"recession" ruined my game

You have to adapt. Adapting to situations is a big part of GalCiv.

First remember that the AI is going through the same thing that you are going through. Secondly, much like in a real recession you have to make some cutbacks. You will probably have to scrap or sell off a large chunk of your fleet. You may even have to scrap a few social projects. Third, use some spying to see how the other races are doing if you can. Fourth, concentrate on economic improvements. Don't forget adding trade modules to spacestations.

I love these situations because they are really what make each game play differently.

Brian Ellenberger

Here are 3 things you can do...if you don't want to deal with the random event. 1 save often..set your auto-save function as 10 or 5 turns, then go back before the random event occured, this will spoil the game as it's meant to be played but will allow you to continue the game. 2 Set the game at a lower setting, the random events are less damaging..3. The last options as mention above is to adapt.

Think of these events as a challange -- they change the game and you must react appropriately. Like Brian said: sell ships to cut down on maintanence costs, scrap some high-maintanance social projects if you need to, cut back on spending. The recession only affects tax revenue, I believe, so be sure you're not too dependant upon it -- generate revenue through trade and tribute. Sell techs for tribute. There's lots of thing you can do. The Altarians were probably extorting and trading with the other civs, thus allowing them to expand.

Also: when times are good, never overextend yourself. Be careful about building lots of social projects with maintanence costs -- especially the high (anything over 1, IMO) maint costs -- choose wisely. Don't build too big of a navy unless you really need it.

The recession event can hurt, but there are ways around it. My worst mistake was getting used to a long economic boom and building way too many social projects, then the boom ended and was followed immediately by a recession. I was hurting!

Yeah, because recessions never actually happen in real life. I mean the entire global economy wasn't ground into dust in the 30s or anything...millions of lives ruined. That can't happen...it isn't fair...you should be PO'd.

God damn it why'd those slap nuts at SpaceDock have to go and make a game that actually requires me to think and plan instead of just click click click my way to victory. This sucks.

Happened to me too, the first time I just wasn't able to figure what happened with my economy that was eating dirt, and I was waging wars ...
The event is not very well described and I didn't think it had that much effect and lasted that long !
Indeed it's a challenge and one has to review its strategy to it : but 100-150 turns is somewhat too long for game balance, even if IRL recessions can be 10 years long ...

But it affects everyone equally, so how is it imbalanced?

Well, it is imbalanced in the sense that computers are better able to optimize than people, so they have an edge in setting all of the setting right to minimize the effect. But that just makes things more interesting. Humans get the benefit of judgement and seeing the big picture. Computers get the benefit of super effective number crunching...in the end Computers are dumb. Even GalCiv AI.

Follow the Bush Doctrine. I've used it in a number of games and it works like a champ.

Be in a constant state of war and extort the AI players for money to "end the senseless violence". This is worth at least a couple thousand bc every couple turns.

Ok Ok, I slept it off. It's a great game, but I still think this is an issue. None of the other AI players were able to resist the altarians either. i got rid of buildings, reduced my fleet (not hard-i was at war), and still by the end had something like -8000bc. I've been able to use shorter recessions to my advantage, but it just went on and on. Long enough for the altarians to go from a little corner of the galaxy to complete military victory in a gigantic map. I hadn't even met them yet when the recession started.

Now you know how the Japanese feel.

I've never had a recession yet that I couldn't get on top of just by lowering my Expenses tab, when you combine that with the methods mentioned above there is no way you should end up with -8000 BC, that's just crazy. You did something very wrong, either you were massively over-built both in infrastructure and defensive ships or something.

It's been my experience that recessions cause the comp AIs more problems than they do me, possibly the Altarians were simply dominant regardless and the recession didn't make enough difference to slow them down.

nice replies... btw how do you actually sell off social projects btw?

One thing is to move down your tech slider (at least in my games it seems to eat more resources than social or military) plus change your overall government spending to ~40%. bump taxes to ~60%. Sell every single moral boosting social project unless the moral of a system is 2 except for fusion power plant. Sell shipyards and planetary defences. Get tribute from minor races by selling prized techs like battleship and dreadnaught. Sell the AIs techs like trade, adv trade, etc that will benefit your economy when they make trade routes. Consider starting a war with a race just long enough to take 1 or 2 econ galactic resources. These can make a huge difference. Sell defenders, battle axes, battle hammers that are defending backwater planets. Research techs that +trade and +diplomacy. Make sure from the start of the game that you never go into debt. Don't buy ships on loans except for 1 or 2 at the very beginning. Lower social spending. Higher military spending to give you a couple extra battleships will help in negociations with the AIs and prevent them from going to war with you so your trade routes with them will be safe.
After all that you can consider changing the econ sliders to maximize your money.

Recessions totally suck. But I like the realism involved. I certainly get as many economic boom periods as I do recessions.

The thought that recessions can happen keep my from building too many social projects to begin with. Unlike Civilization, it doesn't pay to build everything available.

C&P

You can sell social projects by going to the planet in question, open its main screen, and select the Details button. Choose your project from the list and hit the Cancel Project button. I don't think you actually get any money, but you'll lose the maintenance.


~SDC~

I actually had a similar long recession, but I had enough cash flow at the beginning to spend through it; I also found this gave me the ability to do one of my favorite tricks- lend money to the AI at high payment plans; for example, Id give 300 now , in return for 25 a month for 20 months. I didnt mind the delay, and I found this to be a simple way of making money. However,
the AI, even at the lowly level, had different levels of rates it would accept.

ThreeSpy, sell off your morale buildings -and- raise your taxes? Unless you built them way ahead of a need for them that will result in plummeting morale across your entire set of planets with consequential massive loss of potential income. If it comes down to selling buildings (and I've never had it come down to that), then morale would be the one's I'd get rid of last, not first.

Let's see... There's 12 turns in a year, right? I've had plenty of games with recessions that lasted 1200 turns. And longer. (That's right, 100 years. Whee! 2185 to 2285... recession!)

Didn't even trouble me at the time. Of course, I was trade raping the AIs, selling them ships for a little bit now and lasting until the end of time. They'd pay for whatever they could get. Let me kill their economy completely... they couldn't afford to do anything but pay me. And the AI was too stupid to go to war to break its deals.

Econ resources are a true gift. Max them out. Trade modules where you can get a decent return can really help out.

Hadn't thought of the loan for money deal. Thanks!

You've got Tax sliders, and Spending. Use them if you need them.

I have yet to need to sell a tech to the AI. I'll give my trade partners some decent techs to keep them afloat to keep my economy chugging along at a nice level why pumping out the ships and grabbing the techs, but hey, I'm still working my way up to the more challenging levels... Maybe the economy isn't as easy to manipulate?

Recession is one event that I don't even notice. 87 craft suddenly being given to my opponents early on, that's noticable. Space sharks and pirates, when noone has better then star fighters, that's noticeable. But recession? Might be trouble if you haven't gotten to playing with the tax money/spend money slider. Heck, you can tax at like 90% for the entire game and still keep a 100% morale in 049 (as long as all your worlds started at decent PQ).

Give the game a spin again, and keep an eye on your tax/spend sliders. And remember to sell off your spare, older ships. The higher that diplomacy, the longer you can make the payments they owe you for the ship.

I don't know why but when I had my first recession event I thought it was only a one turn event. Many turns later, I noticed that my awesome treasury was down to a few hundred billion credits. In a panic, I started scraping expensive social projects and ships while selling technologies to the minor races.

The funny part about this whole thing is that this recession acutally SAVED me! The Dregin empire was a level higher in intelligence than everyone else (including me LOL ) and was making progress to galactic conquest (in spite of starting off with only one star system). Their fleet was just too large. At the height of the recession, not a starship could be seen in the whole galaxy. When it finally passed, I was able to outproduce him because of my many planets and win the game!

Star Pilot, no prob- I came up with by playing around
and realizing I could do more with my extra cash (I am a business/finance major, after all ).
What Ive also found is fun is to pick a fight with the minor AI's, but not to destroy them- Im a lot stronger, so I can demand a lot in tribute and they will pay it, whether they can or not...

With the .049 patch you really don't need to build more than 1 social project per planet. I save a lot of money right there.

I think you can extort way too much money from the minor civs. I got 215 bc (all the $$ they had) for 50,000,000 turns in return for a peace treaty. Thats a little unrealistic. Over 4 MILLION years of tribute. That just seems a little wrong to me.

Does anyone know if sabotage can induce a recession? This might partially explain why folks are dealing with prolonged ones.

Nevermind the *minor* Civs... I played a game a couple of days ago where the Altarians and I ganged p on the (previously very powerful) Torians and ground them into dust. They were so desperate for peace, they agreed to 500BC per turn for 1000 turns! Needless to say, they died a horrible death soon afterward.

~SDC~

While my experience in extortion is limited, I can testify that trade will set you free. The recession only hits taxes and not trade income. In a recent game I played, my tax income during a recession was around 450 bc per turn, but I was pulling in around 600 alone on trade routes. Not too bad, but I was not involved with any wars either. Early investment in some trading post starbases after I had snagged as many resources as possible was the key. Four trade bases packed with +trade modules did the trick.

For those who cannot delve into a trade route strategy because you are an anti-social UP outcast trying to be the #1 Evil Warlord of the Galaxy, a couple of unexpected early wars, or whatnot, I can only suggest what others have said: watch military upkeep costs and only build the social programs that you need. An entertainment center on every planet might sound great, but something that is +morale AND +economy is better. Do use the +morale boosters on your home world and maybe a plum system that comes along later, but go easy with the majority of the worlds. While it is wise to have high spending at the beginning of the game to establish a decent position, be willing to slash spending to the bone once the borders are set to ride the recession out. The exception to that is pumping money into something that will make you more trade, like a +trade income tech or a +trade module to stick on one of those trade bases that should eventually be built.