then your first little success makes you the most powerful civ, and you've pretty much won the game. But, if you want it as fair as possible, you should use scattered stars instead of tight clusters. This will spread the planets more evenly. A larger galaxy or fewer civs might help average thi
Play a higher difficulty level. Crippling isn't much harder, but masochistic is pretty mean. Turn off tech trading, or leave it on and don't do any trading yourself. Turn off minor races. Turn on blind exploration. Customize your civ to have weird abilities, or no abilities at all. Don't use any exploits, or tactics that you think are too easy. Try a different strategy, like cultural conquest. Play a smaller map with everything set to abundant. Choo
Masochistic and above don't seem to get certain types of events. I see morality choices on colonization and at random, and I get events like the economy boom that affect everyone, but I haven't seen a lucky ranger or an alignment change for a long time.
Just to be clear, I don't like stealing tech when you invade a planet. That's too easy and exploitable. Stealing tech through espionage is fine with me, I think I've only done it once. That'll probably be more interesting in the expansion, anyway.
I'd like this feature too. Or at least a change so that you can't buy or steal techs that you don't have the prerequisites for.
The "Unlimited Power" scenario starts you with 50 logistics, but you have to play as the Drengin.
Making a fleet of one ship is easy. Select a ship that is alone in a parsec, and press "f" on the keyboard.
One of the reasons I'm asking this question is that in my last game, I tried using starbases and tiny fighters for defense, and it failed miserably. Some of my full-strenght fleets lost to theirs, and the fleets that won took heavy losses. I think the change to combat in 1.2 made this strategy weaker because these fleets of tinies are very offense-heavy, and really benefitted from first strike. The starbases are really expensive to upgrade unless you're evil, and researching those t
What's the best way to defend your civ when a more powerful civ attacks you? If a civ has fleets that are stronger than yours and more of them, how do you survive long enough to make peace without having to give up planets? The best thing I've come up with is to build fleets that are faster than your enemies. These fast fleets won't be able to beat the enemy's main combat fleets, but the will be able to avoid them. They can go after softer targets, taking out transpor/esc
Usually the first ship I build is a cargo hull with 4 impulse drives and a few basic life supports, but no sensors. Its job is to check stars for habitable planets so I know where to send my colony ships. It's cheaper and faster than the colony ships (10 moves), and it doesn't "disappear" when it finds a good planet, so it's a much better scout. Knowing where the good planets are really helps in winning the colony rush, even on Suicidal. It lets you settle planets far from your homeworld fir
Maybe it's just be, but I'd do it completely differently. Using two types of weapons on the same ship is bad because the enemy rolls defense against each weapon. Defense isn't worth researching or building unless it matches your enemy's attack. But since you already have strong defenses researched, using them isn't bad. Put some engines on it so it can actually intercept enemy fleets.
As many planets as possible, so long as you don't go completely broke.
No, it is actually 5000 million soldiers, which is 5 billion people. It's working as intended.
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