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The following are a some tips I've found useful when playing GalCiv games with relatively intelligent AI opponents. I certainly don't consider myself an expert; anyone else who has done well at Challenging+ levels, feel free to toss in your own comments.
Hopefully this has been useful to people trying to get ahead in the game; I'm interested in hearing strategies from other players who have managed to go toe to toe on the better AI levels and win. Good luck out there!
- The first aspect to look at is the game setup itself. I never leave the alignment to default; you want to set up the alignment/intelligence of the opponents to best suit you. What I do is figure out what sort of game I want to play (evil or good, neutral is no fun in my book!
) and set up the AI accordingly. If you're just starting a higher difficulty level, give the higher AI to the races that you plan on being friends with, and leave the other races the difficulty you're used to playing. One potential strategy here is to have 2 ultra-good races and be good yourself, relying on them to help do your dirty work. You may also want to modify your starting abilities; I generally have the 10% improvement to planet quality mixed with other options. - Never underestimate the power of location. If you want to be shy and retiring in your game, start out in a corner with a lot of planets nearby (control-N is your friend!). If you want to mix it up with everybody and get trading right off the bat, find a nice starting spot in the middle. There's certainly nothing wrong with restarting to find the sort of position you want to play.
- You should have your opening strategy down by now: use the combination of lease/quick buy/adjusting sliders to maximize production that you're comfortable with, and get out there fast. The AI will be colonizing fast and furiously, and you should be too.
- Even within the early stages of colonization, start having some of your lower-class planets working on a few constructors. They take some time at the start, and if you don't have them early on, you'll miss out on all the resources that you need to support you later on. Of course, you need to know where they are; it helps to have a scout or two out early, to locate them. Make sure your survey ship is being used as an explorer, as well; leave the anomalies near your own colonies for later exploration, and get out there to meet the aliens!
- If you've been researching as quickly as you should be, you should have a few extra techs to sell to the other races that you meet. Squeeze the cash out of them, if you can; the minor races are often nice cash cows and can't research a lot on their own. The idea here is to keep your cash flow high enough that you can keep your production bar raised to at least 80% in the first few stages of the game.
- Figure out what techs you want and get there fast, to try to get ahead of everybody else. I like having the (relative
) monopoly on Diplomatic Translators and Aphrodisiac. I'm always building one of those on Earth early as soon as the Manufacturing Center is finished. After the first round of techs are done, I usually try to grab Interstellar Refining for the sweet power of the Fusion Power Plant. It costs 3 to maintain, but it's only half the building cost of the Man. Center and has +10% economy, so it more than pays for itself even on dinky planets. You want these low-build cost projects available to buff up your lower quality planets without taking 50 turns to do so. - Taxes: These should rarely be above 50% for an extended period of time, at least during the early/mid game. Your population will shrink (or at least not grow at the rate you want it) if they are over-taxed. This is true even if your approval rate is sky-high. People vote with their feet, and they will quietly move elsewhere (or just work the grey market) and you'll end up never having the number of taxable people that you need. I found this one out the hard way...
- Diplomacy: It can be hard to keep the peace at higher skill levels, especially if you have people of opposing alignment near you. My last Painful game, I had one point where everybody in the game was Cool toward me or worse, so I'm still working on this myself. The usual suspects apply when it comes to remedying this: get those freighters from your big planets out to get the trade routes up, for both the cash and the diplomacy benefits. Trading helps marginally, and of course just keeping up with the military buildup is good, even if you don't plan on going to war immediately. If you're militarily weak, the other races will tend to look down on you and not have any problem shoving you around.
- Apart from the starbases on hopefully a few resources, you must have at least one starbase early on in your primary production sectors (usually Earth's sector if you picked a good starting spot, and one other nearby sector.) Always build constructors when you don't need more military ships and get the production in those key sectors cranked up. The trade bonuses are important for maintaining the cash flow, as well, especially mid-game where you may not want to sell as many techs to prospective rivals. Ideally if you have enough extra constructors you want to have 3 loaded starbases in your primary building sector, but that doesn't happen sometimes when you're too busy building military to keep from getting pounded. These primary sectors should contain the high quality (22+) planets that will be cranking out your battleships and dreadnoughts once they come along; those are the few planets where you want to take the time/cost to build the shipyard, star ship foundry, etc.
- Approval: There are two very different parts to your approval rating. The first is the approval on a planetary level, which varies widely based on the planet quality, improvements, and potential changes based on the moral choices made when you colonized. You ideally want to keep this over 80%, and absolutely no lower than 60%. Think like a dictator; use propaganda if you need to! There is also the time-honored method of shipping off those unhappy people in Transports to sit in orbit endlessly, which is unfortunately still needed sometimes, although not nearly as often with the latest patches. The other part of approval is your global approval, which is generally quite easy to maintain once you get the hang of it. This matters for elections, and mini-election events such as going to war. The key here is to remember that there are no electoral colleges in space; it's based purely on the popular vote across all your worlds. So do what any good politician would: focus on the population centers. You will have the most people on your best planets by default, which means they'll tend to be happier, since they're living in paradise and not some back-water hole. Focus on keeping these high population planets happy, by building the occasional morale project. Ideally you want them over 90%; if you can keep them at 100% morale, even better. If you do this and have your other planets at better than 60%, you'll easily cruise to victory anytime you have to put a vote to the masses.
- Taking out the trash: Sooner or later you'll end up either sucked into a war or needing to expand yourself. You can get away with cruising to victory without much fighting on the lower skill levels, but I haven't found the AI races so accommodating at higher skill levels. If you're skillful and have someone close to you just itching for a beat-down, you can take them out relatively early with transports and the lighter ships. Usually, though, I skip researching Corvette Technology entirely and just make a bee-line on the military side for battleships. You can prepare for potential fights with your population movements, as well. I tend to keep some of that excess population in transports near the front line planets where I'm most likely to be attacked; that way, you can beef up the population so that even if you get hit before you have all your ships out there, you can pour some extra citizens in as a last-ditch effort to beat down their soldiers when they try to land.
- Endgame: One of the hardest parts of my games so far has been figuring out which way I want to win.
It's all really game-dependant, unless you have a specific goal in mind and stick to that. On the scoring side, I would say to crank up your tech once it's clear you're going to win. During those turns when you're just doing mop-up, or waiting for your culture to expand to the point where you win, you really want to be cranking out as many techs as possible. A large part of the score seems to be based on the amount of techs researched (although it's also based on the time it takes to win, so just waiting around building more techs doesn't help unless you're going for the tech victory.
Hopefully this has been useful to people trying to get ahead in the game; I'm interested in hearing strategies from other players who have managed to go toe to toe on the better AI levels and win. Good luck out there!
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