So, what am I doing wrong...Get smushed alot by the AI...

The simple answer: I don't bother to keep up with their military. I usually play with high diplomacy bonuses and I will align with neutral to keep everyone mildly happy. One thing you can consider doing to stave off war is to trade economic and/or research treaties with the biggest threats. When they have a treaty with you, they will not be very willing to attack you because of the penalties of breaking a treaty; the AI, however, seems to forget that they plan to attack you when you propose trading the treaty, so if you can come up with the cash/goods it is relatively easy to diplomatically thwart their plans in this fashion. Another possibility is to use the Super Manipulator tech to cause the people with the greatest militaries to attack each other and retard both of their militaries' growth.

Planet quality isn't a very good bonus; from what I understand it only improves your homeworld by a couple tiles. Spend more on economics.

Well, for a general question I can only give a general answer

Seriously though, below is a guide I posted a long time ago to help a new player that was having problems. Hopefully reading through this (only slightly outdated) list of starting strategy will help you some. It isn't going to jump you to suicidal, and some of the advice is for a medium galaxy... but it should point you in the right direction. Enjoy.

~ Wyndstar



Well, the trick really is to balance a lot of things. Here are some very basic tips that might help you (not necessarily super cool though)...

Assuming you are starting a game on a medium map, there are, I think, four things that is helpful to focus on in the first year:

Early game economy: Early in the game (the first year, as you mentioned) is the most important time to build an economy, or figure out some way to make money. Here are a few simple strategies:
- Take the Super Trader Ability. Not only does this let you start building freighters right away, it also lets you build an econ capital from day one. Building your economy capital on a world with 15-18 billion people will help.
- Take the Super Breeder Ability. If you are colonizing a lot of worlds, this can really help. It only kicks in when you have 100% approval, so watch those sliders. This is a good way to get lots of people in the first 3-4 months, which will help set up your empire for the rest of the game.
- Spend your bonus points on the three economy helping stats. With 10 points you can pick the +30% economy, +10% morale, and +40% population growth abilities. If you have a custom race, that still leaves you with 5 points to customize your race (I personally pick up +1 speed, or go to +20% morale and pick up +10% planet quality). If you don't have a custom race, those basic ten points will add on to whatever bonuses your race already gets, so you should be fine.
- Set anomolies to "abundant" in the map setting. Early on research sensors (and to a lesser degree impulse drive). For medium maps build 2-3 more survery ships in the first month and set all of your survey ships to "auto-survey". Anamolies can give a variety of boosts, but the instant cash ones (+100,+250,+500 and +1000 in DA) are the ones that will help your early cash reserves.
- Don't spend all of your initial 5000 credits on rush buying things. Instead, drop your taxes so that your people are at 100% approval so that they breed faster. Keep some money around so that you can handle 100% production while you "buy" approval. When your colonies get within about 2-3 billion of their max, or when you run out of money, then raise your taxes up to a higher rate (as needed).

Research early game:
Unless there is a world you absolutely must have, the colonization techs are generally a waste of time. Some people disagree, and it does depend on how many of any type of environment spawns on your map. There are a lot of directions to send your research, but it can help to try and catagorize techs into three catagories:
1) Techs that increase your money
2) Techs that spend your money
3) Techs that help your military
Catagory 1 includes techs like econ buildings, morale buildings, better governments, trade, diplomacy and influence. Until your empire is generating a profit, it is good to focus on these techs early.
Catagory 2 includes techs like research centers, manufacturing buildings, anti-matter power plants and the like. These "infrastructure" techs are going to be very important for you to have as you enter the middle game, and prepare for war. But realize that each one you research will increase your costs - in the cost to upgrade, needing to spend bc on the increased production provided, as well as basic maintenance costs. One strategy is to alternate going up the Catagory 1 and Catagory 2 branches. Build econ enhancing techs, then when you are generating a surplus, go up the next infrastructure tech that you can afford, then build some more econ techs, repeat. You will have to adjust this based on your specific game conditions.
Catagory 3 techs are things like weapons, defenses, soldiering techs, starbase enhancements, hull advancement and logistics. These techs are vital when you actually want to fight war. However, you don't need them early. I wait to start on these until I have a firm range of catagory one and two techs already researched. At some point your galaxy will start to militarize. Keep pace with the other civs and only pick up these techs as needed in the first year. Keep a check on the Military graph to see which empires have built attack ships, and how strong they are. Even if you really like war, generally you want to wait until quite late to start researching these.

Colonization Early Game: Well, on a medium map a few extra worlds can really swing the balance, so you don't want to be out-colonized either. Still, at a little over 1000bc to rush buy each colony ship - that is probably not a good way to spend that precious starting 5000. If you start off by building survey ships you should get a good picture of your immediate surroundings in the first few weeks. It is probably better to rush buy 1-3 factories on your starting world, and just focus a lot of your production on "military" to quickly build colony ships. Try not to build too many, you want to get back to researching as soon as possible.
In star systems with damaged and undamaged worlds, go for the undamaged worlds. You can probably get away with completely ignoring the extreme colonization tech until you start invading those worlds. Go for the PQ 10+ worlds first, they give you a morale boost. Go for the PQ 1-4 worlds next, they will be some of the best worlds in the long run. Pick up the PQ 5-9 worlds last.
If you colonize a lot of worlds, spending money on all of them might be more than your early economy can handle. That is OK. Just let some of your colonies sit there and breed until you can afford to spend credits on production. For instance, on some worlds you might only build a morale building, or a morale and farm building using the basic colony production pts, don't even worry about building factories - just focus production on social for those worlds. You can always build over these tiles later when you want to develop the world. You just want a little morale boost to help you keep the people at 100% approval so that they breed and start to pay taxes. Trying to build up 8 industrial worlds simultaneously can be a good way to crash a young economy, even with (or because of) the Super Hive Ability.
The key in the colonization phase is to grab good long term planets so that the other races don't get them. They don't need to be developed right away. The extreme colonization worlds usually don't need to be a part of this strategy. Remember, if you and several other empires share worlds in the same star system, a higher population and approval will help you in culture flipping their worlds to you as well.
Finally, you probably want to design your own colony ships. I like to put a pair of ion drives on mine in place of the hyperdrive, but it depends on how far they need to go how fast. You have to buy those bigger engines with precious early game resources, so only build more expensive colony ships when the speed boost is actually needed.

Your homeworld early game: There are a lot of ways a homeworld can go, and you probably want to use any bonus tiles that appear (except the +300% food tile). However, assuming the most common startup, you will have one PQ10 world with a 12 billion population cap. The best way I have found to use this world is to make it your early manufacturing and economy capital. Specifically, I like to develop it with 1 morale building, one food building, the econ capital, the manufacturing capital, and 5 factories. Here is why I like to do this:
- The manufacturing capital now only gives a +33% production boost, and this effect can be duplicated later on more appropriate worlds using Quantum Power Plants. But manufacturing capitals now also give a +10% econ boost, so you want them on a planet with a high population to maximize the new values. Your home planet will have a population in the 15-19 billion range for most of the game.
- The high starting population and high population cap for the homeworld makes it a good place to put the economy capital. You want to build that early because it is fairly cheap to build, and typically it is early on when you are having the most trouble with money. With the new morale rules, you probably are not going to have some super 40billion population world ever, so it is a safe bet that your homeworld will have as healthy a population as any other world in your empire.
- Early on you want that 100% approval so your people breed. You also want a lot more people. Building the morale building helps you keep a higher tax rate while still keeping approval at 100% on your homeworld, which because of the large starting population is often the hardest place to handle morale early.
- You want to build one, and only one, farm building here right away. This will change your pop cap from 12 to 15. Later farming upgrades will take you to 17 and 20. The key is that they changed how morale works so that populations over 18 billion take a huge morale hit. If you know you will eventually research intensive farming, you only want one building here. Alternatively, if your home world starts with a +100% food tile, build basic farming on it, but remember to never research a higher level of food. This will start out your homeworlds population cap at the optimal 18 billion.
- You want factories early. You want them to build early survey ships, colony ships and constuctors to grab resources from your enemies. If you are already making this world your manufacturing capital, you will want as many factories here anyway.
- remember, except for the capitals you can always change what this world does later by upgrading existing buildings with new ones. Sometimes I will later switch my homeworld over into a pure research world (and while I may lose the 33% production of the manufacturing capital, I still retain the +10% economy on my high population). Don't be afraid to be flexible.

This strategy will leave you lagging in research behind the AI for the first two months or so. I usually make the first decent PQ world I colonize into my research center, because I know I will need to catch up eventually. Of course, adjust your strategy based on bonus tiles, galaxy composition, quality and distance of new worlds found, and your specific needs at any point.

There are, of course other strategies for other situations. Hopefully that gives you a good feel of a way to approach the first 50 turns or so (1 year) on a medium sized map with about a half dozen enemies. Hope that helps. Or at the very least it shouldn't hurt

It only improves your homeworld, and any worlds you colonize. +10% gives you 1 tile for every 10 the world originally had. +20% provides 1 tile for every 5 the world originally had.

In terms of usefulness, it is possibly one of the weaker powers. Its usefulness has a direct corrispondance to how many worlds you are able to personally colonize. As such, it is practically worthless on maps with few planets, while helpful with maps with lots of planets.



I don't bother to keep up... I build better. In my latest game, I'm playing as the Yor and I held back in my military production so I could keep my research at 60% so I could research huge hulls, max miniturization, and research good PD defense so I could mix it with my stolen "Nightmare Torpedo" tech.

Suffice to say, my military might jumped from last to the best in 30 turns, using only 2 of these super ships, nocking the Krynn from best and pushing them down to my old spot. I'm now looking at the other civs that I haven't forgiven for their bullying ways, such as the Korath and Terrans.

I haven't played TA yet, but in DA, the AI smokes me at everything in the beginning. I concentrate on weapons tech and start overtaking them through conquest early to mid-game. Once you take enough of their planets, you can turn it around your way. Though, I don't always win and a lot of it depends on luck.

For high diffuclties, you need way more planets than the AI does. There's no way to compete with them planet for planet (unless you drop the difficulty way down). That's why strategies are always based on taking as many planets as you can as soon as you can.

One thing that makes high difficulties winable is the fact the AI doesn't deal with all out offensive attacks well. You can use that to your huge advantage.

I see you're only trying to move up to normal, but the principles are the same when advancing difficulty regardless of where you're at now. Go out there and take those planets, inhabited or not, and you'll find yourself toward the top of the difficulty level in no time. Don't let the AI's faster pace discourage you.

One other note, TA is still beta which means the game can be heavily unbalanced at various stages of its development. Unless you really want to beta test, I would recommend mastering DL, then advancing to DA since it's a harder game. I'm expecting TA to be harder again.

Thanks all, I've read every word so far, and its good advice. Going to put this to good use. And no worries on the general answers, thats sort of what I was after...a mile away view of how to go about things, and adjusting the details from there, depending on the current game. Thanks again, and keep it coming if you have something to say

Can someone elaborate a bit on this? How exactly are the low-quality worlds some of the best ones in the long run, and why would you take them over the 5-9 PQ worlds?

PQ 1-4 worlds are better than 5-9 because the 1-4 worlds nine times out of ten will have something like 3 or 4 terraformable tiles to start out with. While this sounds profoundly underwhelming at first brush keep in mind that those 3-4 terraformable tiles are per terraforming tech IE multiply the number of yellow tiles by 3 and you get the actual PQ of the fully upgraded planet. I have seen 1s and 3s turn into 18s and 19s once they were done being terraformed and this is not a once in a million occurence. I find its rare for a 1-3 to not come out at least a PQ 15 in the end.

Conversely 5-9s usually only have about 3 terraform tiles total and are thus better short term investments early game but much worse long term investments overall.

That interesting you point that out about the lower PQ worlds turning out to be diamonds in the rough. Now that you mention it I also have seen that happen more times than not.

As for advice, just focus on what you are doing. I haven't played the beta yet, but the Korath, Drengin, and Yor are going to outpace you militarily because that's what they do. Their infrastructure suffers for it. Let them build their ships. Just build enough so you don't turn out to be the small kid in the playground.

The Altarians are going to rock their research out. The Thalans will outproduce you. The Terrans will have a better economy. The Iconians and Torians will sit around and wait for someone to conquer them

But just stay the course and follow a lot of the great advice that's already been given. I've posted this before, but my game went to a new level when I didn't rush buy and set my taxes so low at the beginning that I ran at 100% approval for as long as I could. Those extra people turn into extra cash and it really jump-started my economy, making me a contender very early.

I find that I'm not the most efficient player but I'm usually able to either pick off a weaker race or take a large chunk out of a race that attacked me. The AI always has more ships and a higher military rating than me, but they tend to produce much more small and tiny hulls than I do. I also try to optimize my weapons and defenses to counter what they are throwing at me. Sometimes this means taking a step or 2 back on the tree but it really pays off. I also swear by miniaturization the more guns and defenses you can put on your ships the better. Essentailly what ends up happening is the AI is sending many small ships equipped with lets say mass drivers an sheilds at me. Meanwhile I'm countering with large and medium ships equipped with missiles and armour. While they have a difficult time punching through my defenses due to a lack of firepower per ship and my optimized defenses, my larger ships can knock out a ship or 2 per round. Essentailly I can take out 10-15 enemy ships for every one I lose. As long as I can start picking off some of the better enemy planets then there is no way the AI can sustain those losses.

Hopefully if you follow some of these ideas you'll have a little more luck.

Hey all, just wanted to update you. I followed some of the general advice here, and in particular changed a little about my research approach. I just wanted to say thankyou. At the moment at least (and maybe I just got lucky with this particular game), I'm running really strong, about midway through the game. I absorbed the Dominion of Korx pretty easily, and I'm easily a match, when everything is taken into account, for any other Civ. The fat lady certainly hasn't sung on this one yet, but things seem to be running alot smoother.

My start strategy, where I went for colonies, and whether or not I started building on new planets right away or not made a huge difference too. Most of them I didn't start on for a bit. In fact, I built up 3 or 4, and ended up with a couple dozen I hadn't yet touched. While normally I hadn't gone that route quite so completely (usually I left quite a bit less planets sitting than I did this time), it worked out great this time.

I also concentrated my early research on economic upgrades. Some of the tech topics would have taken 50 or more turns so early, but creativity seemed to go off alot early on, and finished a couple up for me in no time.

Anyways, long story short, thanks a ton for the advice, and I seem to be doing pretty well this time around. Thanks again!

I think new players often feel they need to fill the build queues right away on every world they get a hold of. That can play hell on your economy. Planets make money, do research, and produce with the initial colony. Buildings greatly enhance that, but it costs money. Early game, I build only a handful of planets and don't even touch most of them until mid game. The benefit from initial colonies does stack up nicely once you start getting numbers of them. When conquering planets early game, I'll sometimes decomission expensive buildings already on them to protect my economy.

You're right about that! I'm a beginner and I have been going full bore with research and always have something being built on every planet and in every starport. As you say, this loses a lot of money and eventually I have to scale my resource spending way down to avoid going broke. (I don't know what happens if you actually do go broke, but I assume that it's bad. )
Eventually, through trade and population growth, I can start ramping things back up and things start going gang-busters, but there is a big lull there where my civ is quite vulnerable.
Next game, I'll have to try your advice and let some planets sit idle for awhile and see how it works.

It's a matter of degree really. I've run my economy pretty far into the ground and pulled it out. I've also run my economy into the ground and had to scrap the game. What happens is you have to set spending to zero. If you can hold out for a number of turns spending nothing, your populations grow and you can pull it out. If you dig yourself in too deep, you just keep going more and more into the red until you can't climb out. In every game I play, there's a point at the end of year 0 where I have to run at zero spending for a few turns waiting for things to pick up. It's a fine line and it can make or break my game.

I partially agree with this.
I still prefer PQ6 and higher over the PQ 1-3 at the start, simply because in the short run, a pq6-9 will be a benefit to your game, while PQ1-3 will be a penalty. Planets with such low PQ have a max pop which means that especially on a PQ1, you will be losing money unless you ship in people to reach the 6B mark. And being able to ship those people is usually a sign of lack of efficiency.
Secondly you can safely ignore all PQ1 planets untill you have 2 of the terraforming researches. The AI will ignore them forever so why bother racing to colonise them, when you can easely take it later and take a more directly useful planet now.
Do take it later though, especially the ones that are PQ1 AND have a colonisation restriction (for instance heavy gravity), those usually turn out to have more terraforming tiles than the regular PQ1 variety.
The PQ2-5 that the computer will take can usually be culture flipped if in your area, if they're not in your area they are often vulnerable to culture flipping away from you anyhow. I'd only colonise them early if I desperatly need planets and everything else has already been taken, or if I need them to culture-defend a better planet in a hostile environment, several planets close together can be sufficient to prevent them from defecting...


Upon the subject of manipulation:
Getting everyone at war with someone is an excellent way to defend yourself. Keeping them busy by bribing them into wars with eachother can play a huge part in them forgetting that you're an insignificant weak fly with an impotent military. This will buy you time to get the invasion technologies and some weak military researches to take a few planets from anyone who does try to attack you eventually. It will also slow down the enemies' race towards the extreme colonisation techs, allowing you to get a headstart researching those and colonising a few extra worlds. Just make these worlds either research worlds or economy/farm worlds, because their manufacturing output will only be half of what it should be until you have also researched the Advanced extreme colony tech for that planet.

Definitely. I only grab the 2's and 3's because the AI will grab them right away and I don't want too much outside influence in my own area. But, they do cost money until you can terraform up the PQ.


For sure. I always work the diplomacy techs so I can bribe the galaxy into turmoil as soon as I can afford it. The early game is easier when they're all fighting eachother.

I call it the Civilization Syndrome. Players, that have had experience with 4X games in the past try to take these same basic strategies and employ them in GalCiv. The problem with is that GCs economic engine is very different from that found in many other 4X games.

For example in many versions of Civilization, you couldn't just let a city sit there without development or creating soldiers; it would spell doom for your empire. But in GalCiv, its actually a very smart move to let some of those extra worlds just sit around for a while and build up their economic and population base before building them out.

As for the PQ bonus, I have to disagree with DivineWraith back in reply #3; the PQ bonus is MUCH more valuable in a small, rare map than on a larger map. This is because each tile on a small map has a much higher intrinsic value as compared to the multitude of available tiles in a gigantic setting. On a small, rare map, starting with a Class 11 instead of a Class 10 and getting that extra morale boost from the start can really make a difference. ((For the record, and correcting Wyndstar (sacrilegious I know!) in reply #2, that your worlds must be at least PQ 11 to get the 10% morale boost. They do NOT at PQ 10. This is why that 10% PQ boost can be useful.

Also, plan your research. Don't just research the next cheapest technology. You can almost always outresearch the AI if you proceed along a tech line until you get what you want. The AI tends to be more mish-mashed in its researching ability, but you can win with a determined and focused research effort.

That's a good point. The AI tends to look at the tech tree in one big line, covering the lower techs in each area before moving on. By focusing on a particular line, you can gain quite an advantage. Building an SCC early comes to mind.