Basic Game Progression/New player

i can tell you as a fellow gal civ newbie, it'll take longer than one afternoon to figure this game out. the interface is slightly less than intuitive and to be blunt you have to play a couple times before you figure out how shit works. once you do it's pretty cool though, i'm looking forward to updates to improve the weaker aspects of the interface. trade items are a kind of 'wonder,' except you can trade them with other civs. you can't delete them, it'd be like destroying the pyramids in civ, can't be done. the amount of time for competition to get intense depends on how many players, size of map, difficultly level, and of course random factors in the map. but remember, it took me several days of playing (and i'm not a idiot or anything, been strategy gaming since original civ) to start to understand the unexplained aspects. good luck!

Trade items are unique, stand alone items. Not only do you get the benefit of ownership, but they can be pretty valuable to trade access to with the AI.

There are many things that can influence when the great wars begin. Larger, more spread out galaxies, or smaller numbers of opponents will slow things down. There are some scenarios which start with you further up the tech tree so you don't have to research all the basic military techs to get started at war.

Tony

The reason I ask is that on a tiny map, with four other civs, even after a couple of hours no-one had many military ships of note yet. Maybe they were building them up in secret, but I hadn't seen them.

That's because you made a map that's too small for how the game wants to work and you put too many civilizations in too small a place. Everybody's restricted to a few planets, and the AI isn't very good at such things. It's going to take everybody forever to research anything, because there's just not enough colony worlds.

I played against the Drengin in a 5-way on medium and again on large. On medium, they could never get more than their initial 2 planets, and were typically just dead weight. On large, (with abundent habitable worlds), they were actually a power.

Diplomatic translators are very valuable.
Never trade them.
They give you an advantage in every deal.

One thing that is different from some other games is the opening.

Buy, buy, buy! Don't save money, put it to use building colony ships and getting your home planets industries underway! Then get those colony ships out there ASAP, cause the computer won't save any nice planets for you!

I tried the tiny map once, it wasn't very fun... my favorite short games happened on the medium map.

Thank you.

All of this makes sense and is very helpful.

Now if I could only understand how influence works, I would be ready to rumble.

I am kind of the opposite. The beginning of my games tends to be really technical with colony management.

Buy, buy, buy! Don't save money, put it to use building colony ships and getting your home planets industries underway! Then get those colony ships out there ASAP, cause the computer won't save any nice planets for you!

Not true, on a large plus map, you should only buy initial factories, altough even those you don't have to (Especially in the beta build). Of course you need to master the economics. Good thing for newbies is to play with a race with maximum plus military production and rest used for some diplomacy and economcis bonuses. I suggest playing Yor at first (Thou make sure to modify the bonuses) because their starting tech gives you nice engines and the next factory tech. Yous houdl also ctrl+N till you get a nice world with production bonus tile as your homeworld, ideally a +300%. Buy the factory for that tile, and crank your spending to 100% and 100% into military production, then focus your homeworld into research. This should put just enough point to keep you going with a bit of tech so you don't fall way behind. Start researching to universal translator.

Now design a custom colony shipw ith one colony modual and a combination of engines (Usually 2 or 3) that will allow you to build a colony ship on your homeworld every other turn. This maye take some trial and error. You may have to buy additional factory. But once you have it set so you get a colony ship every other turn, you are good to go for the next 20 turns (Assuming you play a large map). That shoudl give you a good start put you on the way to victory.

Marko,

That's a lot of players for such a small map. I recommend at least a medium map, maybe with 3 AI players. Then you'll see more activity. Your difficulty level will also change their behavior a lot. Even though you're new, it might be good to play standard difficulty level, to see more of what the AI can do.

No, there's not much just "next turn" and waiting in the game, until the middle to late game, and only then if you're at peace with everyone. You'll want to buy colony ships every turn for the first 3-4 turns of the game, in order to get them out there fast. Else the AI will gobble up all the planets. That eats up most or all of your starting money. There are different approaches to developing planets. I usually make earth a factory planet (nearly all factory buildings on it, plus a starport), then I look for a couple more planets to develop that way, and a couple for research. Ideally, one more to specialize in generating money (high population using farms, plus some markets) So, I specialize them. Other people don't.

Sometimes you select a project from the list and can click "x" to halt it. Other times you have to select the building and then "Decommission" from the building menu. Depends if it's finished or not. If you actually manage to build diplomatic translators before the AI does, I would definitely keep it.