Pycroft

Join Date 09/2008

Help for a beginner

Hello everyone...

I recently purchased the game and am having a few problems I hope the community can help me with. I am definetily not new to the type of game and strategies, but have some minor issues:

1. I have been playing a game against 'simple' computer and I have dominated the the 'colonization' race and have a big lead on planets. I have found the most difficult part to follow is the technologies, specifically relating to ships. I had 12 planets to 3 and the race comes at me with huge vessels. I had a huge technology advantage Lasers III, miniballs IV, all these advancements, but the best ship I had (As Terrans) was a Star Fury with very little firepower, against a Frigate, and my fleet was destroyed. Any suggestions about how I can figure out the tech tree to go specifically to better ships? Any 'MUST HAVE' techs to build ships. I found I followed the 'red' tree which was the weapons, but then had no ships to put the weapons on

2. I had an example which a planet that was formerly not inhabitable was suddenly inhabitable. Fortunately I voted myself to have tehe planet (I overwhelmed them in numbers at the vote). It was near two other planets from another civilization and within two turns the planet was lost to their culture. Then later, I took some ships and destroyed them. Again, within two turns, it was back in their hands. How do I avoid this? Should I bring a colony ship with some of my colonists to populate the planet? Would this negate the effects? Should I have attacked their capital city first to try to kill some of the culture?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Pycroft

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Any suggestions about how I can figure out the tech tree to go specifically to better ships?

The best advice to follow is to head to the shipyard, and make your own ships with whatever technology you have on hand. There are only a small number of 'core' ships with scattered requirements, and none of them are very impressive. As well, designing your own lets you adapt to the weapons or defenses your enemies are using.

Then later, I took some ships and destroyed them. Again, within two turns, it was back in their hands. How do I avoid this?

Influence is a function of several things (resources, starbases, influence buildings on the planets themselves, etc). If the planet is deep in enemy space though, the simplest solution would be to just invade a cluster of planets sufficient to establish a bubble of your own influence there.

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Is there a guide to make your own ships with the tech? I don't have a clue how to do this.

Thanks for the advice.

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

The wiki page references two threads here: the Unnoficial Ship Guide for info and the SHOW OFF your cool ship designs thread.

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As you continue on in your galciv career you will notice that for some races their AI will concentrate on researching and building medium to large ships early in the game. A few medium or large ships will quickly skew the military rating in their favor. However they are very underpowered and you just need to zerg them with your ity bity ships till they pop.

Also i will concentrate on 1 weapon line during a game. I rarely have a had a need for 2 different weapon systems

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I've barely started playing a few weeks ago, almost done with the Dread Lords campaign on Beginner\Normal. Sounds like your first problem can easily be addressed by using one of the most powerful and fun tools in the game: the shipyard.

Create your own designs! You may have the technological advantage, but the core designs do not automatically update as you research better weapons, armor, shields, etc. Your StarFury is probably still using laser mk I, hyperdrive, and such not to mention you're just wasting mini-balls IV if you don't create your own designs (or upgrade the core).

As far as getting bigger ships, you'll want to look to the "hull" research portion of the tree. Medium scale building is where I spend most of my games as it gives you access to a few medium sized hulls. Coupled with miniaturization, you can extend the usefulness of your medium hulls by packing more into its limited capacity. Even when uprading to larger hulls, I still found myself going back to my medium designs for cheaper, quicker to build, solutions. I also don't phase out my medium designs when I moved to the larger hulls; no need to chase down freighters, scouts, troop transports with huge battleships if your scrappy fighter is more than enough to get the job done and can get it down faster.

I've only been "forced" to invest in another weapon technology when the Dread Lords started adapting missile defense on their ships. I mean, they're tough enough, that just wasn't fair! Not a big deal, beam weapons are given to you during the campaign, it was just a matter of trading my missiles for others' beam technology.

Cannot answer your second question, just not enough experience. I do know when conquering the Dread Lord colonies, I found that their social production was terribly low. Didn't think to check the colony details to find out why it took so long to build the colonies, so I opted to destroy the colonies instead of risking the Dread Lords taking it back. Those colonies were most definitely engulfed in their ring of influence.

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You should look at the pink part of the tech tree where you will find, Medium scale buildns, large hulls, and such techs that give you bigger ships, normally the pre-requisite is insterstellar consruction wich is dark orange just like the factory techs. Also its better to use only 1 type of weapons, the red tech tree reperesents 3 types of weapons divided in 3 diferent lines, select 1 and max that, the only reason to change is if a good civ (generraly very good defense) is overwhelming your weapons with too many defences.

Also as every other guy here has said, use the shipyard, is very intuitive, you go around the tabs and select your hull, then the extra aprts wich are only for decorative porpuses, then you can put engines if you like, then the weapons and so on.

What do you mean by "Then later, I took some ships and destroyed them." did you destroyed his ships?

Mainly the only ways to take over a planer are:

Trade it thorug the diplomacy screen
Flip it over with your influence (the planet mus be in your sphere of influence and you need to have 4x the influence of the world you want to flip)
and the must common one, invasion, you need t reaserch planetary invasion, then create a transport and send it to an undefende world.

The best way to negate a cultural flip on of your planets is to increase ppulation and put some embasys or any other influence enchanter in your planet, or you can construct a influence starbase near your planet.

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I found I followed the 'red' tree which was the weapons, but then had no ships to put the weapons on

Did u ever research larger hulls to put these weapons on?

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