Frustrated

WWW Link has a lot of helpful strategies for the early game, have a look at what you're doing differently what could cause you to lose.

Also, how exactly are you losing, are you falling behind in military, going into debt, ...?
What race and abilities have you chosen? Some are easier to start with.

You might wish to look at these threads:

https://forums.galciv2.com/301684
https://forums.galciv2.com/308693
https://forums.galciv2.com/178357

Good luck!

whish species are you useing.

I'm using my own species, but used tips from one of the links about what things to pick.

Also, does having more than 1 economy building add additional bonuses? Like, having 2 stock markets would give a 50% increase to economy for that building. Does that work?

Yes, economy bonuses stack. Many players devote whole planets to econ buildings.

Yea, I'm seeing that now.

Can you describe in more detail how you are loosing? Going broke? Slow to build a military? Got overwhelmed in the short term before a chance to build up? Poor technology compared to the others?

You say you were on the easiest setting and loosing - do you mean "CakeWalk" level? Knowing the level you were on also helps suggestions as it indicates your opponents abilities.

Its probable you were concentrating on just one aspect of the game (ie colonising planets, building tech, building factories - whatever). There needs to be a balanced approach, not just one activity or types of activity. It would help therefore to give an overview of what you do when starting a game. The early game is Hugely important, its effects are Exponential, and small gains early on can have Massive benefits later in the game, equally, failure to achieve various things early on can loose the game later.

My guess at present without more info, is you have a terrible economy and probably get near to or are going broke. At that point the game kicks in a limiter and forces you to correct that. That activity puts you way back and can cause major hassles. Make economy your Top (but not the only) Priority. Get into how an economy is built, get that right, and you get the space to learn the rest. Get that wrong, and you dont even get a chance to make errors to learn from.

Regards
Zy

Yea, I was going broke and I didn't have any military. I was also playing on the smallest map, which made it a bit more difficult.

The mistake I was making, was building only one econ building.

Whats generally a good fac/eco/lab ratio on an average planet, say, PQ 10?

On the game I'm playing right now, I'm doing 1 farm per planet.

Should Happiness buildings be used? I'm finding it my taxes are too high, some planets approval will just continually fall.

A rule of thumb is to add 2 happiness buildings for each farm.
Don't build farms on your homeworld (where happiness is enough of an issue once you reach the population limit without farms) or on farming bonus tiles. High populations have a big negative impact on happiness, just check the details of your planets' happiness.

It's often worth specializing your planets (except for your homeworld and except for any bonus tiles on other planets). Have one with factories + starport to churn out military ships, another one or two (depending on galaxy size, I'm thinking about small to medium size here) for research. Devote the other ones mostly to economy until you're making enough cash. Then either spend the cash on buying techs, upgrading fleets, rush-buying special buildings OR slowly convert some econ buildings into factories/labs.

And what about influence stuff?

Zero. That's not how you should build your stuff.

Each planet should be specialized to its needs. Never play on a small galaxy unless you massively bump up the number of planets, stars, and habitable planets. Otherwise there just won't be enough tiles to go around; victory in such cases is decided through luck (who gets nearby good planets), not skill. If you're looking for practice, go for a 3 player game (you and two others) on a medium map with lots of planets, stars, and habitable worlds. It'll involve more management on your part, but that's what you're trying to practice.

Second, specialize your planets. You need money producing planets. But the most efficient money producing planets come at 9-13 billion population; after that, it just takes too many happiness buildings to be worth it. Generally, I use 9 billion. To get the most out of this, I never use a planet with PQ smaller than 12 for a money planet. A money planet is one with a pair of production buildings (every world need ast least 2 production buildings), one of the lowest-level farm, 2-3 happiness buildings, and everything else is econ.

Low quality planets (1-4 range) can sometimes become late-game money worlds due to terraforming technology. They may get 3-5 tiles per level of terraforming tech, so they will often end the game at around PQ 10-15.

Now, for PQ7-10, these should be your main production worlds. That is, all production buildings, and a StarPort. Other worlds should be research worlds: a pair of production buildings and then research buildings.

Different map sizes just lend themselves to different play styles. One is not necessarily easier or harder.



It is easy to overspend in GalCiv2, under any version. Money is the most important thing in this game - it lets you do everything else, although that is often not clear right away. Econ buildings help a lot, so does researching better government styles, as well as taking econ bonuses and morale bonuses from the getgo.



Broadly speaking it is better to speciliaze your planets.... a planet with all labs will benefit more from econ starbases and the technology capital than one with a mix. Still, depending on how many planets you own, you may have to mix it up a bit. Even when mixing it up, I would suggest going labs/econ with some worlds and factories/econ with others, and then some worlds (if you can spare any) that are ALL econ.



That is fine, as long as you never use a +300% farm tile or put any farms on planets that start out with a pop capacity of 16 billion, only on the planets that start with 6 billion. If you only use one farm per planet then you are free to research up to the end of the farm line whenever you need more people.



You should not use happiness buildings. I have a thread elsewhere with lots of math, but in almost all cases happiness buildings lose you money rather than gaining it. More econ buildings is what you want, and your tax rate should be based off of the happiness you get from morale bonuses that apply empire wide. Things like mining morale resources, the morale ability points you spent, the morale bonuses from researching the entertainment tech tree, and the morale trade goods. In short, 1 farm + 2 stock markets makes almost twice as much money as 1 farm + 2 morale buildings and a higher tax rate. I won't bog you down with the behind the scenes math here.

IF you have a morale bonus tile (it looks like a blue water drop) then you do want to build the weakest morale building you have on it. Those tiles add a flat +100% to that planets morale, as long as ANY morale building is on it. Morale buildings don't do as much as they say they do (more math) but for instance, if a morale building SAYS it adds +10% it really adds between +6% and +2% for most populations. This is because there is a hidden penalty that was added over a year ago to penalize high population worlds, so the effect of morale buildings scales down the more people there are.


In short, focus more on making money. Better governments, happier overall people (not from buildings, from bonuses), and lots of econ buildings should help you.

Good luck,
~ Wyndstar