spiceants litle galciv kwide

[spiceant]

I have played galciv2 non-stop for 4 days now, i did not play beta.
I have developed a way of how i play the game.
In this guide i will try to teach you how i think the early game is best played.
I believe i have the validality to write a guide to be red and learned from because i manage to beat ais consistently on their intelligent settings, look me up under my 'spiceant' alias in the metaverse.

I assume you have a general idea about how to play, you are playing on a random map of small to huge size with numbers of stars/planets etc. set to occasional with atleast 3 opponents.



In (a somewhat) chronological order:

• Put your spending to 100%, tax to 55-60% (keep aproval above 40%). Send out your flagship to explore anomalys.
  50% military spending
  50% social
  or
  100% social
• Que up 4 factorys, purchase the first 3 and let the planet build the 4th.
• Start pumping colony ships under 100% military.
• The starting colony ship can be upgraded to a speed 3 or 4 with life support (depending on wether you start with ion drive) send it out to a star with planets that is far away as possible from alien civs
• Once a colony ship arrives check the star to see how many habitable planets it has, if it has more then 1 check to see which has the highest quality and colonize that one.
• Buy 1-2 speed 3-4 colony ships on your homeworld and send them out, build the next amount of colony ships required to colonize all other planets without buying them.
• If the planets are very far away and you have ion drive starting tech, research impulse drive on 100% spending while building research labs. switch back to 100% military after finishing research.
• otherwise: buy a couple (1-3) scouts (cargo hull, 6 sensors 1 hyperdrive 5 sensors 1 life support + hyperdrive) and explore for resources. Decomission when they have nothing left to explore.

Once your last colonizers arrive on their planets designate each colony for a task and name them accordingly.
designations include but are not limited to;

• Research outpost -] Converts revenue to technology points (build with lots of labs)
  1, 2 or 3 factorys + labs
  
• Production outpost -] Converts revenue to social and military points (lots of factorys)
  Lots of factorys
  Starbase
  the occasinal farm or entertainment center for added population.
  
  
• Economy outpost -] Substracts the revenue from people to be redirected to production (put a lot of people on this planet)
  1 farm to begin with and more as time passes and population grows
  Enough entertainment to keep aproval above 50%
  Trade centers
  
• Influence outpost -] generates influence (put a lot of people on this one)
  Similar to ecomy outpost, but with comparatively more farms and entertainment centers.
  this kind of planet is optional, usefull nearby planets under another civs control might give you a reason to designate your colony an influence outpost.
  Influence outposts can be very profitable altough it may not show so in their revenue screen, controlling a large percentage of the galactic population combined with having your borders over lots of this galaxy generates very much tourism revenue.

• In all cases quality 9+ planets should have atleast 2 factorys (or a factory bonus tile), low quality outposts may be best left without a starport.
• Turn spending from 100% military to 100% social.
• Designate your planets strategically, research aplications are fragile and better off in the back of your empire, production outposts up in front to suply the war effort and economy somewhere in the middle.
• Once your production and research outposts finish their labs and factorys begin to balance your sliders to a more balanced version like 33% research/social/military. You will have to run on this kind of spending anyway (on average)
• Designate your best planets as headquarters, for example your homeworld the economy headquarters, the outpost with the 700% manufacturing bonus tile the production headquarters, another the research HQ and your influence HQ your political headquarters
• You will probably not find situations which are ideal for my advise, you may not be capable of putting your ideal research outpost in the back or your production in the front!
• What you should build on designated planets is not absolute, if you cant run your empire on 100% spending considder using that aproval or food bonus tile on your research/production planet.
• If you manage to fail your revenue income you might want to put the trading tech as a priority, the extra money is always nice.

also:

• Economy planets are best left on quality planets (usually large or with lots of bonus tiles). where production and research outposts can easily live with a lowly quality of 5-6. Economy (revenue) -] quality ; Production -] quantity.
• Designations can be changed, when in the dire need of military convert your research outposts.
• I considder it best to have your economy produce some more revenue then you can spend so you have something to bargain with in negotiations (optional)
  
• Dont shy away from building economy starbases, they can expand your production at the litle cost of some constructors. Think future, investments like these return with a passion.
• Take or trade for mining starbases, as you research techs up from xeno industrial theory these will become very important and are certainly become 'not best left in drengin, yor or spiceants hands'.
• Whenever you earn to much revenue quickly build more and better spending structures, conquer an empire, build up influence or research techs to do the previous or raise diplomacy.
• I realize i havent said very much about techs, what you research is heavily subject of what you want.

My litle notebook and kwide to my mindset to the galciv II galaxy is subject to future molestation and will probably be altered as spiceants superiority is subject to pagan criticism.'
(you may post your opinion and notes so that i can make change as i see fit)

regards and good night everything

[Kinjiru]

See, this is what I love about 'Poly. Your approach to initial builds is radically different than mine, and now I defintely want to try yours out!

Couple thoughts though...

1) What bother with decommissioning those initial scouts? Don't they make great (with their sensors) spys all through the game?

2) How do you manage growth, with all those farms? Whenever I make use of the farms (especially on bonus tiles) I find that my approval ratings tank. Granted, you seem to be happy with a lower threshold of approval rating than I do, but even given that consideration, I find my approval rate dropping much further down.

I highly suspect that there is something very basic I am missing here, but have not managed to find it yet!

3) "Buy 1-2 speed 3-4 colony ships on your homeworld and send them out, build the next amount of colony ships required to colonize all other planets without buying them. "

Colony ships are pretty cheap, why not just buy them all?


Anyway, thanks for posting your guide. I look forward to giving your strategies a try.

[bovine cannibal]

What's a kwide?

When I'm playing an easier game, such as beginner, medium, three opponents, I tend to ignore purchasing. I don't use the following strategy when I'm going up against more efficent AI, though. I may salvage bits of it, since it is compatible with a 3-4 colony ship purchase strategy.

I go 100% spending and social. I queue up around three factories, or whatever it takes to get between 50&60 production. If I build four total, it tends to take my civ five weeks. After this, I switch to 100 % military. I'm now in the sweet price/production spot to produce a colony ship every two weeks or a scout ship every one.

I tend to flood the galaxy with basic scouts, then park them near key planets. If I use only a few scouts, I make cargo sensor platforms with around 5 sensor and 4 speed. My Terran Alliance "Blue Whales" are quite handy, but they have a couple quirks. They're around 80 credits, can't convert to tiny hull fighter ships, and the designer lists them as 1 maintenance while the shipyard lists zero.

I have to ask also, why bother decomissioning those scouts? Don't they have zero maintenance cost? At the very least I keep them around in case I want to upgrade them into a fleet or two of fighters.

[JeffS]

2) How do you manage growth, with all those farms? Whenever I make use of the farms (especially on bonus tiles) I find that my approval ratings tank. Granted, you seem to be happy with a lower threshold of approval rating than I do, but even given that consideration, I find my approval rate dropping much further down.

What are the consequences of lowered approval? I know that one is lower growth, since the manual states that 100% approval results in doubled growth and less than 30% approval can result in negative growth. I asume (correct me if I'm wrong) that approval rates scale such that growth becomes lower as approval gets lower. This does not strike me as a reason to limit population however, since the worst that will happen is that you simply stop growing. The whole thing strikes me as being, at least partially, self-correcting.

If you have any elected form of government you will have to keep approval high enough to keep winning elections. If GalCiv II is similar to original GalCiv then just over 50% should be sufficient (I yet played enough GalCiv II to know whether it's a problem). Keeping approval rating high is presumably also important if one of your planets is in danger of defecting to another race.

Beyond those, are there other advantages to having a high approval rating? If not, then I would think that in most situations it would be safe to build up population agressively until approval falls to 55% or so without many negative consequences. What has your experience been?

[tetley]

I think there's some randomness in the elections, so you want some buffer over the 50% mark. I agree with you--population growth stops at 39%. That's not that far below 50%. You can have other planets (like with approval bonus squares) make up for that. And then you've got re-education centers that can stop defection, and even those hopefully aren't often necessary, because more population means more influence. It's going to take an awful lot to overtake a 21b population colony by 4x influence.