I put super projects to the smallest planets. I don't build them, I buy them. Eyes of the universe, terraformer, spin control and hyper computers are good candidates. I'm surprised no one else mentioned this.
My "fun" tactic is to ally with everyone except 1-2 of the strongest races. Then I park my ships near the planets of the strongest races, and I wait for them to announce war. When they do, my allies start fighting against them and I retract my ships back to my territory. After a while many have no defenses on their planets and my troops mop up. This is nice if you have to start in a distant corner of the galaxy and you have only 1-2 weak neighbours.
Empire wide boost? Huh, I never knew they had such a huge effect. I've never built starbases in any of my games because it felt too micromanagery and rally points didn't always work right. Somehow I still managed to get a maso win on first try in v1.31. Must have something to do with stardock making the ai levels easier because it felt kinda easy.
I don't understand why my latest game was cheat flagged. I didn't have negative ability points, no ctrl-n, no initial alliances and no edited game files. In fact before the game I had made a fresh install because SDC update from 1.11 broke the game(e.g. clicking Options in main menu crashed the game immediately). The only thing I can think of is that I saved the game on first turn and loaded it multiple times. I kept restarting the game to change video settings because there was this
The 4a beta does seem to have new AI code for this. I can now only yank out one planet/peace treaty, and after maybe 6 times they stop accepting peace treaties altogether even though I am way ahead in military rating. I always saw it as a speedup tactic when you're winning already, so it didn't really matter much.
I've found it very useful to specialize home planet for factories and a manufacturing capital. Just fill it with them, buying one each turn, and you'll be able to produce one colony ship per turn. I stop researching after I get impulse drive and focus on expanding and improving planets mainly with factories and labs. After I have all the planets I can get, I turn to research, and the rate will be 10 times faster than any other race. This see
It's easy to miss the special treatment for the Paradox Collector's Edition. Check out https://www.galciv2.com/paradox/ if Stardock Central complains about an expired account / registration missing.
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