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Reply to class 5 starport planets (somehow stupid, bug/ai problems) in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Sorry dm04, I think you're doing it backwards. You want your banks and farms on your best planets, and your factories and labs on your worst planets. This is because the population on a planet multiplies with the banks on the planet to produce money. So you want to have a large population and lots of banks on the same planet. For example, 2 farms and 10 banks on one planet is much better than the same buildings spread across two planets. Also, a planet with many factories will w

Reply to Are defenses simply to expensive? in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Defense is just fine the way it is. It is great in some situations, and bad in other cases, which is the way it should be in a strategy game. Defense is useful when there are more ships in your enemy's fleet than there are in your fleet. The important thing to notice is that every weapon shoots once per round of combat, but defense activates every time a ship gets shot. So if your enemy outnumbers you, your defense activates more often than your weapons. With good defense, a single ship can

Reply to Evil, Neutral, or Good? in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

I think Neutral's bonuses are the most universal and easy to use. Morale, research, more planet tiles; these things will help (alot) no matter how you're playing. You can almost never go wrong by choosing Neutral. The other two alignments require specific strategies to really take advantage of them. Good can be worth it just for the diplomacy bonus. If you're struggling in the galaxy, it can keep you out war or get you some easy allies for protection, and it really helps in an a

Reply to Comparison to Civ IV in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

I like both games a lot. I think GalCiv2 is the better empire-building game, and I think Civ4 is the better strategy game. GalCiv2 is great for customizing and building up your empire. There are lots of opportunities to run your civ just the way you want it. You get to pick abilities before the game starts, specialize your planets however you like, research only what you want in the tech tree, and trade anything for anything. And then there's the ship designer, which is the bigg

Reply to Noob question in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Attack a ship or starbase, or invade a planet. That'll declare war.

Reply to Optimized growth strategy in 1.1 in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Agreed. 100% approval is a good but micromanagey strategy.

Reply to Game Exploit in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

I don't think this problem is unsolvable. Make the damage to the planet proportional to the number of defending people killed. This would prevent the exploit where you use mass drivers with one soldier: it won't kill many enemies, and it won't do much damage. It also prevents the existing exploit: if you use mass drivers and kill lots of defenders but don't win the batlle, it will do a lot of damage.

Reply to Difference between top three difficulties? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

The question is about the top three difficulties, NOT the top three AI settings. Masochistic through Suicidal all use all incredible AIs, so I have no idea if there is any difference.

Reply to First Game Completed - Relatively Disappointed in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Kolpo listed all my favorite improvements GC2 made over GC1. The new planetary development, ship design, fleet battles, and tech tree all allow new, deep strategy. The problem is, some of the things I didn't like about GC1 are completely unchanged. Civ 3 had many of the same problems as GC1, but Civ 4 made changes that make it a much better game than Civ 3. I don't like the beginning colony rush in GalCiv. There's one best strategy her

Reply to A strategy the AI fails to cope with well (warning: long, rambling) in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

This can be a very serious offensive strategy too. Build constructors with several engines, and build tiny ships with one attack, one defense, and as many engines as you can. This is a surprisingly fast and powerful offensive force. The constructors can move many spaces, build a starbase, upgrade it, and support your fighters all in one turn. Your combat ships rarely die because of the big starbase bonuses, so they gain lots of experience. You onl

Reply to What gets me more money? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Combination of both. Population and economic bonuses multiply together to produce money, so you want good amounts of both, rather then emphasizing one or the other. 10 * 10 > 19 * 1, and all that. 5 factories, 3 farms, 6 entertainment nets, and the rest banks/economic capital/political capital sounds about right to me.

Reply to Request for clarification: ship combat in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

As far as I can tell, attack rolls from 1 to the maximum. I've never seen zero damage done to a ship with zero defense. But defense seems to roll from 0 to its maximum. I've seen ships with 1 attack damage ships with 1 defense. As for mixed attack and defenses, I think this is mostly covered in the manual. Different types of weapons all fire seperately, and each seperate shot is affected by all of the target's defenses. Bas

Reply to 2 technological capitals in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Yep, all captured super projects work just fine. This gets really powerful if you capture things like the hyperion logistics center and hyperion shrinker that affect your whole civilization. Once you get a few of these, you have larger fleets and smaller weapons than everyone else can ever get.

Reply to All resources too overpowered? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

If you're playing on a map in which you have 209 colonies, you're playing a very extreme variation of GalCiv. With 209 planets, of course anything that affects all your planets will be very powerful. If I played a gigantic map with rare stars and rare habitable planets, then trade routes would be overpowered. If I added abundant anomolies, then survey ships would be overpowered, too. On a tiny map with all 9 civs, military starbases and warfare in

Reply to What racial abilities / political party do you use, and why? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Speed is very powerful for the early land grab. And it's good for early warfare because you can skip putting engines on your ships and load up with weapons and troop modules instead.

Reply to Metaverse Difficulty in Metaverse GalCiv2 Forums

OK, so I'm not the only one. I just posted about this in the Metaverse Help thread.

Reply to STICKY: Metaverse Help! in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

I completed a game on suicidal, submitted it to the metaverse, and the game's difficulty got listed as "normal". Could this have something to do with the fact that I started the game before the last update, then updated to v1.0X.1, and then finished the game? Here's me Link the Altarian game is the one I'm talking about.

Reply to Unrestricted Tech Trade Ruins 4xTBS Games in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

It's not an AI problem, it's a game mechaincs problem. In the tech economy, supply and demand are messed up because when you "sell" at tech, you don't actually lose anything. After you take their money, you can still use the tech and sell it to other people. So, there's reasonable demand for techs, but infinite supply. In other words, techs are valuable to peple who don't have them, but worthless to people who do. Selling tech is basically free mo

Reply to Does anyone bother with tiny hulls? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Even if the Dreadlords do shoot back, losing one tiny ship isn't as bad as losing a larger ship.

Reply to Difficult victories! in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

You can make a lot of money tech trading even without high diplomacy. You just need a lot of buyers. Buy a tech that a few AIs have and sell it to all the rest. This will let you stay current in tech, it evens out the AIs so no one becomes too powerful, and it makes you tons of money. And you can get a diplomacy advantage by building the diplomatic translators and researching the diplomacy branch of the tech tree, which the AI seems to completely i

Reply to Total influence for one turn bug after capturing a planet. in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

I had something like this happen to me too. I invaded a planet and used information warfare. When I conquered it, the planet had an extremely high population, somewhere around a thousand trillions of people. Since a planet's influence depends on its population, I had a ridiculous amount of influence, too. Next turn, the planet starved down to its population cap and everthing went back to normal, except some alien planets outside my influence border

Reply to What're they doing that I'm not? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

The AI does love the economic capital. On campaign missions where you start with the tech to build it, the AI often rush buys the econ capital on the very first turn.

Reply to The value of a good defense? in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Comparing defense to attack one-to-one is oversimplifying the issue because attack and defense "activate" in different situations. Ships always attack once per round, but defense activates every time a ship gets attacked. Defense gets better when the enemy outnumbers you. Let's say you are faced with an enemy fleet of 5 small-hulled ships, and you have 3 large ships, so the logistics of the two fleets are even. Your ships will fire their weapons 3

Reply to Using a "tank" in your fleet in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I think the only way you can do this is to use the tiny ships as expendable tanks. Get some tiny ships that are all attack, and some big ships with just enough hitpoints and defense that the enemies target the little ships first. The little ships will be swatted like flies but it will waste some of the enemy's firepower. If an enemy does 20 damage to a ship with 6 hitpoints, 14 damage was wasted. The big ships will survive and gain experience, and

Reply to Campaign - Dread Lords... omg in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

Yeah, if you use tiny ships, it doesn't matter how much attack the Dreadlords have, they'll only ba able to do 6 damage a shot.