First Game at Challenging Level

Welcome to Galactic Civilizations 2!

To answer your questions!

1.) To improve your attack, add more or better weapons to your ships. The Drengin are strong at war thanks to their weapons bonus, so you need every advantage. It also seems that they are using missiles extensively, which works VERY well with their strengths. Things you can do are: add more weapons, research better weapons, and find military resources (those red crystals).

If the Drengin are really pounding you, consider bribing another civilization to go to war with them. Since they love to extort money/planets from people, you should not have too much difficulty in enlisting their enemies against the Drengin.

2.) The Drengin would be mostly focusing on ships and stuff. They also might have traded for technology (which is possible). And are you sure it was the Drengin who is sabotaging your planets? It could be someone else. Don't worry, the price of agents will also go up for them, so after a while they will rarely send agents after you once the spy cost becomes too great.

3.) No, there is not a way to decrease cost of agents, but I THINK the cost will flat out after a certain point...

4.) There are many ways to beat your enemies. You just have to be creative:

* Consider building military starbases. They can be upgraded with many modules that will boost your military might and, despite being highly intelligent, AI's will be attracted to them faster than mice to cheese. Use this to your advantage to lure them into traps.

* Try enlisting their enemies against them. This would work extremely well against the Drengin since they love to extort and step on people's feet.

* Try to research better weapons and defense. If you can't research, trade for technologies.

Like I said, there are many ways to victory, but the moral of the story is don't give up!

At this level, defenses are pretty fast to research, and the AI is stupid about this.  Develop antimissile defenses, equip your medium hulls with enough defense to stop the Dreng attacks, and just enough offense to beat 'em down while your defenses hold 'em off; properly designed mediums ought to be able to pound the cookies out of badly designed smalls.  

Also, miniaturization is your friend.  More stuff=tougher ships.  

With my (very) limited experience of GCII, I can confirm what SCampb29 says.

In my last game, the Korath were getting rampant with missile technology and big attack value fleets, so I researched point defence which as previously stated seemed to be very easy to do and ended up with some modest attack ships but with largish defense values (24) on medium hulls (some miniaturisation needed of course).

Even if I couldn't mass lots of these together in fleets of their own at first, merely adding them to existing fleets made a huge difference, turning defeats into victories and generally losing one ship for every 4-5 of theirs.

Give it a try.

Yes, ship design is mostly rock-paper-scissors.  It is vital to see what the enemy uses for weapons and defenses and design your ships with the right defenses and a weapon for which the enemy defenses does not stop well.

The larger problems begin when you have multiple foes with different weapons.defenses.

For example, suppose the Drengi use missiles and shields, while the Terrans use guns and armor.

Well, in that case, you want to research missiles, since neither enemy uses missile defense, but your defense choice is a conundrum.  YOu may end up with two fleets, etc.

Some old hand players claimed to have had some success with quickly researching a weapon type (e.g., missile defense theory)and trading it to everyone they could, then researching the defense to it in hopes that all the AIs would use that one, and similarly with defense.  Some have said that worked, but I have never tried it.

In early game, you may be able to build ships that are stronger overall if you mix defenses and weapons.

For weapons, it appears that each type deals a minimum of 1 point, so 1 Laser, 1 missile and 1 gun attack would always deal a total of 3 points minimum. I'm not sure if this is true for all versions of the game though - there are official postings stating that damage may be 0. Never seen that happen myself though. The deisadvantage of spreading damage over different weapon types is that you will probably deal less damage against ships that have defenses of any kind. But then the AI very rarely builds those early in the game...

For defenses, those of the wrong type count by their square root only, but sqrt(1)=1, so no loss here. If you can pack 1 of each type of defense on a ship, your defense will always be 3 against all weapon types.

Of course, this trick will fail once you get better weapons and defenses. Also, early defenses and weapons are quite big, and you won't be able to fit one of each on a single ship, unless you got medium hulls at least. I've seen the AI build ships with at least two kinds of attack though, and often at least one defense module, or even two, on its own ships. And these ships are pretty effective already.

It's been a while since I started this thread. I ended up resigning from the game I was playing. I did manage to build some ships that were effective against the Drengen. However, they were just too big and eventually just wore me down.

I have played about 10 games since then. I have managed to win a couple. The games that I didn't win have developed in about the same way each time. There is the initial colony rush. On a large map there are usually about 75 habitable planets inculdin extremes. After the colony rush each race will have between 10 - 20 planets. One of the races will become the agressor. The agressor will declare war on a weaker race. The agressor will win the war and the weaker race surrenders 5 - 10 planets to the agressor. The agressor picks the next victim and repeats. The agressor is usually the Torians, Thalans or Krynn. So after 10 games I have some strategy questions.

1. How do you stop the agressor from picking on the weaker races?

2. Why do the weaker races always surrender to the agressor? I have been at war a few times and have beaten my opponent to only have him surrender his last 4 or 5 planets to somebody else.

3. What is your general war strategy? I am naturally a turtle. So I try to place a few ships on each planet to protect them. This just doesn't seem to work as the AI will attack with a larger fleet and then take the planet. It would seem that each war develops into a war of attrition. I take planets with my large attack fleet but the AI take my poorly defended planets with his large attack fleet.

Thanks for all your responses. This realy is a great game.

One strategy is to be the last one to get into a war.  This is especially important on the higher difficulty settings (particularly Suicidal).

Wars generally begin when the colony rush comes to an end, though there are exceptions.  Get the AIs into wars BEFORE the colony rush ends.  In particular, get the ones that border on you into wars with other AIs that also border on them.  I try to keep every AI in two wars, and sometimes give them a few $ (small amounts only) or a useless tech when my rating with them slips.

One psrticular trick is to get an AI to declare war on an AI that has the super-ability that calls other AIs to fight alongside them.

Bribing the AIs into wars early lets YOU decide where the wars are.  As soon as an AI is in a couple wars, Trade with you looks better and they have the "Too Busy" to war against you factor show up in their diplomacy/relationship screen with you.  Having the AIs in multiple wars also keeps them off the Minor AIs backs, letting you harvest them of techs, money, trade, and treaty flows. 

Try also to find out where all the anomaly mining starbases are.  Get a constructor near every one, especially green and red ones.  When AIs war, those mining bases are generally early targets, especially as they do not move and do not require researching Invasion technology to attack.  If you are Neutral, your constructor can vulture the anomaly when the base gets destroyed.

Also, as soon as an AI declares war on you, or as part of your own war planning, defend your anomaly bases and destroy those of the AI.  The Red ones are particularly important, as each can boost Attack and Defense of ships by up to 39%.  The Green ones are also vital, as they represent the same 39% boost to the overall economy.  At higher difficulty levels, the AI will only be inconvenienced by losing Green bases, but you will be severely damaged by losing any.

If you plan to attack an AI, your opening attack should be at all its Red bases.

At higher difficulty levels, I have found it better NOT to push my Colony Rush out too far and, instead, focus on a good perimeter with all the internal poor PQ planets colonized by cheap engine-less colonizers.

The AIs get PO'ed earlier if one has planets interspersed with theirs.

I even colonize the PQ1's, but turn off auto-improvement for land (soil enrichment, etc).  The AIs rarely research and build the Orbital Transformer so I go for that when I get around to it.  It seems to instantly turn all my little PQ1's into PQ16's.  Once well settled, the former-PQ1's help flip any stray AI planets quickly and the AI seems not to even get PO'ed when its outliers get flipped.

On that note, some advocate settling Mars (or the equivalent for your race), keeping its pop low, putting the Political Capitol on "Earth," and then trading it to an AI for $ or stuff.  It will soon flip back, and then you can rinse and repeat.

Actually, weapons roll from 0 to weapon attack value.  So for lasers, it's 0 to 1.

To answer your questions:

1. You can't, not really.  You can go to war with them to divide their firepower up, and you can shoot down their transports so they can't invade the weaker races, and you can bribe them to make peace with the weaker races, but at some point a race which has military strength is going to war with a weaker race.  Unless of course they form an alliance with the weaker race.

2. No idea.  It seems though that the AI remembers how badly the war has gone or considers relative military strengths and uses this as a factor when negotiating to end the war.  So maybe it plays a part in surrenders as well.  Perhaps the way it's designed is supposed to encourage you to intervene earlier and build up a good military of your own.

3. By the time the enemy sends fleets at your planets determined to obliterate the defences, you need to look at building more powerful defenders (remember, you're not limited in terms of logistics here so you could park eight battleships in orbit if you wanted to), slowing down incoming enemy ships with warp disruptors (available on military starbases only) so that you can get a defensive fleet over there to mop up the enemy fleet, and/or striking at the enemy's manufacturing planets so that they can't put together any more super fleets.

You can use espionage to figure out which planets to target - either train a spy and just browse the enemy planets without actually planting him for a sabotage mission, or use the race-wide spy slots to get the intelligence level up to high, that way you can see the planet screen for any of that race's planets.

Don't worry about losing planets.  Just make sure that you have some warships and transports stationed at rally points all across your empire, then you can zip over and take your planet back in a turn or three.

If you would actually prefer to pursue a scorched earth strategy, keep some nearly-empty transports around (manually launch them from a planet with just 1M troops on board) and land one on the newly-conquered planet to pick up all of your surviving soldiers, leaving it with a population of zero.  Then click the Details button on the planet screen and then the Abandon Colony button.  The planet will now be uninhabitable and the enemy will not be able to claim it back, but you can either re-use the surviving soldiers or send them back to one of the planets that you're keeping.

When the enemy is sending fleets to intercept your transports it's important to have more than enough ships covering them, because transports tend to die easily.  Quite often I've found that in the late game, I need at least two full-logistics fleets covering one transport fleet, just in case.

When you have to declare war on an empire that has an ally, don't forget that just because the ally declares war on you, doesn't mean you need to fight them for the whole duration of the war.  You can sign a peace treaty with the ally without stopping your war with the other empire.  This can isolate enemies from that support and gives you a much better chance at wearing them down.

Wars can be costly, especially if you have an influx of new planets with high-maintenance improvements and low population.  So if you aren't going to divert funding to Social during war time (I prefer to keep it all in Research and Military) be prepared to sign a peace treaty to avoid economic meltdown.

Don't be afraid to start wars when you see that an enemy is researching hard.  For one thing, because he then has to eventually spend more money on building new ships, you're slowing down that research anyway.  Also, if you don't get in there before he finishes perfecting that cool new weapon technology, you'll have to face much nastier and tougher ships.  Take out those planets which have labs on bonus tiles - they're costing him the least in maintenance, but giving 100, 300 or 700% more research.  And that just won't do now will it.

I rarely have more than one tiny one-weapon, disposable ship around my planets.  The human simply cannot defend everywhere against a large AI empire.

Some have success with building the Spin Control Center on a planet, and then putting a max fleet in orbit.  This inflates your race Military Rating and hence deters early AI aggression.  Some have suggested that cargo war-hulls work early for that, as the game engine uses Attack (and maybe Defense) but not hitpoints in the math.

What I do is have major fleets at exposed anomaly bases.  The AI usually goes for them over and over again, and I try to intercept invasion fleets in deep space.

One trick is to leave a planet undefended near a fleet-defended anomaly base on the border with the at-war AI.

Be advised, though, that at Suicidal, the AI will send fleet after fleet after fleet at the base, and maybe the planet too.

Another trick is to build defenseless all-attack ships, maybe not even with engines, and get them to the base.  Then, when the AI fleet approaches, attack the huge fleet with the ships, one at a time.  If your cheap kamikazes take out a major ship or two each time, you will have a far better chance when your real fleet engages it next.

Did you mean a resource mining base or an asteroid mining base? I suppose it's the former? Or something else entirely?

Resource - the ones located at the color anomalies (space crystals?).

Before I awnswer a question my military  stratedegy is not better than this it does surprise me that the drengine r better than u or the thalans what I have to say that instead of giving them a planet raise colony instead this is why U might lose a tech on loss of the planet the Ai thinks that a war is also a cold war if U comtinuasly build a lot bigger fleet it thinks it is losing even if their is no fighting if u don't believe me pay attention to your advisors I'm also surprised U don't notice the importance of a research or morale resource The only way that the drengin could be gunning as strong as U with 3 small ships when U have a medium and a small ship is if U screwed up U need to look at their ships and your ships and figure out whats wromg I'm guessing you r using the Terrans are U using more than one engine more than one sensor or more than one support do U have an defence modules or r u adding hit points modules Maybe U should try more than laser one all the economy means is all the Bc your earning before expenses your economy goes into figuring out militartary social and research and savings if they r playing right then their is no savings its all going toward something for the most part that is true unless U build structures on the planet factories can increase production not as much as the economy this does raise expenses remember slave pits r cheap also have u researched all the military production techs if u have not and they did this will give them better ability to build ships without raising the economy do they have and production artifacts on any planets that also will affect this they could also be modifying the slldider in favor of military production any of this could have a better military production and not a better economy

befpre

If the AI is attacking you, why are you wasting your time by building spaceships? 

Instead, do this:

1.  Put all your BCs into research, take the tech lead, and bribe some other AI to attack them. 

2.  Get Intensive Farming II, and increase the pop size of all of your border colonies.  

3.  Laugh as the AI futilely tries to invade your planets.  At higher difficulty levels, they might succeed, but not before they pay a huge cost in lost troop transports.  

At suicidal the AIs WILL succeed, at least in DA.