Galactic Civilizations II

[VonFenris]

So, I just got the game, but while I read the LPs on this forum and won my first game (then again, it was 'cakewalk' difficulty), and I feel I'm a bit drowning in all the options.
What are useful tips? Any knowledge I completely absolutely totally should know?

[Blayze]

From personal experience, I grant you these slivers of knowledge:

1) There will be a point in every game where conflicting levels of Influence render all attempts at diplomacy worthless as the entire universe spirals into constant chaos with everyone declaring war on everyone else--and especially you.

2) Trade with the Minor Races as much and as often as you can. Every piece of technology you trade with them is one piece they won't attempt to research later on, thus increasing the chance that they'll research something you don't already have.

3) Super Diplomat. Get it. It works.

4) Trades are never in your favour. I checked it once with a custom-built "pure diplomacy" species--my chosen victim wanted 7bc of my money in exchange for 1bc of theirs.

5) If you want to trade for a planet, you're going to have to either trade your tech for it extremely early or Super Annihilator it into the ground before you can get it at prices that aren't vastly in excess of your entire intergalactic empire.

6) Korath tech tree. Build one Dark Influencer on each planet. I call it the "Galaxy Flipper" for a reason.

[Artanis]

What expansions (if any) do you have? It makes a big difference (for instance, Blayze's 6th point is meaningless if you don't have Twilight of the Arnor, which introduces race-specific tech trees).

It also greatly depends on playstyle. For instance, Super Breeder is ridiculously good, but I could never leverage Super Diplomat worth a damn.

[Gaius Marius]

Just have fun. Pick a course and go for it. Then next game, do something different.

I know it doesn't sound that useful, but it's the best I can do about it. You will crash down miserably about as often as I did, but whenever you will manager to scramble a victory out of defeat just because you'd made a dumb move, you will be all :smallbiggrin:

The game is meant to be played and enjoyed. Not necessarely to be "won". Have fun out of it dude.

One of my most memorable game was playing as the Yor Collective on the corner of the Galaxy. I only traded with the humans, effectively making them my Neutral Puppet. All of the mid-powered evil civs were wiped out despite my best efforts, and the Drengin, the #2 galactic power and only potential philosophically-enclined ally "saw the light" and converted GOOD! :smallfurious:

Bloody Altarian Brainwashers.

I ended up fighting an attrition war against my biggest neighbour, the Arcaeans, and I ate up half of their territory, controlling the entire galactic south-east border. I then decided to expand my tactical range by conquering all the minor races in the course of 6 turns.

And then I struct the final blow. The Iconians, the race that originally created the Yor, my closest neighbour and wipping boy, finally got on my nerves one last time too many. I coordinated a massive invasion force where I took every single one of their planet in a single turn, save one minor colony.

I checked out the stats. I effectively wiped out 46B people in that turn. And then the fun started:

- The Altarians
- the Drengins
- the Torians
- The Arcaeans
- the Drath

All declared war on me. With the Humans remaining neutral, it was gonna be the Galaxy Vs. Me.

I felt like a Galactic Sauron, or maybe the Borg. :smallbiggrin:


I won that game. Or at least, I fought this war until I wiped out the Arcaeans and Draths, I brough the Torians down to 5 colonies (largest galaxy available) and forced them into a Peace Treaty. And I had neutralised the Drengin. The game reached the point where it was going to be a mere mop-up, and I lost interest.

Still one of my most epic game.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Super Breeder gives you a great baby making machine. It helps jump start the economy on those money sink holes you call colonies. I don't recall much else other than try to go with a different weapon type than the leaders. With some luck their defense will be the wrong one.

[Gaius Marius]

Super Breeder gives you a great baby making machine. It helps jump start the economy on those money sink holes you call colonies. I don't recall much else other than try to go with a different weapon type than the leaders. With some luck their defense will be the wrong one.

Go with High Morale instead of high breeder. (or go for both). higher morale means higher population or higher taxes.

If you have too much population, you'll have morale trouble, and that leads to discontent = not good. You can crank up population density and economical activity when you have nice natural bonuses.

[Ailurus]

I don't recall much else other than try to go with a different weapon type than the leaders. With some luck their defense will be the wrong one.

On that note, I find that diversifying your weapon techs (and to a lesser extent armor) is generally not a good idea. When outfitting your ships, 10 mass drivers on a ship pays much better dividends than having 4 lasers, 3 mass drivers and 3 missiles. Check out what your likely opponents start deploying, and then pick counters and hit the research on those hard. (for example, if they launch ships armed with mass drivers and equipped with anti-missile systems, start researching armor and either lasers or your own mass drivers, and stuff all your ships with just lasers and armor - at least until he starts diversifying [but even then, a ship with a pile of mid to high end lasers can punch through low-level shield systems pretty easily])

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Oh yeah, pick one weapon and go with it, but try to pick a different weapon than the leaders.

[warty goblin]

Oh yeah, pick one weapon and go with it, but try to pick a different weapon than the leaders.

Note that it can be worth faking your enemies out at times by starting with one weapon, then switching to another once they've invested in the requisite defenses. I've also actually had pretty decent success with developing a second line of weapons to a reasonable degree and sticking one or two of them on in addition to my main battery. That way I'm going to be doing at least some damage, and until later in the game a high defense ship can be exceedingly hard to crack using the weapon type it was built to counter.

My one piece of advice is that economy is absolutely king in this game. It's not explained very well, but here's some things it's worth understanding.

1) Everything costs money. To be specific every point of research, domestic or military production costs 1BC. That factory you built doesn't generate any production, it allows you to buy it. How much you can buy is determined by a few factors.
A) What sort of factory it is. Obviously the more advanced ones allow for more production
B) How much of your economy you're leveraging. On one of the screens (can't remember which atm) there's a slider that allows you to determine how hard you're running your economy. Unless you're actively melting down, this should be at 100%. It's nice to have money in the bank, but it's better to just make stuff as fast as possible.
C) How you're dividing your spending. Below the slider mentioned above are three that control spending on construction, military and research. These control how much money gets sent to each branch of your economy - building new buildings, building new ships and researching new stuff, respectively. By default they're evenly split, and usually I've found it OK to leave them there. There may be times, say during a major war, where you need a lot of ships and new weapons, so it's worth throttling back construction spending or something, but in general I leave these alone.

2) The best ways I've found to get money is to sell off tech to the AI - which I don't like to do as it feels vaguely abusive when done optimally - or get lots of people and taxing them. Population growth is proportional to the number of people on the world modulo how happy they are, and if you took any racial advantages that allow you to breed like nympho space rabbits. How happy they are is determined by how many there are (the more the less merry), how much they pay in taxes, and all the entertainment buildings you've built on the planet to keep them happy. IIRC happiness is not factored in as a continuous variable, but instead in some fairly large discrete percentage blocks. That is to say the game doesn't distinguish between 70% happiness and 75% happiness, but going from 69% to 70% matters, as does bumping it all the way up to 100%. Helpfully these are color coded, so it's easy to tell when you've increased or decreased your happiness a meaningful amount.

Essentially if you want to grow your population very fast, drop taxes until your happiness rating is 100%. If you can't afford that, raise them until it's as close to 70% as you can get it without it dropping below that point. You'll make some extra money, and your growth rate is going to be pretty much the same.

You can also make money through trade routes with other civs. This can be extremely profitable, but it makes you vulnerable, and requires some investment to set up. Controlling a lot of territory also gives you nice piles of money, but unless you're going for a cultural victory it probably can't support your economy.

3) It is worth going to war for a class 30 world. Really. If you can afford to run the thing full tilt (and that's a big if, those suckers are expensive!) they can do amazing things.

[tribble]

3) It is worth going to war for a class 30 world. Really. If you can afford to run the thing full tilt (and that's a big if, those suckers are expensive!) they can do amazing things.

isn't a class 20, like, an entire planet of Bahama resorts and ski mountains and naked buxom natives who would love to hear you talk about your level 18 wood elf etc. etc.?

[VonFenris]

A lot of replies, and many thanks!
First time around, I went for a simple "conquer everything" civ, now I'll try something different (super breeder huh? Hmmmm...)

[Triaxx]

I have only the original game, and the best I've seen is a 26. But it was completely worth going to war with the humans by destroying they're colony ship to get it first. I filled it with nothing but research and made it my research capital.

Ascension for the WIN.

[Gaius Marius]

I have only the original game, and the best I've seen is a 26. But it was completely worth going to war with the humans by destroying they're colony ship to get it first. I filled it with nothing but research and made it my research capital.

Ascension for the WIN.

I am still wondering how the initial 50m settlers on my Class 32 planet became, in less than 3 years, 46B

I mean, I like the whole argument that "registered population is taxable population, but doesn't represent the entire of your world's population", but come on. There really were 45,5B smuggled people on board of my colony ship? Talk about Illegal Immigration problems.


On another topic, asking for the best-quality weapon to a defeated ennemy is always a good thing to do if they developped an alternate tree than you. In the unlikely case you encounter an ennemy that picked the right defense, it's worth it to skip entire tech tree and just bully the ennemy into giving you the top.

These secondary weapons saved my ass in a few occasion, and diversifying my Death Portfolio is never an action I regret.

[Artanis]

I am still wondering how the initial 50m settlers on my Class 32 planet became, in less than 3 years, 46B

I mean, I like the whole argument that "registered population is taxable population, but doesn't represent the entire of your world's population", but come on. There really were 45,5B smuggled people on board of my colony ship? Talk about Illegal Immigration problems.

"Pay no attention to the ridiculous number of cloning tanks behind the curtain." :smalltongue:

[skb]

For some pointers on combat, here (http://galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Ship_combat) is the wiki article on ship-to-ship combat. Also of note is that when fleets initiate combat, they both make a list of priority targets by the formula: Total Attack / (Total Defense + Hit Points). the higher the result, the higher that ship will be on the enemy threat list.

You can exploit this: if you have modules that grant fleet-wide bonuses (like the terran warp bubble thingie); slap it on a cargo hull (1hp) with no weapons and lots of defenses. This will ensure it will only be destroyed after the whole fleet is obliterated.

[Gaius Marius]

I remember, before an early patch, that I completely abused the ship design system. It was funny, since I noticed I never needed more than 10M people to properly conquer a world (yay Force Multiplier!!), I just stacked all of my transport ships with about 20x engines, giving them a speed of 80+ squares.

Let's just say I didn't waste time with my "creative emigration policy" :smallbiggrin:

[Winter_Wolf]

I am still wondering how the initial 50m settlers on my Class 32 planet became, in less than 3 years, 46B

I mean, I like the whole argument that "registered population is taxable population, but doesn't represent the entire of your world's population", but come on. There really were 45,5B smuggled people on board of my colony ship? Talk about Illegal Immigration problems.

I think they (devs or whoever) were thinking of it in terms of "local fauna". Basically the backwoods hicks of the galaxy that are less than minor races, rambling around in their yurts and basically unaware that anything exists beyond their planet until they get colonized. Once you introduce them to "civilization" they start to invade your colony cities in droves looking for the good life. ...And then it all goes to hell because of overcrowding.

[Gaius Marius]

I think they (devs or whoever) were thinking of it in terms of "local fauna". Basically the backwoods hicks of the galaxy that are less than minor races, rambling around in their yurts and basically unaware that anything exists beyond their planet until they get colonized. Once you introduce them to "civilization" they start to invade your colony cities in droves looking for the good life. ...And then it all goes to hell because of overcrowding.

I prefer the excuse that there are emmigration lanes between my core planets and my colonies, to compensate population unbalance.

If I had to design such game, that's how I'd do it. You would have to protect and manage the emmigration scheme of your specie :smallbiggrin: And also have to deal with multi-species worlds.. so maybe Genocide will be a viable option?

[skb]

I prefer the mind**** theory that the devs couldn't fix the pop growth without horribly breaking the games' economy and hanging a lampshade on the whole thing with the quarterly reports.



Outlandish I know :smug:

edit: this board has an automatic censor? Huh.

[Douglas]

I prefer the excuse that there are emmigration lanes between my core planets and my colonies, to compensate population unbalance.

If I had to design such game, that's how I'd do it. You would have to protect and manage the emmigration scheme of your specie :smallbiggrin: And also have to deal with multi-species worlds.. so maybe Genocide will be a viable option?
Reminds me of MoO3 (yes, I admit it exists), where migration between planets was explicitly built into the game. The fact that one race would eat population of other races on the same planet, plus the possibility of inter-empire population migration, turned this into a major headache or a great blessing, depending on the player. Some players welcomed the opportunity to convert their entire population to this alien race, while others took a rather dim view of the implications regarding their kill-it-with-fire policy towards that race and the inability to selectively ban such immigration.

One of the many decently good ideas ruined by execution in that game.

[tribble]

I've been wanting to get this for a while. Where can I buy this? (cheap is good)

[factotum]

I've been wanting to get this for a while. Where can I buy this? (cheap is good)

Buy it from the source--Stardock's Impulse service (http://www.impulsedriven.com). The bundle with all the expansions is showing as £18.35 for me, but obviously you may not be UK based! (Oh, and you'll need to download it once you've bought it, too).

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Lords of the Realm 2 had emigration. Pretty much the citizens of less happy counties would tend to move to happier counties. Normally not too noticable unless there was a huge happiness imbalance. It was also a mixed blessing. More people means more taxes and more of a population you can draft. It also meant that you needed more food and could really hurt if some disasters just struck or the enemy decided to pillage your fields.