heh - this thread makes me feel dull, as i probably never would have come up with 1/10 of the 'tricks' that are found here.

good stuff for sure - can't wait to finish up my current game and implement some of these when starting from scratch next time around!

Here is a classic

When I start a game I change my mining vessel to a colony ship send it to the home planet to fill up on colonist and then send it on it's way. Gives me 2 colony ship right at the start.

Then I put my tax slider to 0 and keep my moral to 100% as much as possible to get the most groth on my new planets. This usually gives me a huge boost on my ennemies on small maps anyway.

When I have a new ship and I am not sure if it can battle my ennemy I negotiate a war between one race and that ennemy and I sell my ship to the other civ. Then I follow it around and I can see how well it does against it.

    Lots of good tips here.  At higher levels, the tech selling to minors works really well, especially after you have enough military/diplomacy to get their attention.  Early in the game, they pay very little for new tech.

    Once you have a few medium ships, the intimidation progresses to the point that you can trade techs for Economic/Research treaties.  This eventually works for the weaker majors as well.

     Of minor interest: Noone will pay anything for Toxic World colonization (basic or advanced), not even 1 BC.  They can be used as gifts.  But you can quickly research a long line of defensive techs and sell them 1 at time.

      The minors are so useful as maintenance free cash cows, that I almost never conquer them, unless another civilazation declares war.  My next plan (mostly for fun) is to gift them a few ships to defend themselves.  (In a previous thread, 1 enterprising player actually gifted them some transports parked next to a major civ planet.)

wow, just started playing gal civ again (bought ToA) simply cannot believe this thread is still going, well done gal civ community.

OK, to business: this works for DA, having a colony ship with very little people in it (less than 10 million is my guess) will spontaneously sprout colonists upon landing on a planet, 10 million free colonists.

Also, a colony with 0 colonists on it will grow 5 million in a turn.

Put these together and you can have a low population production planet (since pop. doesn't affect prod.) and send every colony ship out with the last remaints of the colony's population, these will magically grow into 10 mil wwhen they land, and your production world will sprout 5 million more the next turn.

Just make sure you land these on future production worlds, with the starting population so low, the colonies will hardly grow at all

-Super Breeder ability is a 'per-colony' ability, meaning you can run your taxes high so your capital is at 46% approval, and the new colony is at 100% approval, and the new colony still gets the 4x modifier.

-You can see what any enemy planet is building with the 'Ship/Planet List' window (F1/F2). You must have uncovered the fog of war over the planet to see it though. Really helpful before you start paying for agents so you know if you need to rush-buy that Galactic Achievement or Trade Good.

-as roveen mentioned, tiny is nifty.

instead of bulking up on factories early race for enhanced minitureization

you can build a tiny colony, constuctor, miner, and even frieghers.

Granted these have no range extension, and they are a bit slow, so continue using some of the regular types, or some medium sized replacements within your fleet. But, colony ships, and especially constructors so cheap, very nice, not to mention you can upgrade/downgrade to tiny, or small combat ships more economically than carrying a huge fleet expense.

If you have been using tiny survey ships, stop when you find a resource, then upgrade into your tiny constructor. (careful of the range). Then you snag the resource untill later when you can send additiional constructors.

If you are playing against a civ that is near you a good trick is before they have built any military sorround the planet withs scouts that way they can not launch ships and therefor can not colonize worlds.  You can do the same thing to a planet that is very powerful to prevent it from sending ships to destroy you

When tou click on a colony there is a tiny box with arrows on it just click that

For a fast repair, upgrade your ship to an identical design saved under a different name. It's fairly cheap and sure beats losing the ship or waiting forever for it to be repaired.

For example, assume I have a ship I designed named Javilin v3 that is down to one 1/20 HP. You can go to the ship designer, upgrade your existing design and without changing it and save it as Javilin v31.  Now upgrade your ship from the original design to the new identical design and you will repair all damage as soon as the upgrade is done. The number of turns required depends on how far from your own territory you are. If you might be attacked while upgrading, drop the ship out of the fleet but leave the fleet on the same space.

Tiny ships with 60 HP are easily possible. In my current game I have a fleet posted near a pair of enemy planets. Every time a new ship is built, I kill it off with my fleet. The ships in the attacking fleet gain experience and HP rapidly. When you upgrade the design, you'll want to upgrade your most experienced ships, they will keep most if not all their HP.

Trading Techs in an organized way.

Offer something outlandish that you really don't intend to trade, all your money, if it is considerable, will usually do it. Now ask for each of the other race's techs, one at a time. Anything that comes up green can be bargained for at a more reasonable price. Once you make a trade, don't leave that dialogue screen until you have completed all the transactions you intend to make or you will have to wait several turns before you can talk to that race again.

Influence traded seems to only affect the next United Planets vote, not your long term Influence score.

Once the bargaining starts for real, ask how much money or influence the alien wants for its tech. then offer instead a tech you are willing to trade. Ask how much money they want in addition. Continue to add techs and check every time to see how it affects the cash required. Sometimes adding a tech does little or even causes the alien to raise its demand for cash. Withdraw those. Soon you will get a green screen and then ask the alien how much extra money they will throw in.

If the alien is willing to sell two techs in a family, say Laser I and Laser II, then it will sell them both for the same price as the higher. Once you have Laser II you don't need Laser I for your own ships but you can still sell it to other civs and it was free to you.

Some techs are useless or poorly utilized by the other civs, but they will trade for them anyway. That first power plant that adds 10% to your manufacturing isn't usually as helpful as building another factory. In my current game I acquired Krynn Conversion. I can't use it on my star-bases so I'm guessing other races can't either but they will still trade for it. Slave pits don't do much for a race that has factories.

Don't be afraid to "lose" a negotiation. If you can sell the same tech 10 times for 25% of it's value, you got 2 1/2 times the value of the tech.

Building up colonies

Once I can build a Recruiting Center, I buy one when starting a new colony. Once the population maxes out, you can upgrade it to something more useful.

If you can, loan or import extra citizens to get the population growing. If you can leave 2000 troops on a newly conquered planet for a few turns it will add significantly to the population remaining when the troops pull out.

You will probably want to "focus" on social production for a good while with a new colony.

Bootstrap manufacturing next. Build two of the cheapest manufacturing buildings available first. You will probably have to go to the "old" tab to find what you need. When they are done upgrade them to something better. If you try to go straight to your best manufacturing facility first, it may take an unreasonable amount of time for that one building. You may need to go to the "details" screen and turn off automatic upgrades under Governors.

A Starport isn't very useful early on, even the simplest ships will take forever.

If you have to cancel a computer initiated upgrade, use the "X" not the delete key or you will lose the building being upgraded.

Be careful of building farms on farm resources. You may be forced to build several morale improvements to deal with the extra population. Your tax rate will be driven by the most unhappy colonies, not all the happy ones.

If later on, you decide to build a Galactic Achievement or Trade Goods, Go to the planets list and select foreign. This will only show you planets you can see on your map but it will sometimes save the heartbreak and waste of being beaten to the punch on one of these unique improvements. If you find another planet building the same thing after you have started, you may be able to send spys to slow them down or just buy your improvement just before they finish theirs.

Freighter Tricks:

 If you have a planet near the edge or corner of the galaxy, use it to create all your trade freighters.  Not only will you increase your trade revenue because of the length of the trade route, but your routes will likely flow through your other systems.  This is helpful because you can build economic starbases to both increase production and trade revenue.

 The little minifreighters that troll across the galaxy are the same ships that you used to create the trade route.  You can use this to your advantage by loading down your freighters with sensor arrays.  This will create automated sensor platforms that also make you money.  Very helpful for keeping track of other empires.  This can also be done by upgrading the minifreighters.

Genius!

The empty cargo hull

To save money while accelerating your start, try this. Design a ship that is nothing but an empty cargo hull. Buy one of these on each of the first several turns. Then design a bare colony ship, just a hull and a colony module, sometimes a couple of support modules may be necessary to reach distant planets. On turn two, upgrade the empty hull. On turn three, pick up some colonists and head for a nearby star system. Depending on how many ships you plan to send out you may want less than the full 250B colonists on each ship.

If you end up with too many, dump the colonists at a nearby colony, re-launch with 1M colonists and convert to a constructor or space miner.

Net result is a one turn delay and a saving of over 500BC compared to buying standard colony ships. If memory serves, buying an empty hull is 492 BC and upgrading a bit over 300BC. Buying the same ship is over 1000BC and buying the stock colony ship is nearly 1400BC.

The same trick can be used for any ship you need to rush buy to save about 20%.

Extra Survey Ships

I've never seen the AI build extra Survey Ships. In a sandbox game anomalies generate randomly through the course of the game, in the DL campaign, anomalies are plentiful and none of the other civs seem to have any survey ships. Once you have the sensors tech, build several cheap survey ships and put them on automatic. it will pay big dividends. You can even give them a simple weapon to take out undefended targets as the opportunity presents itself.

I build battleships and medium fleet ships that have troop modules. I assume one way or another they are going to die might as well give them the most possible uses. clear the battlefield then when they become obsolete land them i only build purpose built transports and warships  once i have full weapon and armor upgrades.

also similar to the freighters as mobile sensors I build mine on huge or large hulls and armor, arm and sensor them as much as possible, after the route is made you don't pay maintenance. and most of the time they send relatively crappy ships to destroy freighters during war so you kill a lot of weak escorts or heavy fighters that would otherwise be in fleets as meat shields. at one point I had 6 trade routes through enemy territories and they were only killing them by sending fleets of battleships which slowly damaged my freighter turn by turn basically trading 5-7 battleships per turn to reduce my ships down 25%.  plus armed freighters really stack up and give you a nice high military rating. 

( the only reason they send battleship fleets was because the route was next to their rally pointe were they built those fleets normally they ignored the freighter until it was within 5 parasec of the fleet)

     This is great strategy, and can be applied to all 3 weapons and defense trees - all the way down to space militarization.

     Trying to trade for Planetary Invasion is a royal pain, but if you can trade for say Tidal Disruption, or better yet, Advanced Troop Module - you can get every single prerequisite tech including Planetary Invasion.  Dicscovered this accidentally.     If you can trade with the Drengin, this would include Ultimate Shock Troops.

       On a side note, Fleet Tactics.  You can include ships without weapons in a fleet, they will not be targeted as long as the other ships survive.  They can have fleet modules such as Tulon or Zalon defense (and bubbles and sensors).  They acquire experience and hit points, and can later be upgraded to formidable ships.   Use the longest lease possible.  (the game will be over long before you pay it back.)

       Edit - I am not too excited about Fleet warp bubbles.  If you engage in combat, it costs 4 movement points per combat.  Its as if your task force reforms after each combat.

Another little trick (more of a strategy I guess), which I must credit to Mumblefratz, is to spread your population out early in the game with the use of a colony ship (or even a double colony module ship).   This helps your population and tax base grow more rapidly.

Avoid building colony ships at low population planets.  (if you do - load them up at a high population planet)   Colonys with low populations are major economic drains.

Quoting Bently, reply 68

There are two sides to this coin. You can build your fleet modules into your biggest hull and give it the best defenses possible along with a little attack. The AI will attack this ship first, so the rest of the ships don't need defense. You may need to repair this ship after each battle (upgrade back and forth between identical designs). If you can build up the HP in a number of easy battles these ships become quite formidable. I had medium ships with over 100 HP.

When building a fleet command ship, I like to include a survey module as part of the sensor package. While costly, it gives range two sensors, you get to grab an anomaly now and then and you can tell at a glance whether a fleet has a command ship (different icon on the long range view).

I used fleet warp bubbles in a different way (for me) in my current game. I built 2 tiny ships with nothing but a grade 3 fleet warp bubble. I could include them in my two fleets to get the extra movement and they lasted forever. As you point out, I often lost movement points when reorganizing my fleets and never really understood how that worked.

Sorry, I somehow double posted.

What a concept! And our government does it all the time! Take the goodies now and let the next generation worry about the debt! I'll have to look at this closer.

If your expenditure is less than 250 BC (about) the shortest lease is less than an outright purchase. A Recruiting Center costs 204 now or 136 + 7X8 or 192 over time. Why would you ever chose the immediate payment?

A personal early game favourite of mine. I like to focus on building up my colonies and economy early in a game and delay warship research and production (aka skip building tiny fighters with 1 attack). Of course all the other civs will start to bully you before long because they have 5 puny useless fighters and you don't. Worse even still if you have an aggressive neighbour that's starting to go hostile. If you've got a civ sitting at cool or worse then buy some or all of his warships. This early in the game I find they're usually cheap, it drastically boosts your military rating keeping other races from getting snarky, and as a bonus weakens your rival to force him/her/it to head back towards friendly status quite quickly. I don't even bother bringing the fighters home usually, I just wanted the rating so I'll leave them wherever they were when I bought em. Then once you can buy or research tier 2+ military tech you can sell or trade the old ships to a weakling.

I play DA.

The best trick I have learned so far is trading planets with your opponents. I like to conquer 1-2 minor civs and also have at least two very influential planets (capital included) and then I trade lesser planets around them and some technology + eventually money for a nice opponent's planet. Someone here wrote that AI values planets based on population and it's true, so early enough and with good diplomatic ability (I play terrans), you can easily reach an agreement.

You get your planets back when your cultural influence does its thing and do it all again.

It is true that giving money and technology weakens you a bit and strengthens your opponents, but the planetary supremacy you achieve by doing this pays off in the long run, especially if you play against someone like Thalans, who will already have strong production on this newly acquired planets. I have used this strategy with terrans on all difficulties except obscene and suicidal (I'm a masohisctic-level player so far) and it works.

Not sure this one has ever been pub'd , its one of my favorites.  I probably shouldn't be giving away secrets like this, lol...  PS: I know this works on da and ta.

You can gain lots of techs or even treaties once a major declares war against a minor race.  Key is you have to have the right ships built early on.  I build a basic dd1 (destroyer) ship (small platform, particle beam) when pb becomes available (don't we all) but these will NOT work for the trading I am speaking of!  You must then build like my dm1 which stands for 'missile destroyer'.  I get to stinger asap then build dm1 which is small, 1 stinger and one or two basic supports.  Later in the game I might add an 'x' to the name for export but early on I use these for both defense and export until I can get into medium builds.  Yes I build ships, even up to the cruiser level for 'export' throughout the game because this not only works for minors but in some cases, major races too! The major has to be really desperate. If he's been contacting you asking for help this is a good time to do it and you will reap enormous rewards.  But lets get back to the minor being attacked example which you will face early on.  PS: build as many dm's as you can and scrap or upgrade the dd's to dm's because they are junk and even thought this will cost you $$$ to upgrade, they can be very valuable as you will see.

Now how do I trade these ships?  When someone declares war on a minor, immediately go to the trade screen with him and start with one of your very basic techs you are willing to give up.  Then ask for something you would like to have of his such as for example: 'trade' or perhaps 'duranthium armor' which are typically VERY difficult to get.  Yes its 'red' but now add one dm1 ship at a time until it turns 'green' It may take just 2, 3 or 4 or maybe 5. Don't stop here!  Add another of his techs, yes it goes 'red' again, now add another single dm1, it will usually just take 1 at a time at this point to get 'green' for each thing you want or sometimes you can just keep adding multiple techs or the treaties with just the one additional dm1!  You can even do this to get economic and research treaties but of course they are being attacked and probably won't be around for that long.  But he's very desperate and wants your ships not only for defense but maybe to try and get the attacker to back off?

Out of all honesty, this worked so well I made a rule for myself that first time I would take everything I could get then after that, any other minors I would limit myself to only 3 of his techs and one treaty.  I made the same rule for majors.  It was just too easy and I prefer a challenging game.     

Sorry I made this so long.