Yosh Wrote:Forgot to add -
Sirian - your Missile Frigate design looks and has almost the exact same specs (and Name) of mine! I named mine the Missile Frigate Mk I - it had the same body, and pretty much the same specs - Convergent engineering FTW!
In my designs and research, I tend to emphasize speed over everything else; with greater speed and range, you need fewer of the same ships to accomplish the same goal - a fighter defending a planet can destroy an incoming fighter, then race off to the front and become a strike fighter in just a few turns. I try to take advantage of my interior lines as much as possible, which having a higher speed ship can accomplish very effectively.
I've only been in one war. The AIs are kinder and gentler to you if you have the biggest military rating. Well, that's not hard to get. Tech up to Medium or maybe Large hulls, load them up with high tech goodies in your current "best config" with a new design, then crank 70%-100% Military Production on ships at all planets until you are well in the lead, then you can coast again.
I have yet to be attacked while having the lead in military rating. And if they did attack, I'd absolutely eat their lunch, so they are wise not to attack.
This, however, is on larger maps with breathing room. (I did not play out that one "screwed in the corner" start I had mentioned.)
Of course, at some point I'm going to tire of playing Goody Two Shoes and Get Middy Evil on their @$$#$, so we'll see what happens then. My first game was on Challenging and my second on Painful. Maximum N-fer trading is such a brutal economic swing that I may be back up to Maso before you know it. ... However, there are now two settings beyond that. So could be tough as nails to win that highest setting.
The problem with this is the Civ3 Deity problem. The more bonuses you have to pile on to the AI to compensate for the human's ability to rape them with tech trading and by diverging from "the pack" in research choices, the more things break in other parts of the game balance. ... There is the theoretical option of variant rules that limit or forbid tech trading, but the AIs are doing it, so it's even a deeper hole if you don't do any of it at all.
GalCiv2 has a LOT of goodness in it, but much of that goodness is the same as the GalCiv1 goodness, which I've already fully explored. It's a better game, clearly, but I will probably not get as many games out of it as I did from the original because the amount of goodness from Nothing to GC1 is pretty high, and the jump again from GC1 to GC2 is not quite as far. ... Unless, perhaps, the patching efforts are grandly successful. (If the economic waste is cleaned up... If the interface got some upgrades that dramatically reduce the tedium of the most repetitive player actions... Those two things would go a long way.)
We're also in a lull with Civ4, though, waiting on the patch. I've got an Always War SG, plus Epic Two, on the horizon, and maybe also an Adventure (there will be some, but I don't know yet if I will be playing them!) I expect to be playing more Civ than GC.
One thing GC has going for it is the solo nature. It doesn't lend to tourney play at all, but it's fairly quick to play and can fit a game on spur of the moment and finish it in a weekend or a few evenings.
I tend to run only two of the three spending types at a time in GC2, now that we have those Emphasize checkboxes. (I don't build Star Ports on my small planets, so they can keep chugging along, albeit at a slower rate, on their social projects now.) I will often run 100% in one of the three areas. Push HARD on tech, get up to that new improvement or clean up a new generation of military techs, then push hard on production to build a lot of bleeding edge military ship designs or push all those new planetary items. (If anybody is setting spending ratios and never touching them, well, good luck cracking the higher difficulties with that approach!) The radical leans let me get more out each unit spent.
For instance, the Roach Race. I will lean 100% Social to start, until I have four or five factories (or equivalent, if blessed with planet specials), and maybe a lab or two, with micromanagement down to the penny. (Factories take 75 units to build, and Basic Factories... Well, I don't remember, but it's easy to figure out. For the Factories, that's 4x 19 units with a unit shaved on the last turn, or 3x 25 units, or 2x 38 units with a shave on the last turn.) Pinch the pennies and whatever is shaved goes in to early research on Propulsion, or Xeno Labs, or maybe Translator or early miltiary (for military production boosts). You have to weigh your scouting needs vs race with close neighbors for nearby worlds, but as soon as you can afford to do it, you crank out the amount of Fast Scouts that you think you need to identify when to stop building colony ships and which planets to prioritize. When there is enough factory output to produce custom designed high speed Colony Ships in two turns from the homeworld, set the planet to do that with leftover pennies going in to social spending (to build a lab or two, or a planet special) and then research. Early items are really cheap to research, so you can do a lot of things with those shavings. Breed your Roaches and ship them out in your mobile Roach Motels (I may start naming my colony ships that -- heh) and rinse and repeat. ... What to do with your initial colony ship depends on the map.
Of course, a cramped map may call for rushbuying a colony ship, or a factory, or some other shortcut, but it's painful to burn cash like that. You do start with a lot to burn, though, so I'm sure the right burn in the right situation would help.
- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
too much!