Making a goos start

from GalCiv2 Forums
Greetings lads n ladies. I'm um new to Gal Civ so please forgive inevitable ignorance. I'm beta testing GCII at the moment but I'm flying blind in many ways (which I figure is a good way to test something under some cicumstances).

Anyway, what I am having trouble doing is achieving a good start in the game. The AI players seem to have some kind of magical ability to produce colony ships from thin vacuum and after only a short time I find myself with a civ about 50% or 33% the size of my nearest AI competitor.

I was wondering if anybody had put together a guide of some manner regarding starting strategies or at least something nubs such as moi can use to get a decent civ up and running. I have seen some basic user guides but they don't have much meat as regards making a competitive start for one's civilisation.

I'm intimately familiar with MOOII and how to cain the computer opponents good and hard with that game, but none of the techniques I used to apply seem to work with GCII Beta. Or maybe they do but I'm not implementing them correctly.

Any assistence would be appreaciated. I would just like to have the opportunity to help the dev team out by providing some useful feedback.

Cheers
Roger
8,328 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Well, what is your level of difficulty? you should try cakewalk to get a goo grasp of the game mechanisms.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Dont be afraid to spend your money in a burst like fashion, early on. Purchase a factory, to start building a colony ship 1 turn earlier, purchase a colony ship and get it moving... dont forget to adjust your sliders in the domestic screen. Bump your spending to 100% and depending on what you're trying to do, 30 / 70 / 0, social / military / research. Build some market centers and factories before you build things that cost money but wont help you with the colony rush.

The AI gets out to a fast start because they purchase things outright and dont let that nice chunk of change hang around in the bank.
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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
You can also crank your spending up to 100 % and not worry about deficit spending until your treasury gets too low.  Deficit spending only affects your morale when you have a negative treasury balance.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Agreed. My usual start is to crank spending up to 100%, taxes up to 60%, buy either a factory or lab on my home planet (depending on bonus tiles and my mood), buying a starport and maybe a factory on every new colony, and sometimes I'll throw in a colony ship as soon as I see my influence border (if an AI civ is close, it will be something other than round) if there's a nice planet I want to make sure I get.

While there's been debate on whether it's better to buy or lease stuff, or what settings to use to split up your budget, I don't know anyone that advocates saving your starting nestegg in this game There's no interest on savings and the rainy day is quite a bit less likely to happen if you spend the money to get into a better position early enough.

The starting funds are currently enough to buy your first factory and lab, and your second colony ship and starport, and that's usually enough to get the ball rolling. Note that if you're playing on a small map with few inhabitable planets, or if you start off crowded by AI civs, a third colony ship is probably more important than the factory/lab/starport, though that would leave you at a deficit.

Furthermore, racial abilities and political parties can have a strong influence in the early to mid land rush. While your economy starts off fairly slow, if youlre playing a larger map, you'll probably reach the point that you'll be able to buy colony ships from your treasury almost as often as a single planet could produce a colony ship, especially if you take the Federalist party and/or spend some ability points in Economy. On the other hand, some of the other abilities let you build ships faster, get extra speed, or extra range.

Quite a few options, and I don't think there's any one right way to play it.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Thanks guys. Getting a hang of it now.