Hi,

I watched Sapher's last CoM youtube video series where he wins in Phantasmal difficulty and it appears from it, that the Mystic Surge enchantment can make am average unit super strong that it can defeat the highest level creatures and the strongest best equipped heroes in a single hit. do you think it's overpowered? I personally believe it is overpowered and that it should allow only common and uncommon unit enchantments, IMO very high level enchantments like Haste/Phantasmal should not be included in this spell enchantments.

What do you think?

It was not me who found this but i created a video to show it. 
Going by the information i got this was sitting undiscovered for over 2 decades in the game since before LoD came out.
It can be repeated several times in a row and it's said that for each letter the glooms drawn you get a massive yet invisible MF boost.

I have beat MOO1 on Impossible, but I usually struggle to do it and fail quite often. I'd say doing what I do I can win about one of out 5 games. What are some tips for greater success? 

I have beat it under the following conditions:

1) Race = Klackon
2) I get Improved Ecological Restoration and  Reduced Industrial Waste 80% to start
3) I get Improved Robotic Controls III
4) I'm able to find pretty good planets to start with at least one decent sized Rich planet that is Dead or less

But I find that unless those things happen, I typically can't win a game.

Generally, in terms of population management, I'm not super OCD on that. I'll typically make a colony, then send 5 or 10 pop  to it and that's it.

I do try to really pump out colony ships once I get by home world fully built out with factories, and of course I put scouts on all surrounding planets to hold them as long as possible.

In a lot of folklore, the male trolls are huge, brutish, and strong, and female trolls are big but more tricksy/witchy. Renaming troll shamans into "Tollwives" and troll magicians into "Troll Hags" or "Troll Witches" would add a small amount of flavor to the troll race at very little dev cost.

For slightly more cost, you could remove the fireball spell from Troll Witches and replace it with subset of Weakness/Warp Creature/Web to make them seem more witchy.

I've been having a very bizarre crashing bug where the last 3 different games have chosen an exact date to crash on, and I can't make any connections.

The games each choose a different date, and if I reload from various turns, no matter what happens, the game crashes on that specific date.

I know civ4 crashes randomly once the save files go over about 4 or 4.5mb, but these have all been under 2mb. If there is a way to see a crash log or something, maybe I can figure out what is going on.

So we all know the AI loves them some lizardfolk, but I generally didn't start with them. I like to build tall and lizards are not a tall pick.

However, I've been forcing myself outside of my comfort zone recently and tried them. They certainly have a strong start, especially on island maps. And it's nice that a third of the AIs are building cities of your starting race for you.

But there's something I'd missed, in part because the AI rarely does it, and in part because I'm biased against single figure units:

Stacks of dragon turtles are really good. Basically, their main weaknesses are that they're slow and middling in the damage department. Otherwise they are high HP, high defense, amazing resistance units that can attack flying units and water walk, are cheap to make and cost 1 g+f in maintenance. Resistance based chicanery can mostly be igored, offense is good enough, and the stacks are cheap and replaceable. As a one figure unit, buffs and xp don't matter very much so you just beat your enemies to death with turtle shells, Mario-style, and not worry too much about losses.

So my lizard strat now boils down to "Grab a bunch of land early, <ahem> 'turtle' up until the DT pipeline gets going, make full stacks of turtles and go on a conquering spree.*" I call this "Yertling" because Yertle was the pioneer of the "stack up turtles and conquer the world" strategy.

As a side note the Yertlestacks move pretty fast on the strategic map with carracks, but you will need a plan to take down fast units on tactical. I suggest starting out with a solid line of turtles 9 squares wide but magic can obviously help here.

This is not an amazing game crushing strategy, and it is admittedly a little tedious, but it gives the lizards a little more mid-game ooph, at least for me.

What do you folk think?

*Obviously, wizard picks matter a lot for the deets here, in the late game especially.

From my understanding with a Democracy government rebels of conquered planets should convert to citizens at a rate of 1 per 4 turns. The Alien Management Center is supposed to cut the rate in half, so that should make it 1 per every 2 turns. However, when playing as a democracy and using Alien Management Centers, it still takes 4 turns for rebels to convert. Am I missing something or is this a bug?

I need to be replaced in PB69. The game is 4 players & late Industrial era. Your civ is #2 in an interesting political climate. Password's in my thread, and I can give more details there or via PM.

Welcome to the thread. I'm going to try and be more engaged here this game than I was the last time I played a pitboss, but my real life is getting more complicated (in a good way) so no promises.

First thing first is to look at what free techs would be most impact-full. IMO there are two types that will be most useful: military ones that allow an early high-strength unit, and techs that provide some sort of economic boost from turn 1.

The military ones will be limited because of resources, the economic ones might be too weak for the time-scale of the game.