Galactic Civilizations II

[MeklorIlavator]

I recently got this game(plus all expansions), and so far its been...interesting. Very fun, in any case, especially designing ships and such. Any other playgrounders play the game? Have any general strategies for new people?

[Z-dan]

I got it a long long time ago... haven't played it in ages, though I remember it being a very good game- and it's given me an idea on what to play when I get as bored as I was last night :smallbiggrin:
Suffice to say, I can't really remember many strategies- other than that when you have a fully functional culture station you are a god.

[Ethdred]

I've been wasting far too much time on it over the last couple of weeks - mainly the Dark Avatar expansion, which has some extra bits I like so much I can't now go back to the original. I've been doing random games rather than the campaign, and haven't really worked out any strategies. I've only just got up to difficulty levels where the AI is becoming challenging, so am having to think up ways of playing other than 'research every tech that only takes 1 or 2 weeks' and 'colonise everything you can then devote all building to constructors for influence starbases'. So some strategic thinking is now called for! I've only played a couple of races - the Drengi and the Terrans, both of whom I like. Tried the Krynn last night but made a pig's ear of it (partly deliberately). It's good how all the races are different, but means it's going to be harder to work out how to play them properly!

[The Evil Thing]

Though I love this game to bits, I'm really bad at it. I'm the sort of person who doesn't like to build ships until I have a real technological edge. So I end up with a very small fleet (if I remembered to build one in the first place) that can't defend all my systems when the barbarians start hammering on the gates. :smalltongue:

[Blayze]

I just play the Sandbox mode. For the moment I've only been doing Tiny matches against a full set of the hardest opponents. Give me either the Korath or the Krynn's technology tree and my own custom race (The Dai-Gurren-Dan) and I'll kick everyone else in the face through a combination of culture and diplomacy (Spam the minor races full of tech and they'll help you out here, as every tech of yours you give to them is one more tech they'll research that you might not have yet).

And when my culture expands to the point where war is inevitable, I'll chuck a few Terror Stars around and hopefully detonate my enemies' homeworlds.

[Om]

Though I love this game to bits, I'm really bad at it. I'm the sort of person who doesn't like to build ships until I have a real technological edge. So I end up with a very small fleet (if I remembered to build one in the first place) that can't defend all my systems when the barbarians start hammering on the gates. :smalltongue:I had that problem as well until I started building a whole load of crappy defenders, approx three per world. This artificially inflates your military score to a huge degree, thus putting the fear of God into the AI. Its volume and not quality that they care about (in the early game at least)

[Artanis]

I recently got this game(plus all expansions), and so far its been...interesting. Very fun, in any case, especially designing ships and such. Any other playgrounders play the game? Have any general strategies for new people?
I have the game and I love it, but I only have the first expansion. While this means that I don't know what everybody is capable of in the newest one, some things should carry through no matter what the changes are:

*Pick a race that suits your playstyle. For example, in DA I prefer the Yor because their Super Isolationist trait is an amazing asset to my style of warfare. You'll almost certainly be different, but the intent is the same

*Expand expand expand. Ironically, speed is hugely important in TBS games, and that goes double for a 4X like GalCiv 2. The bigger you are at the end of the colony rush, the easier the rest of the game becomes. It's a serious bitch fight a competent AI like the Korath are in DA, but if they're bigger than you, it's going to be a bloodbath no matter who wins.

*Keep enough military to defend yourself. All the colonies in the world don't matter if they get overrun. You don't need to have the biggest military, you just need a big enough one to hold the line until you can ramp up war production if the enemy attacks. If you're going to err though, err on the side of a bigger military because of exactly what Om mentioned.

*Keep track of what weapons and defenses the other races are using, and counter that. Get defenses for the most likely enemy weapons, and get weapons that punch through the most likely enemy defenses.

*Start each colony's production with several factories. It doesn't matter what you're going to turn a colony into, it's going to take forever to get there if you don't boost its production a bit first.

*Be aware of where diminishing returns kicks in. In DL and DA (and thus I presume in the later expansions), populations grow more and more slowly as they get bigger, so at some point, it becomes better to make econ buildings than it is to try to keep the population growing even bigger.

*Money is EVERYTHING. Research buildings do nothing if you can't fund them. Factories produce nada if you can't fund them. Invasion support actions might as well not exist if you can't pay for them. And that's on top of all the usual 4X costs like ship maintenance.

*Make sure your transports are full. Invading with a transport that has 5 troops in it is a complete waste of the time and money that went into making it.

*Specialize your worlds. You'll get more out of one econ world, one shipyard world, and one research world than you will out of three hybrids.

[Fri]

Though I love this game to bits, I'm really bad at it. I'm the sort of person who doesn't like to build ships until I have a real technological edge. So I end up with a very small fleet (if I remembered to build one in the first place) that can't defend all my systems when the barbarians start hammering on the gates. :smalltongue:

I'm also that kind of person. I found a trick for my kind of game.

Research until you can build, say small or medium hull. then, build a lot of them, equipped only with weak weapons. Dont forget to vary the ships, basically buld base ship A, base ship B, etc.

Then, after you think you got enough weapon/shield tech advantage, upgrade your ships. Suddenly, all of your dinky base ship A-s become godly fighters equipped with big freakin lasers. Base ship B-s become Torpedo platforms. etc.

upgrading ship is expensive though. But I almost always got so much money when it's time to upgrade the ships that I can afford it. But remember to vary the base ship, so you don't upgrade, like 50 ships at the same time. It will blow your economy to kingdom come. That's my basic way to do it. Maybe not really good or efficient, but suits my play style.

[warty goblin]

I was just rolling a game of Dark Avatar the other week, and was having a blast. Here's the strategy I use:

1) Increase spending to 100%, drop taxes until approval is 100%. This will cause your economy to exsanguinate faster than a chicken with its head cut off, but is worth it.

2) Buy factory at homeworld. Focus military production, start work on custom colony ship with only one colony module and an extra engine. Asteriod miner should be doin' its thing, survey ship should be checking anomolies, except for wormholes and Civilization Graveyards. The first just send you someplace you don't want, the second should be saved for major researches since they sometimes give you a 25% research bonus.

3) Grab some colonies. Don't bother researching colonization techs unless you see a really good world somewhere- class 10 or above, it's just not worth it for anything less than that early game.

4) On your colonies immediately queue a factory, then a pile of economic buildings. Find a high class colony and designate it a research world, and a prominently placed good world for ship building. Everything else should be mostly economic. Research at this point should be aimed towards planet upgrades and economic buildings in particular.

5) Support your economy by selling tech to the AI. Make sure to sell the same tech to all the AI in one turn, otherwise they'll trade it to each other and cut you out of the profits. If your population is getting reasonably large, jack the taxes up until you have 70% approval- no more and no less. If you really need more money, increase taxes until approval is about 45%. Hopefully you can maintain a high (green) approval until your colonies begin to make a profit.

6) Military: this is the gamble of this strategy, since production really doesn't kick off until after the population has increased sufficiently, after which you will be drowning in credits. Then its simply a matter of throwing your money at stuff. If the AI gets overly aggressive however you may end up screwed over, particularly if you got bad luck on the colony rush.

[MeklorIlavator]

Hey, does anyone have problems with using Galcatic Civilization2 with Vista?

[Om]

Hey, does anyone have problems with using Galcatic Civilization2 with Vista?Nope. I may have had when getting started, can't remember really, but it does run


3) Grab some colonies. Don't bother researching colonization techs unless you see a really good world somewhere- class 10 or above, it's just not worth it for anything less than that early game.Ah yes, the biggest single criticism I have the game is that success is determined to a significant degree by starting location. Colony spam is really the key to success and most strategies, including your own above, are ultimately about optimising this

[factotum]

Hey, does anyone have problems with using Galcatic Civilization2 with Vista?

Nope, runs fine on Vista 64 here. What sort of problems are you having?

[Rutskarn]

Just thought I'd share my Galactic Civilizations II strategy with y'all.

1.) Start a civilization focused on technology and war.

2.) Begin the game. Set miners on automate, and start cranking out scout ships. Create buildings related to research.

3.) Begin investigating with scout ships, flagship.

4.) Look through technologies. Make a list of ones that will improve your economic situation as it stands.

5.) Keep looking at the list for a minute.

6.) Throw the list away. Bo-ring!

7.) Start weapons research.

8.) Make peace with local empire. Trade stuff with them.

9.) Realize that you've pretty much botched your buildings. Knock down a few, build farms instead to increase ship output.

10.) Last? Whaddya mean, last? I'll show those other civilizations!

11.) Impatiently produce a warship.

12.) Launch a completely unprovoked attack on whichever race has the most obnoxious color. Unless they're at Friendly or better in diplomatic relations. That'd just be rude.

13.) Start winning the war. Pop some champagne.

14.) Start losing the war. Throw the bottle at the screen.

15.) Desperately try to make peace while trying to colonize other planets. Dammit, they got all the good ones!

16.) Now we have some production power, let's just...crap! Why is my approval rating so low?

17.) How did my planet get so overpopulated? That sucks!

18.) And now...great! They've declared war on me too? And them? And them?

19.) OMG WTF H4X!

20.) Quit game. Start game on "Cakewalk" difficulty.

21.) Ooh, shipbuilder!

Yeah. I play turn-based strategies with the finesse of a drunken, blind hobo performing open-heart surgery with a prison shiv.

[MeklorIlavator]

Just general computer problems. Well, that's a bit misleading. What actually happened is that vista got corrupted and then some vital files got deleted. Next thing I know, Vista can't boot. Luckily. I'm home over break so my dad(an IT guy) has looked at it, and it should be good by the end of the day. On the other hand, he thinks it might be because my older games caused problems. He can be a bit fanatical about such things, so he wants me to not install any games(even ones that are made to work with vista) until I come back for spring break.

Back on topic, yeah, I noticed how getting alot of colonies is very important. The first game I played I won handily because I had a decently large cluster all to myself, and was thus able to expand readily. On the other hand, in my second game things aren't so good. I didn't expand nearly fast enough, so I almost got hemmed in. Things aren't too bad at the moment only because I was able to colonize some nice planets on the other side of Humanity, and I'm thinking of attacking them if only so I can get more planets. Or at least, that was what I was thinking about before my computer died on me.

[chiasaur11]

No, other than stuttering cutscenes, which have happened on every computer I've played GalCiv 2 on.

My favorite thing to do so far?

I built Mechagodzilla. It can kill pretty much anything.

[Fri]

6) Military: this is the gamble of this strategy, since production really doesn't kick off until after the population has increased sufficiently, after which you will be drowning in credits. Then its simply a matter of throwing your money at stuff. If the AI gets overly aggressive however you may end up screwed over, particularly if you got bad luck on the colony rush.

You MUST have some military asap, however small it is. A couple of defender is enough. The point is, to show to the other civilization that yes, you have military power.

Imagine a country without a military at all. No matter what, his neighbors will point and laugh at him.

[AgentPaper]

You MUST have some military asap, however small it is. A couple of defender is enough. The point is, to show to the other civilization that yes, you have military power.

Imagine a country without a military at all. No matter what, his neighbors will point and laugh at him.

If you want a historical example, this is exactly what happened to Tibet. :smallwink:

[factotum]

You MUST have some military asap, however small it is. A couple of defender is enough. The point is, to show to the other civilization that yes, you have military power.

Imagine a country without a military at all. No matter what, his neighbors will point and laugh at him.

I always try to maintain at least parity with my strongest opponent, militarily--it makes them considerably less likely to declare war on you. Making sure you have the best ships to defend against that race (e.g. if they're using Mass Drivers you'd better be using armour as your main defence) helps too.

Oh, and the most important thing of all: get some survey ships out there! The techs required to build one are early ones (so long as you don't mind putting it in a Tiny, Small, or Cargo hull) and they will gain you a lot of stuff over the course of a full game.

[Jarade]

My strategy was usually to focus primarily on culture and research, boosting my economy as the game went on. I usually wound up allies with 3/4ths of the game, and never worried about military until endgame / imminent attack.

Yes, that strategy takes forever, but, it can make the decimation of your enemies that much sweeter, as your Invinvible war machines slaughter their weak formations turn after turn.

I have no idea what difficulty I got too, but I'm fairly sure that strat would be the wrong idea when facing the really bad ass guys.

[Hawriel]

I see I think along the same lines as some of you other guys.

I build a smaller faster colony ship, and a faster construction ship.

I try to place econ star bases so they cover at least two planets. Then I build a second so base to over lap. Thoughs worlds become my tech, industry, econ worlds. thoughs along with my home world will be the core of my empire. I usualy set up small worlds as food production. I try to put one econ, farm and moral building on every planet with a score of 9 or above. I try to spread food production around so if i loose one planet I'm not starving.

For super projects:
I always go for the ones that gives free max out sensors to every ship, and free maxed out life support. You can build some over powerd ships when you dont have to worry about life support. The last one is the privateer. This project makes your trade routs immune to attack. Only established trade roughts. New freighters can still be attacked befor they make a trade rought.

race.
I use the customized race. The Corellian Federation :smallbiggrin:, yeah I know I couldn't resist. When I want to be evil its the Galactic Empire. When I creat the I max out the trade techs so I'm an expert traider right off the bat. I also give a bonus to my peaples moral +15, soldering +20 traid +10. Oh and Luck +25 Im playing corellians after all. For the political party I use the industrialists, +20 social and military production.

Mony:
Build econ star bases. Two per planetary cluster and have them over lap. Dont forget to add the trade mods to them. Remember the farther out the trade rought goes the more mony your freighter makes. So I build a freighter then send it to the farthest friendly planet I cant find. Usualy a minor race planet on the other side of the map. Just pick a bunch of planets from different racess. That way if you go to war with some one you only lose two or three trade roughts at most.

Military:
First find out what weapon your potential rivals are using. Potential rivals are usualy the most hostile guys on the map. I find most like energy weapons. So build up your shield defence and reserch energy weapons. Yeah I know the guys will have shields too. This is why. You sell off the energy weapon tech to other racess wile you research mass drivers. Now every one is energy weapon relient wile you can put a mini singularity right though their shields. Go for quality of ships rather than quantety. I find the nano ripper is one of the best weapons in the game.

I have six types of ships.

Intercepters, Tiny hulls that have one weapon and move 7+. they shoot down troop transports.

Privateers: Small hulls with one good weapon, that move 10+, with some defence, and have longe range and max sensors. They kill all support ships, unarmed bases, mines and scout ships.

Defence: Medium and large hulled ships with no engines. They have good weaponry but as much defencive tech I can stick on them. They sit in orbit around my important planets, and planets on my borders.

Reaction: Medium and large hulled ships that move 7+ with good weaponry and defence. These ships move to repond to invaders and make up the bulk of my forces.

Battleships: Large or Huge hull. I only have one Huge hull desine. These are for building fleets around to pound any invading fleet and to strip away military bases and planitary defence for invasions.

Troop carriers: I build them in pairs. You can get to a point whare you can put 3 or four troop moduals on one ship. Thats good for the high population worlds. However researching techs and building super projects to boost the soldiering score is the sure way to invade a planit with out fuss. And to with stand invasion. If you have a very high soldier score you can take on a planet with four times your invading army. The mini soldiers tactic is the best i find for leveling the odds.

Last comment is tech trading and colonisation. I find that almost any specias, including the small guys will give their grandmother and their right nut for an advanced coloniztion tech. Toxic, heavy gravity, aquatic world. You can most often get what ever you want if you trade that away. Just make sure you trade it after you colonize thoughs worlds you want first.

[Fri]

There is one thing that still confuses me. Say we have a fleet consisted of one big ship and half dozen small ship. Does enemy fleet shoot at random ship, shoot at weaker fighter first, or shoot at bigger ship first?

I thing I had built this gargantuan defender with minimal weapon, only to be ignored by the enemy. They finished my smaller ships that had the weapons, the n left my ineffectual defender for the last. Is it random? Or we can give order to focus fire or something?

[factotum]

I would assume the enemy is intelligent enough to shoot at the ships that might be able to damage them first--otherwise they might spend their time taking down a transport or something like that. I wouldn't recommend specialising ships in that way anyway; if you need to make more room for guns, sacrifice speed, sensor range or life support!

[warty goblin]

There is one thing that still confuses me. Say we have a fleet consisted of one big ship and half dozen small ship. Does enemy fleet shoot at random ship, shoot at weaker fighter first, or shoot at bigger ship first?

I thing I had built this gargantuan defender with minimal weapon, only to be ignored by the enemy. They finished my smaller ships that had the weapons, the n left my ineffectual defender for the last. Is it random? Or we can give order to focus fire or something?

There's no way to order ships in combat at all. There is some sort of AI algorithm that prioritizes targets on what I think is a 'how much good will shooting this one do?' criteria. An all offense ship is a better target than an all defense ship because 1) It does more damage, and 2) It's easier to damage.

There are some flukes with this, transports fleeted with other ships are always last on the targeting queue. I say this because I got the law passed that gave all transports a 4 in all weapons catagories very early one game, back when the most cutting edge warship in the galaxy had a beam attack of 2. Yet in fleets the escorts were always targeted first, which left this brief window of opportunity for transports with a few escorts to rule the skies.

[Artanis]

There's no way to order ships in combat at all. There is some sort of AI algorithm that prioritizes targets on what I think is a 'how much good will shooting this one do?' criteria. An all offense ship is a better target than an all defense ship because 1) It does more damage, and 2) It's easier to damage.
Yeah, there's an algorithm. IIRC, what it does is looks at each ship's score using the same equation that determines your military score, then divides that by the ship's defense score (part of said equation). Whichever is biggest gets shot at first.

Or something along those lines.

Needless to say, this has its issues, but not as many as the headaches revolving around a civ's military score.




Edit: Something I just thought of.

It might be solved in the latest expansion, but I know that when I play DA, there is an issue that causes an effect similar to a memory leak. As more and more ship designs come into play (and the AI makes a LOT of ship designs, sometimes winding up with 50+ per hull size by the end of the game), they have to be stored in memory. However, the program doesn't like to delete old ones from memory. So eventually, you run out of memory and the game slows down real quick. So when you notice the game getting waaaay slower than it should be (even after accounting for all the stuff in the galaxy that would slow it down anyways), save the game, quit, and start it back up. That'll clear the crap out. It only takes a minute, but helps in the long run.


Also: PLAY THE METAVERSE! Join the Empire of the Stick, so your games can bring greater glory to The Playground! :smallbiggrin: