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GalCiv Strategy Tidbit - Sirian As of this writing, I have played just over a dozen games of GalCiv. If games where I've replayed to try a different strategy on the same map are counted separately, I'm getting close to twenty games by now. Here are some of the most interesting bits I've picked up. * You start with 1000BC in the bank. This means you should crank up the spending immediately. Whatever you are building, build it faster. Whatever you are researching, learn it sooner. Speeding your growth curve with maximized use of the starting surplus is key to success at high difficulty. Don't stop spending it until you drop to around 100BC. (You don't want to go negative for long, but you can even do that short term if you just gotta spend a little more in a race for something vital). * Alignment matters. The entire destiny of your game will change according to the alignment you pursue. On most maps, you will have one or two neighbors nearby, the others more distant. One some maps, the quality and quantity of good planets will favor one or more empires, determining who will rise to the top of the food chain. (Population equals power). Depending on these variables, each map will have an "optimal" alignment, for the sake of Earth's security. Choose your friends wisely. Of course, sometimes by the time you figure out what the most expedient alignment would have been, it is too late. If you should lose a game, the RB GalCiv Empire rules allow for one replay. If you decide to replay, consider how your alignment went for you the first try, who is near you, who has the best terrain, and whom you want to target as friends/allies, as part of your replay strategy. * The AI's have a limited scope of priority on research. They all tend to research the same things in roughly the same order. They might differ in research slightly, but there are some techs they usually pass over, and a few they tend not to bother with. If you research the items they do not, they may offer you tech trades. There are a few items the AI doesn't tend to research that the AI's still value highly. If you play your cards right, you can even get them to offer you hugely expensive techs like government tech or capital warship tech, for something much cheaper that you've got. THIS IS AN ESSENTIAL MOVE if you are to survive at the highest difficulty level. As a rule of thumb, if you research all the cheapie techs, the AI cannot then offer you cheapie techs in their tech trade deals. That's half of it. The other half is researching something they will want to trade for. Then again, this is a gambit move. You can also spend your time and resources researching useless or low yield techs and not get any trade offers. If you live by this gambit, sometimes you will also die by it. * There are some techs the AI places extra value on, diplomatically. Unless you have focused your bonus picks on diplomacy, don't even bother trying to trade for these. Even if you get a deal, you'll give up too much. Some of these are even quite cheap to research, with the AI demanding as much as fifty times their research cost in trade for them. Don't be a sucker. The first such tech is Deflectors, and the second is Corvette Tech. You'll learn to spot the others as you play. By contrast, this works both ways. So if you research these techs yourself, you may be able to trade them to bottom dwellers (especially minor races) who don't have them yet, and clean out whatever they do have in trade. * You need fire to fight fire. If your ships are more than one generation of military tech behind, forget it. Defenders are useless against Frigates. Battle Axes are useless against Battleships. Battleships are useless against Rangers. Rangers are useless against Overlords. One level behind, you can fight it out with numbers and strategy. More than that, you are going to lose. Find a way to improve your tech! * If your military is weak, you WILL BE bullied, targetted, and attacked. You get some grace period in the early game, but by the time the AI's have built some frigates, they will be gunning for the easiest available target. Around about that time, you need to have some cardboard cutouts manning the walls, or you will soon find a horde of barbarians at the gates. I tend to go straight for battle axes. Those at least can fend off frigates and battle cruisers, and buy you time until the the capital ship era. Larger maps, "defenders" may be better, especially in your back lines: you just need warm bodies in tin cans in sufficient quantity for your military rating to look competitive and some other sap to be the first target. You always want at least one unit at every system, because that prevents enemy transports from beelining you. Of course, you also need to have a real military at some point, or the enemy may call your bluff and blow through your cutout defenses like a hot knife through butter. If a dominant enemy achieves complete space supremacy inside your borders, the transports WILL follow and you WILL lose. * Trade is hugely important. In many games, you will have more income from trade than you do from your entire internal economy! Trade is also vital to diplomacy, and is enormously vulnerable to attack by your enemies. You will come to appreciate the strategics of planning trade routes: for profit, to butter up to your desired allies, to slow or prevent the emergence of new enemies, and to shield your routes from attack, because your income can go through the floor if your mature trade routes are disrupted. Longer routes are only more profitable if you can protect them. * "Research" and "Military/Social Production" refer to CAPACITY. These are the engines, and your income from taxes and trade is the fuel. If you are spending 100% (using all your capacity) and still have surplus income, you are cash heavy and you need more capacity. If you are running below 50% spending, you have too little income for your capacity. What this means is, the "industrial" and "research" picks only increase how much production you can put out per turn, how much horsepower is in the engine. If you only have enough fuel to power a 300 horsepower engine, it won't do you a lick of good to have an 800 hp engine sitting under the hood. You can only go as fast as your fuel supply allows. The same is true in reverse. You can have the wildest economy since the Roaring 20's, won't do you much good if the money piles up in swiss bank accounts. If your engine is only 300 horsepower, it won't matter if you have enough fuel to power 800 horses. Your output will only be 300. Trying to balance these economic factors to get the ideal amount of both capacity and income is something that is easy to understand, difficult to achieve. Good luck! * Both taxes and spending are GLOBAL, not local. The amount of spending is tied to CAPACITY, which arises out of the size of the population, adjusted for special bonuses or penalties on a given planet, and for all of your buildings, trade goods, wonders, bonus picks, and scavenged anomaly bonuses. In order to bring in any income at all, a planet needs to be Planet Quality 15 (PQ15) or better. PQ14 breaks even. PQ13 or less costs maintenance. Anything under PQ10 costs HUGE maintenance. Better to stretch your reach with starbases than settling crap worlds. However, since you can upgrade a 13 to a 15 with two cheap early improvements, the 13's are worth getting. The 14's are definitely worth it. 12's... You would only want to settle PQ10-12 if your bonuses are income heavy. You can gain extra capacity from settling these borderline worlds, but you gain no income and may even pay maintenance. If you've got money to burn, though, you can burn it faster with these "no income" worlds. You'd have to be pretty hard up for habitable planets to want to bother, though. * The AI will not touch anything less than a native PQ15. So you can skip over the systems that have at best a 14 or less, and come along to clean up the 13's and 14's at your leisure. * Planet size matters in three ways: morale, income, and capacity. Morale determines population maximums. When morale drops to 50, pop growth stops. When morale is at 100, pop growth is doubled. Morale below 50 will cause LOSS of population. Morale levels are affected by planet size and tax rate. Increase taxes, you increase tax income, but lower morale. If you have planets that reached their current population maximum (morale at or just over 50) and you raise taxes, morale drops and people start to vanish. The higher the Planet Quality, the stronger the morale, the faster the population will grow and the larger it will grow. The economy is tied directly to planet size. The higher the PQ, the more money the planet brings in in taxes, because the people are more prosperous and costs are lower, meaning more surplus for you to skim off in taxes. Production is tied directly to population, and since population is so strongly tied to planet quality, the best planets with more people will also have stronger production capacity. As a rule of thumb, you want to build your manufacturing and economic "one per civ" achievements on your highest quality planet. That is often, but not always, Earth. Less often for evil alignments, you'll see why. * On higher difficulty, the AI's influence bonuses are killer. Your systems will not survive being in the same sector as a major rival. They will flip away. If you are in an adjacent sector, you need to focus on influence and cultural resistance buildings, and on Masochistic, it's a good idea to build news networks almost everywhere, and fairly quickly, unless you are isolated in your own little corner of existance on a large map. Use your "political capital" along your border to help stabilize any risky influence situations. Beware of any neighbor who builds galactic wonders involving influence: Restaurant of Eternity, Galactic Monument, etc. Especially be wary if one civ builds several of these. They CAN start converting the entire galaxy with a form of cultural push, one flip after another. Scary thing if they get a toehold inside your core (due to a random event, United Planets action, or by taking over a minor civ), and start flipping your major planets! * Starbases are hard to defend, expensive to build, and coveted by the AI -- for good reason! A fully mined resource is worth 48% bonus! Two red-cone military resources fully mined will DOUBLE your ship strength. (I lucked out and managed this in a Masochistic game this week, went on a romp and had military conquest in hand, but took alliance victory with one weakish AI left). By contrast, check out your rivals, see what kinds of resources they control. You may be able to turn the tide of the game by killing a certain starbase and preventing your enemy from ever building it back up again, even if you can't yourself manage to control it either. * Starbases can be built anywhere. They cost 10bc apiece to maintain, so don't go nuts. But starbases can be upgraded in all kinds of ways, with many add-ons. If you are income-rich and need more productive capacity, build a starbase and add productivity modules, at least near your best systems. Of course, that's if you can afford it and defend them. When you really NEED them, you usually can't afford them. When you can afford them, you usually don't need them. The strategic possibilities of starbases for trade, for culture both offense and defense, for military uses, for production... not even counting the resource mining! The right base in the right place with the right configuration can make the difference. * There are at least four kinds of alliance victory: 1) Coattail Alliance. You align yourself with the strongest AI and ride his coattails to a shared victory. 2) Alignment Alliance. All the good guys or all the bad guys eliminated. Everyone left is friends with everyone else. 3) Dominant Alliance. You achieve military dominance and wipe out all your enemies. You COULD wipe out your friends, too, but decide to let them live. 4) Runner Up Alliance. You lose the tech race to the Final Frontier, and therefore you have to play for a different victory condition. Those are the four I know about so far, being able to testify to at least that many varieties of alliance victory from personal experience. * The tech victory gets to be pretty nasty. The last half dozen techs are enormously expensive to research. Sixty to eighty turns APIECE for the last two or three has been the norm for me, even doing 100% research with fully improved economy. A lot can happen in sixty turns, especially if you are clicking Next Turn over and over and not paying attention. Know what you are in for!
These are some of my thoughts about GalCiv. -
Sirian
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