Ok so I'm just finishing up my tenth or so game, my latest one on challenging difficulty on a normal map with 5 opponents. I've noticed a trend that is a bit upsetting.
I colonize 3-4 planets, and just barely lead in research and military. Then I conquer a small civ, gain 2-3 systems, and soon find myself near the bottom of the military chain (about 10-15% less than other races). The civ I conquer is usually a good civ, because they always have 5% the military of the other evil races for some stupid reason.
Then about 5 turns later, the OTHER good civ surrenders to an evil civ. This pattern has happened in every game on normal-challenging difficulty level, but more often and more pronounced on challenging.
What happens next? Well as I struggle to match the military production of the enemy (I'm way ahead on tech), ALL of them attack me out of the blue. I get two (--) for military strength, but honestly I seem to have as big/larger a fleet than all of them combined...
Ok so they all attack, and I hold them off and even manage to take over some of their planets. Some make peace, some just attack forever like gnats. During this time, 1 of the civs manages to take over half the map... leaving me with 25%, and the other 2 civs the leftovers.
Why is it that one civ always seems to go buck wild and capture everything so early in the game?
Why is it the good civs never seem to care about a military, and die within the first half hour of gameplay every time?
What is a good strategy for making sure the remaining evil civs don't all declare jihad on me :chuckle: ?
If this wasn't a fairly repeatable thing I'd not mind. But in this particular game I had a great starting position and am cleaning house with everyone attacking me, but end game is going to be impossible. The one evil civ is just going nuts gobbling everything up. I really do prefer more balanced game progression. Having only 2 civs left after an hour of play has been annoying me, you really can't be a diplomat and pit people against each other, when there is nobody to pit hehe...
