Galactic Civ II query

The Game Room
1

Ok, I burnt out on Champions Online…I knew it would happen. I wasn’t ready to go back to WoW or CoX so I loaded up Galactic Civilizations II and started dinking around.

Its complicated. But having not really played it I expected a learning curve. What I hope here is that some of you may be able to offer me some advice.

Playing as the Terran federalists I noted that early in my games the alien races have mastered one or more of the Extreme colonization techs. or me, it says around 50+ weeks to learn it. So how did they get it so fast and still have other techs?

Is it best to not build anything on Earth until the the second colony ship is built? I see that it takes longer once you start building improvements. (Because the populace is busy building the ship and the improvements?)
How can I get these techs without crippling my expansion?

2

I believe the Yor and Iconians in particular start with some advanced colonization ability.

This one is tough to answer. There are dozens of different winning strategies, one of the great strengths of this game, and some would say yes, some no. A lot of people, especially in small galaxy settings, will rush colony ships with cash as long as they can and deliberately avoid building on newly settled worlds until population ( and hence taxes ) build up a bit. But that is hardly the only way to play and can vary quite a bit, especially if you have the expansion packs which differentiate species bonuses even more ( I’d recommend at least the first and probably the second as well, but beware as they can change the basic game a lot ).

Trade. The Terrans, at least with the expansion packs, are often considered perhaps the easiest species to play because of their enormous diplomatic ability.

But really you may not need them anyway until late game. It depends entirely on your starting settings.

3

It’s been a while since I played (and that was a few versions ago) so some of this might be slightly off.

For how the computer researched stuff so fast you have to understand how the economy works and it’s kind of complicated.

You can adjust your tax rate panels (empire management? I don’t remember for sure). You wanna jack the taxes up as high as you can and still maintain ~50% popularity. There a breakpoints at 50%, 60%, and probably others where it drops alot more then normal, so you will probably want to put it at 49% to start out till you can get more happiness buildings going. If you’re on a lower difficulty or you picked morale traits you can probably go higher from the start. There are penalties for having too low morale, though I don’t remember what they are offhand so don’t let it dip too low.

Spending rate (probably not called that) is right below that, you want to bump that up as high as you can and still have a positive income. If you get lucky finding money from the goodie huts you might want to bump it up to 100% for a while to spend the excess.

Below that are sliders for social, military, and research spending. These work with the above slider to determine the percent of your factories and labs that are being used. Unlike most of these types of games, factories and labs don’t actually produce anything - they just convert money into either hammers (social and military production) or beakers (research production). Putting the spending slider to 100% and the research slider to 100% means 100% of your labs are being used at full capacity to turn money into beakers. Running 100% spending and 50% research 50% military means your labs are running at half capacity and so are your factories when they are used to produce ships.

Unfortunately, you can’t run everything at 100% (even if you can afford it.) so you have to pick and choose. You probably want to bump military (shipbuilding) production up and maybe social (planetary construction) to start out with to get those colony ships out quicker. Once you’ve colonized everything you can, you can turn military down (or off) to get buildings and research done faster.

Note that excess social production from factories gets turned into military production (maybe the other way around), and excess military production gets turned back into money so there is no loss from that.

A general good start is to send your flagship around looking for goodie huts (which are space debris in this game). It starts with a survey module built in, which lets it open them and the rewards are generally very good - try and get as many as you can before the enemies do! Build colony ships and send them to every star in range - if you have a certain tech (stellar cartography I think… some races start with it) you can see which stars have planets - no use sending a colony ship to stars with no planets. You can build scout ships, but it’s usually best to just scout with the colony ships.

I usually build a factory on every new world (the colony base does not really produce enough hammers) then I specialize them. Small worlds with few slots get a few food and tax buildings to make some money, larger worlds get a bunch of factories to build ships, and so on. I’m not sure if this is the optimal strategy but it helps me keep track of everything, anyway.

As far as research tips, this advice might be out-dated because like I said I have not played for a while but weapons are generally much better then defense as far as cost effectiveness (guns are good vs two armor types and weak vs one, while defense is the opposite - good vs one, weak vs two). Pick a weapon type, there are slight differences (lasers, for example, do less damage but are smaller so you can stuff more on a ship) but it does not really matter.

Research the best (smallest) of the first ‘tech’ of defenses, and put a single one of each on every ship - the wrong defense type counts half it’s value anyway, so for example shields count for 50% against mass drivers. It’s rounded up though, so one of each type gives you 3 points of defense vs everything for minimal space cost which can be helpful early game.

Starbases are incredibly good, don’t neglect them! galactic resources (the little floating colored shapes in space) can make a HUGE difference so capture them whenever you can and upgrade the starbase they are on (fly another constructor into the starbase). Try and destroy the enemy resource starbases too - he won’t usually build guns on them so you can make a few small fast ships to zoom around blowing them up. You can also build trade, economy, military, and influence starbases anywhere - economy ones are very useful near your planets and military ones can buff up nearby ships ALOT. I’ve never had much use for trade or influence ones personally (but then I tend to shoot first and ask questions never).

…this is running kind of long, sorry about that. Hopefully it helps though, and feel free to ask if you have any other questions.

4

Thanks for the advice. It helps. Off courseits touch and go…the game is a bit counter intuitive. I prefer to play a builder, and make my galactic takeover through commerce and technology. With every test game I [play I learn a bit more. That doesn’t mean that anyt advice anyone has to give won’t be helpful!

5

I must be going about the game wrong. I usually start off by trying to claim as many planets as I can support, and after researching a few techs to improve the speed of my ships I go for trade so I can quickly send freighters to the other civilizations to increase my cash flow. Then after I have a section of the galaxy that is “mine” I try to set up influence and military bases in order to deter the others from colonizing in my space.

It doesn’t work, at least not as well as I’d like. The other races still set up planets I’ve overlooked because they had a low class. I tend to not immediately colonize anything under below class 6 at first, but I’ve seen the AI colonize class 3 planets and even Class 1! Sure, they become mine due to rebellions but its a pain in the butt.

Since I try to go for a builder type of win, I don’t engage in war unless I have to. But I’m thinking I’ll have to change that and eliminate or at least severely hobble some of my competitors. But since I have a problem getting my planets to be viable for awhile its difficult to put together a decent invasion force. I may be paranoid, but I like to use overwhelming force in war and still maintain a rear guard so my worlds aren’t undefended. Its a Civ 4 mentality I guess. In Civ series games I would build several stacks of invaders and attack from several directions at once. I always had an objective, also. Even if it was merely to get one city or resource.

Also in the last 2 games I’ve played I didn’t get one soace resource! :mad: None were near my location.

So any advice, again would be welcome. Also, I need to delete all of the ships I’ve designed from the shipyard inventory. Too many overlap each other. Is there a way to do that all at once or do I actually have to delete them one by one? How can I stop them from appearing in every different game?

6

You should pretty much colonize every single planet you can. Even the dinky class 1 planets will provide some income with a single cash building (forget what they are called, market center?) and they give you a longer range on your ships. Population also grows fairly slowish so you want to colonize early rather then later so you have a bigger tax paying population. The AI is coded to scout first, then send colony ships (or at least it was when I played) so if you scout with the colony ships you’re at an advantage and should be able to grab more planets then the AI’s.

The technology to conquer planets is pretty expensive and I don’t think any race starts with it, so you can safely gobble up as many planets as possible early on without fear of a more militaristic AI burning through your space, then later on when the colony rush is over build ships to protect them.

Note that ships in orbit fight 1 by 1 (unless you have a specific building on the planet) so it’s better to intercept enemy fleets when possible and just leave 1 ship in orbit to stop ‘ninja-transports’ sneaking in. So you don’t need a huge fleet to defend every planet, just have a few that patrol around - it will save alot on fleet maintenance.

Influence starbases are not really needed to protect your space. Planets generate a pretty good amount of influence by themselves, even without influence buildings. Influence starbases are mostly used to build next to ENEMY planets, to help take them over without combat.

Military starbases are a good choice for defense if you have the tech to install ship buffing modules (like beam interceptors or omega cannons). You probably don’t want to build them all over, though - the maintenance will kill you. Instead, just plop one down near very important worlds that you think the AI will attack, and consider plopping them down near heavily fortified enemy worlds you want to attack.

I’m not really sure if there is a mass delete option from the shipyard. I usually delete my designs as I go, so it’s never been a problem for me.