The AI needs to be reprogrammed to calculate the influence factors, and not rate a trade as being a very high value if it involves planets that will likely defect in a turn or two. That said, I'm going to go try this trick. It sounds promising.
Based on what other have posted, I was under the impression that the other civs look at your military strength when they decide if they want to bully you around or not. My assumption is that if you take the trade revenue, and use it to build up a strong military, then they will act nicer towards you. Don't know if this is true or not.
I have a hard time seeing how being Good gives you any benefits at all. My best luck has been playing completely neutral. All the races will get along with you and you can build up your trade routes without getting dragged into war. If you play Good, the Drengin will keep attacking you, and they always seem to be the most powerful race (no doubt because they make all the Evil choices and get benefits as a result). Theoretically, the Good player get some technologies t
miquv, SMAC *was* a game of military conquest. That's why it was so great. There was really no way to win without attacking the enemy and defeating him in battle. With Civ3, the designers attempted to soften the game and make it possible to win without fighting. What happened was that the game became really boring. You hardly ever see anyone talk with excitement about Civ3 they way they did with Civ1 or Civ2. Or SMAC for that matter. My take on GalCiv so far is th
Za H, I didn't mean to imply that there is truly a Wrong way to play. I was just being humorous. In a way. My personal preference in these types of games has always been to play the smaller maps, otherwise a single game takes too long to play. You tend to get a very different game with small vs. larger maps. With small maps, you get tossed into the action right away, but with big maps you have some time to expand and build before encountering enemy civs. I
Za H, You were playing SMAC wrong. Play it with a tiny map, and you'll see how much fun and fast moving the games are.
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I agree. If you break a peace treaty, it should hurt your peace reputation, and make other races unwilling to make peace with you. The more you do it, the more it should hurt your rep. Your rep should slowly return towards the mean. If you tried to make peace, and the other party said something like "we remember how you broke your peace treaty with the Drengin, we don't trust you", that would be extra cool. I think it's a big problem that this doesn't happen. It doesn't aff
The lesson to be learned here is that the AI in GalCiv isn't really all that it's hyped up to be. It does dumb military maneuvers just like very other strategy game AI known to man. And unlike in Sid Meiers Alpha Century (SMAC), the AI doesn't need to deal with terrain, airpower vs ground units, and oceans. The reason why the AI is so hard to beat is because it seems to quickly develop a big economic advantage. So GalCiv is just like every other strategy game on the m
Joeaverage, a standing fleet to deter being squeezed for tribute sounds like a good idea! What's the most cost effective ships for this purpose? Corvettes only cost 1 monetary unit per month to maintain. A frigate costs 10 units, thats pretty painful. Does a frigate give you 10 times the deterrence?
I've certainly noticed the AI leaving transports undefending, easy to pick of with the weakest of my military ships. The AI does attack starbases, but it doesn't go all out against the starbase, it attacks everything in the sector that it can find. Unless the AI has a transport ship backing up it's attack on a ship orbiting a planet, such an attack is simply a waste if there's a starbase in the sector.
To establish a trade monopoly, build one of the special resources on one of your planets. Like the Diplomatic Translaters or the Ultra Spices for example.
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Astax, I've been playing in small sized galaxies. You better have your home sector defended... the Drengin will be attacking you pretty fast.
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Do more than one starbase in the same sector actually do anything? What's to prevent you from getting infinite bonuses by building starbase after starbase in your home sector?
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The game uses science-fictiony terms to give it atmosphere. The game also uses a lot of terminology from Operation Iraqi Freedom. Maybe Donald Rumsfeld is going to sue also?
I thought the game explained that they give a bonus to ships defending in the system.
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I think Daveman is correct that it doesn't hurt to backfill planets in sectors you already own. You should only build soil enhancement, habitat center, then the bank and the economic exchange, and maybe an entertainment center if morale is too low. Don't build any more stuff on these crappy planets. Don't land too many colonists on these planets. If you land a billion people on a class 12 world, they will be very unhappy! Start very small.
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I've noticed that there's a huge productivity difference between planets. A 13 planet (that becomes a 15 through soil and enrichement and a habitat center) really doesn't do that much for your empire. It might even give you a negative impact, as the planetary improvements cost more to maintain than the revenue that the planet generates. A single planet in the upper 20s is better than a whole bunch of mid-teens planets. Of course I've only won a single game at Normal level, so
MoM... that was an incredible game... except for the AI (or rather AD for Artificial Dumbness) that ruined the whole thing. If someone could just come out with the exact same MoM game with just some updated graphics and a challenging AI, I'd be the first person to grab it off the store shelves.
This is a really interesting topic. For some reason GalCiv made me think about SMAC, and I'm glad to see that I'm not alone. I think SMAC was the best turn based strategy game ever. But it took me a while to warm up to it. Initially I thought it was just a Civ2 clone and not much different. After playing SMAC more, I really came to appreciate the beauty of it. It was a fast and combat intensive game. The attacker had the advantage in SMAC, and you had to go on the offense
