Index Of Tricks

I haven't found a page deticated to storing all the neat tricks you can do in this game, if you know of such a page, please provide link. As such, these 'gems' are just what I stumbled across through playing, no doubt you have others, please list, we should have a pretty impressive list by the end.


Colonial Speed Boost

This is most helpful in the early game where the speed of your ships is the limiting factor as to how far you can expand. Simply land the ship on your planet, and launch in a different direction. This nets an extra one or two parsecs in that turn. I have used this to beat out other races for planets

Terrorism

In my opinion, espionge sucks, what good is reducing a planet's manufactoring if it has about 10 more ISs on it? You're not making that big of an impact. Here's what you do: search thru your target's planets, and find a huge economic one. There bound to be Xeno Farms and so on there. Place your spy on the farms, and watch the population starve, that's going to hit his bottom line big time.


This is all I got for right now, I really hope you guys can come out with at least a few more. Remember we're not looking for strategies or simple things build into the game for their own purpose (EX. Tech Trading).

Thanks in advance

Use the spy on farms+morale buildings prior to an invasion (1 turn before for farms) - makes it much easier!

If invading a tough target, send one transport in first using mass drivers tactics - providing it fails it won't cause any damage to the planet, but will have taken out a lot of their forces.

When attacking with a fleet, if most of the defenders are destroyed and it's only really cannon fodder remaining make sure to split up your fleet and attack with each ship separately, and then rejoin your fleet at the end, to maximise the number of attacks you can get.

Leave the planet by your homeworld unoccupied, so the computer then takes it, spends money building it up, and then has it revert back to you thanks to your influence

Send your colony ship back to your homeworld to get 250 colonists starting off instead of the 100 it starts with

Sometimes you can get more money selling a line of techs piecemeal rather than selling them as a batch. The AI will realize that adding laser 1 to a deal that already included Laser 3 isn't very useful, but if you sell laser 1 and then sell laser 2 and then sell laser 3, they pay full price for each technology.

Thanks for the replies,

You can usually bribe a civ (CivA). into warring with another civ (CivB) who's stronger than you. Start the CivA v. CivB proxy war wait about 10 turns or so until CivB's ships are over dealing with CivA then swing in with the transports and steal a lot of planets from CivB

This also boosts relations with CivA, who is by now, your new neighbour.

This is best used stealing the top one or two planets is the system (IE. not all of them) and leaving the rest to be cultured onto your side.

Sometimes it's worth it to give somebody a tech. Take banks for example... please! The same resources the AI invests in the 20% bonus of a xeno bank would give them 30% bonus from a pair of trade centers.

In return you can either get some good will or some actually useful technologies.


AI is being stubborn in a trade? Sweeten the deal with a planet or two. Make sure they're underdeveloped and sitting right next to your biggest influence generators. Two or three turns later you get the planet back and can do it all over again!


You don't pay money to maintain most unarmed ships. Build bare-bones colonizers with lots of modules, or advanced troop transports. Stock 'extra' population onboard. You never know when dropping a spare 10 or 20 billion pop in a sector can come in handy, and you can always find a use for a fleet of transports.

Not to mention, when they have more banks, they have more money to spend on stuff you want to sell them.

Currently there is a hard to reproduce 'bug' with Super Isolationist. As always, if you have greater than a max speed of 3 going into a SI area, you'll keep your speed until you A) attack something or the first week that starts with you in the area. The 'bug' entail with ending your move on the fringe of their space next to one of your planets and attacking something with greater than 3 movement points remaining. After the fight, you have 3/3 movement. Dock to your planet and exit back into your space with your max movement points restored AND max movement points remaining. So if you have a 20/20 ship and spent 16 movements to get to this fight, you'll have 20 movement points remaining AFTER the fight and doing this. This can be used over and over if you have many fleets/individual ships next to border planets.

If the game stagnates and turns into several sides glaring over their phasors at each other, my populations have a tendency to cap (or any game I play Superbreeders) filling transports during peacetime gives my planets chance to recouperate and be ready for another attack sooner while damaging my economy less.

[I thought this one up after a game where I needed three waves of transports (4 billion each) to completely conquer a larger civ, my economy was in tatters]

In addition to the "Send in a transport using Mass Drivers to weaken enemy troops" technique (never underestimate it's value, it works wonders), you should also send troop transports in fleets. It greatly improves your chances of winning, and provided you lose less troops than one transport can carry, you get to send the other transports out to other planet (use a fleet of 3-4 on their planet with the highest populace, 2-3 on the next, 1-2 on the next, etc).

When playing with minors, gift/sell/trade them the techs "Trade I" and "Advanced Computing" as soon as possible. They will immediately start building economic and tech. capitals. As soon as you see them complete it, conquer them, and you have a second...and third...and fourth capital of the corresponding type, not to mention a PQ 15 world. Just be sure to have YOUR capital at least queued up on a planet, otherwise you can't build it after you've conquered another.

Hmm, thought I would have seen this by now. My favorite (I've only played the Terrans so far), is the Fleet Warp Bubble trick. This item is nice because your fleets move faster. Also, if you put just one stinking gun on your Warp Bubble ship, it becomes the prime target for the enemy.

So, I know which ship they are going to shoot at. So, I load up the Warp Bubble ship with defenses, reinforced hull points, etc, and one lousy gun (to make room for all the defensive stuff). Then, none of the other ships in the fleet needs any defenses, they can be all attack and just let'er rip.

The AI used to shoot all attack ships down first, but since it concentrates so hard on the warp bubble ship, I'm free to do this now.

True, your fleet can get stomped if the enemy overwhelms the warp bubble ship, but just really defend it well.

Cool thread!

The AI places a lower value on planets which have low populations. You know what planets have really low populations? Ones that have just been conquered! So, when the Galactic News (or whatever it's called) informs you that the Lentzlandians or another minor civilization has just been taken over by the Yor, contact the Yor and offer to buy Lentzlandia from them; since it's a civilization capital, it will be a powerful planet and relatively safe from enemy influence, though it will likely cause tension as a result of close borders.

In my last game as Terrans, with their incredible diplomatic bonus, I managed to purchase five or six different minor civ homeworlds, replete with tech capital, economic capital and other goodies.

Awesome, I've always ignored Minor Civs as being a waste of time and usually keep them out of the game, but if i can get them to do work for me, works well enough. Also the tech trading must bring quite a lot of $$ since the minors have a 100% econ bonus and always have massive treasuries

And put that together with the previous one of selling them Trade1 etc in the first place, its a wonderful self feeding circle - definitely going on my list, and I'm onto a new game tonight, so I'll try those - Love It :LOL:

Regards
Zy

One for the Pot.

Use your Political Capital as a "Culture Bomb". Particularly effective after just taking a fairly developed Minor Race as they will have a high(ish) IP by then anyway. Add the Political capital to it (a cash purchase or partial purchase after a few turns is not that expensive), and it usually shatters the influence of the surrounding AI into vapour (at the very least gives the AI a big culture problem, triggering some planet flips not too soon afterwards. AI Mines are usually toast very rapidly, resulting in "beaming" to the closest friendly, the one you used the Culture Bomb on.

Regards
Zy

Here is my tech trader approach. If you sell or trade a technology to another race, also sell it to every other races the same turn. This assures you maximum reward for your tech and prevents the other civilisations from trading it. By trading the same technology to every races i could sometimes get 6 techs from one tech. Then repeat the process with the newly gained techs. Always trade the lowest tech possible first and Never trade diplomacy boosting techs. Instead you specialize your research in this area and keep it for yourself. When this works well you can get the AI player to do alot of research for you as well as providing money. I usualy play at painful or crippling and if you start off with good diplomacy skill and rush diplomatic translator you can get this method to work pretty well in your favor, I dont know about the higher difficulty settings however. I found this strategy surprisingly fun and gratifying as you rob the crap out of the AI civs, hehehe. When you apply this strategy at a compulsively methodical level it basicaly kills all opportunity for the AI to trade techs among each other and all the bang goes to tech-mart's big daddy (you). It also has a tendency to reduce the technological gap between stronger and weaker civs. Wich when put in relation can strenghtens your allies and weakens your foes. And the fun part is even though you trade them all the time you nearly always seem to end up with more techs than the AI. Having alot of minor civs is also a major plus when using this method

You guys are all EVIL. It is so SICK! I love all of these ideas.

 :CONGRAT: 

One I put on another thread, but its more appropriate here.

Use Minor Races as a free tech source. They tend to go for non yellows, and in the main go for trade and military. Whilst keeping some low value ships around as tokens to ward off crys of "pay me dosh", concentrate on yellows etc, not military, initially, and get a the invasion techs / Ti(thingy)Quan whatever its called.... for soldier bonus. Get good diplomatic techs to have a better level than the minors (more efficient to trade that way)

At the point you want to "get going", click on the nearest minor, look at what weapons he has, build defence for it, one medium fighter using weapons he has not defended for, two transports (one will probably do it with the soldier bonuses), and head on over to the minor. position the "fleet" (all three of them!) within striking range, and open up negotiation for every tech and cash they have. By this stage they have been been getting weapons techs, and if you dont do this too early lots of cash from their tradingso you get lots of freebies.

Trade everything you have - the lot - if necessary (dont give them soldier bonus techs). When you've drained the lot, say "Ta", pull out and on the same turn attack (that way he has no chance to trade your techs you just traded to him, to others) and take the Planet. Then on the same turn sell/trade the lower techs to any other AI who doesnt have them.

You kill him him one turn, get lots of freebie techs, all his cash, resell a lot for more cash, catch up and often leap ahead on military techs, get back all the cash he earned from your trading with him, and get a good influence bonus - all for for free

You have to plan ahead for this, but its easy to do. Later for desert, use the other minor AIs you didnt hit for this, as a culture bomb see (reply 15). I am a fan of the maximum Minors option .....

Its a Dog eat Dog Galaxy :LOL:

Regards
Zy

Use the ship designer to create small or tiny versions of cargo size vessels such as:

Constructors - Easy to get early on, you only need to research small hulls and probably one level of miniaturization. They cost about 50bc less than the regular constructors! Don't put engines on them to maximize efficiency and use them to construct starbases close to your planet. Later in the game, create tiny versions for even faster building!

Transports - Not only are they cheaper, but when you have a fleet of them, you will have better chances of retaining them since using only one transport module, troops are split in multiples of 500 rather than 1,000. The downside is you will use 6 logistics per 1000 troops as opposed to 5 per 1000 with the bigger version.

Hi!
Works best with tech-trading on and lots of races/minors:

When playing all-factories it's difficult to get good research. So get just some most important techs, and trade them for AIs' research treaties. One treaty will not give you much, but 10+ will make quite an impact.

BR, Iztok

I agree, that's a strategy that I use in any game, whether it is all-factories or something else. It's a nice tech boost. ALso, only get one-way treaties, so that you can declare war on them at any time without a reputation penalty.

Sentient species taste better...

You learn something new every day. I didn't know you didn't get the reputation hit if it's a one way treaty. One thing though, if you're play TA, it seems the AI will not part with either treaties until about half way through year 1, or about 75 turns. They usually say it's too early or you haven't proved yourself yet.

Yes, it was changed in TA to stop those dreadful players like Iztok and KP (and me    ) abusing the poor AI!

To be fair, it was far too easy to run your empire without ever setting the research slider above 0%. Still is really, just takes a bit longer to get there.

I would've posted this - I think it's probably the best use for spies in the game ever. You also don't risk losing them as the AI never gets a chance to counter them.

You don't need to put spies on the farms/stalks whatever one turn before invading, though. I found that while the planet information still reads the original population (say, 10 million for a Yor world with two stalks), when you invade, you'll see 8 million defenders.

Anyway, I'd also add that if you're outnumbered, you can put the spies on the morale buildings and farms, invade, and select information warfare. There's a good chance defectors will make up the difference, unless you don't care about property damage, then...

Another nice trick with invasions is Tidal Disruption - if you're invading a planet likely to have loads of buildings you'll demolish anyway, just spend the 200 bc for tidal disruption. As far as I can tell, the improvements are destroyed before the unusuable buildings are removed.

My heart bleeds a lil bit to give away one of my most evil tactics, but so be it.

If there's a race you are not at war with but which has ressource starbases you absolutely MUST have yourself (and I usually want them all...) there are 2 ways:
declare war and take them by force - or if that's not possible (eg because the race is currently simply too powerful for that...):

- Bribe another race to declare war on them (ideally they are at war with somebody else already anyway...which saves some cost at that point)
- position a constructor (or more) near each of the starbases you want to have
- position a warship (or a fleet of ships) beside those starbases as well. (doesn't need to be your top-notch-ships...just enough to take out the starbase)
- Sell/give them away to the race you bribed to go to war with that other race.
With some luck that other race does exactly what you want it to do "hey...there's a starbase beside my brandnew ships ...this needs to go!"

Sometimes the AI does foolish things like wasting the new ships onto some far-away fleet of other ships....but no risk - no gain.

In my current game I took 1 econ mining starbase, 1 morale and 1 military starbase from the Torians that way after I brokered a nice war betwen them and the Arceans. And the ships were useless anyway And selling those ships to the Arceans gave me back ~50% of my initial cost of bribing them to go to war against the Torians.