End turn, end turn, end turn...

Early game, I'm normally searching for planets, colonizing, and looking for anomalies.  This helps give a player something to do.  Also as I meet other factions I usually start diplomacy with them as well.

Oh but it is on the road map,  been discussed many times,  it might have been mentioned in the lase stream but i don/t recall the time frame

Several things go into what makes a game fun. The first 50 or so turns can be a click fest if you are simply trying to get someplace Lots of your fun is determined by game settings. I find that galaxies that have fewer planets but average to better resources are very fun to play in. 

• How many ai are in your games? ( I average 21 majors and abundant minors on all games)
• What size maps do you play on? (I am pretty much exclusive only to insane size, lots of exploration even at turn 200.)
• How do you shape your Galaxy? ( I was large islands but moved over to to scattered as it helps the ai attack you.)
• What handicap do you play on? (I am currently on Gifted, higher difficulties give the ai more stuff and in turn will make em DOW you faster).
• Have you downloaded some Player made ships and modified them for your empire? I love many of the workshop ships and will take their base designs and spend <hours> designing the cool ship templets for specific roles. I will make a 'tanking' ship, a stand off ship, a carrier and others. Ship design is probably #2 in fun with Gal Civ II & III.
• How many habitable planets are in your galaxy and same with resources? My experience for fun is a game where you go OOOO a class 5 planet..COOOL>> 

May I ask what "same" things you are doing?    I find that different races really do play significantly differently. 

I also find that if I am going to go for a conquest victory I research a lot differently than if I am going for a diplomatic or culture victory.

The different races all have some unique buildings and those can majorly change how the planets are built....


While by and large the tech trees are going to be mostly the same..  start by doing the Planet improvement one.. then the farms one... then possibly universal translator...  etc...    by 40 or so turns in I tend to change up what I am doing based on what my "goal" for the game is...

So perhaps you need to just change up your play style or have a different goal...  

I play large galaxies Incredible or Godlike (I back down to Incredible so far for 1.7 since I am slowed down a bit as my ships can't hold as much as components are larger) vs 7 AI.

There's more than enough to do early on. Colony rush, explore, go to anomalies, micro planets, trade with AI etc etc, ok I'll mention colony rush again.

I research two drive techs first. I want fast ships.

With 7 AI on a Large map, you should be meeting people fairly soon, being threatened, swindling the AI for techs, and a whole lot more.  I am not sure I get where you are hitting end turn so much and getting away with it.  Waiting until you have Large hulls before you start building military sounds like my kind of trick and I always get invaded or threatened or both.  Frankly, I would find turns of hitting end turn a break.

Do you have pirates or events on?  They help break up the monotony in sparser maps.  

Things like research decisions are strictly your choices.  I have seen enough discussions of wildly different approaches to know there are many viable opportunities.  I don't see how you can be properly min-maxing enough to not choose some of the juicy options in the different tech trees.  The difference between Thalan Hives and Snathi Scavenging have to have some effect on your tech path, or you are more stubborn than I realize and avoid all race specific techs.

Maybe I misunderstand you description of map size and you are more isolated from the AI than I envision.  Being a little too spread out could be a source of the situation you describe.  I did that for a while, since I do like an expansionist role with some room around me.  If so, add a couple more AI.  Adding one or two AI at a time until things got busy but didn't feel crowded helped me a lot.  It might help you.  Then again, you might get too many factions and they might all gang up on you.  You never know.

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your thoughts. I always play on Huge or Gigantic galaxies, random constitution of galaxy, and with the full amount of AI opponents who come with the vanilla game (so 7 I believe?). Plus all the minor races. But now I just got the (overpriced) DLC with Arceans and Torians, so have more to play around with.

I always do the same things no matter which race I play: universal translator, diplomacy bonuses, tourism, and make a rush for medium or large size hulls. Only then do I bother to start to make any military. I always go for beam weapons and shields, and only research the others once I've got those to a decent level.

I never make any of my own ship designs and I always play the game on max zoom-out (so with small icons/strategy view).

The AI - typically the Drengin or the Krynn - nearly always begin a war with me before I've got any kind of military built up, so then it's a race to see if I can survive their attacks.

I ususally build the same stuff on most planets no matter what race - as many factories as I can as I'll need the manufacturing power to build a fleet quickly as soon as I'm able. I usually make most planets specialise in manufacturing focus as well. A few planets safely in my heartlands I make research worlds.

In my experience you can't survive in this game or at least prosper if you don't have a decent military. You will get crushed. I don't know how ppl win who do ascension or influence victories and don't have any decent defence when the Drengin or others come knocking.

But I have yet to hear of the AI totally wipe a human player out so he has zero planets left - does this ever happen?

Another thing I noticed - I set asteroids to be "rare" but my galaxy is still full of them!

A thing that bothers me with the minor races is that their ships will travel between the stars/around the galaxy but they seem to have no desire to colonise it themselves...which I find strange.

Another thing I don't understand is shipyard output. For example, in my current game playing as Arceans, my home planet shipyard can build ships literally ten times as fast as some of my other worlds, despite me building loads of factories on those planets and setting them to manufacturing focus. What is it that decides how long it takes to build a ship?

Thanks and cheers! Ed

You're correct - some military is required most of the time.  In answer to your question - Diplomacy.  Any race can easily research enough diplomacy tech and build a few buildings to make sure diplomatic relations, even with aggressive races like Drengin or Krynn, never get bad enough for war.  This is of course augmented by trade, gifts, open border treaties, and declaring friendship.  Last game I played as Drengin and pure Benevolent Ideology.  No one ever declared war on me the whole game (350 turns or so). 7 opponents, huge galaxy.

The other way is exploiting Ai weaknesses.  For example, the Ai never sends more than 1 transport, and never loads more than 2.5 troops on it.  If you build elerium shields and other planetary defense on your worlds, the Ai can never successfully invade you.

As for human wipeouts.....only if the human player has virtually no knowledge of how to play the game.  Any player with a decent amount of experience and knowledge of game mechanics quickly realizes how to prevent this, and realizes the Ai's ability to actually wage a war is stupidly, ridiculously, laughably poor (especially compared to its desire to actually declare war).  No tactical awareness of enemy ships, bizarre fleet groupings, failure to garrison captured worlds, 1 transport at a time loaded with 2.5 troops, poor prioritization of what to invade, building a huge fleet but most of the ships can't even reach your worlds, lack of use of engines, only making 1 attack per fleet despite movement remaining....the list goes on.

Minor civs are basically filler at this point.  They're just a tool for the human player to fleece tech and money from.  Even if you empower them by giving them planets and ships, they don;t do anything with them.  At best, they're a niche resource for a small group of players.  I agree with you that it would be nice if they were more active in the galaxy.  Guess we'll have to wait and see on that.

Hi, thanks for your thoughts.

This almost sounds like an incredible exploit. What are the devs doing to remedy this and the other AI flaws you mention??

I think the lack of human wipeouts is more that if the game goes poorly we restart.

On minor race's, I have seen the lanterns in one game get three planets. I dunno how they managed it though. If you play with 20+ players and rare planets, the minor race's are nearly as powerful as the major races.

^^^  This on me as well. And for this reason I exterminate them to the last man.....I really hate the pompous Krynn. They quickly decline in attitude and DoW me. Then after I am crushing them under my Plastisteel shod space boots they are like ..."hey we were just kidding, can we be cool bro"...... Uh no, you must die.

So you are not exploring the galaxy? You are not hunting for anamolies? You are not securing resources? You are not trading? You do not use money to rush buildings or ships? 

Especially the anamoly hunting is something fun and important in the phase of the game you describe. Some anamolies advance or even finish the current research project. Also making (for example by mining and selling resources) and using money is important, since you can build the planets up way more faster.

If you are just hitting the end turn button your really missing a good part of the game. I can't even remember a turn where I had literally nothing else to do but to end it.

One of my fun Xploits I love is to work on my research line that I favor which is usually drive engines. While I am doing that I will find a precursor anomaly and arrive just before it.  On the next turn I will switch techs to say a hull size or a weapon, usually a beam like plasma or Disruptors. Weapons take the longest so I will switch to that and then hit the anomaly. Its a toss up but I would say about a 1/3rd of the time I 'get' the weapon/drive tech right off. BAM>>>> insta lead! 

Good times!

Yes, they are initially all about peaceful promotion of their "spirtual" ways but they soon start hostile behaviours. They're so annoying.