In some situations, your income isn’t high enough to fund your industry at full pace, so you have to cut spending somehow. You can do this by prioritizing military construction and leaving planets without build projects, but sometimes it can be easier to just cut the slider down.
You might run into a cash crunch situation at higher difficulties if you are trying to expand quickly and end up paying maintanance on many worlds before your population gets large enough to provide a strong tax base.
Don’t worry, it’s only a matter of time until someone accuses you of being a viral marketer.
Okay, so it can be useful to have in certain economic ‘crunch’ situations. Cool.
Question 3, with slight lead in, including minor boast: I just successfully performed my first ship to ship combat. The Yor have level 4 mass drivers and level 2 armor (both are in the same ‘military’ category) on their attack craft. To attempt to counter this, I built a ship with level 2 armor and level 2 missles, which aren’t defended against by the armor. And I kicked their asses! They hurt my manly MissleBoats, sure, but I defeated them in both engagements, which means I have ships that need repairs. So Question 3 is how do I repair? Park a ship on a planet with a Starport?
Question 4 is an adjunct: If I’d had level 4 armor, would the Yor ships have hurt me at all? Do weapon level and armor level (in the same category) cancel each other out if equal?
Sweet! We can get it out of the way then: Halo halo halo. Roxxors. L33t. You guyz are c00l, have you tried GamerFuel ha ha lolz it’s teh awesome.
L33t.
Okay, now that I’m fully back into it I have another one.
Question 5: Can you capture starbases in the base game? I’m working with only Dread Lords, and now that I bought CivIV this morning (damn hastiness!) I’ve used up my gaming bucks for a little while, and won’t be able to get the expansion (Dark Alliance?) for a month or so.
EDITED to add question 5 and for clarity
Q3: IIRC, ships repair a bit every turn, even in deep space, but I think they repair in a planetary orbit. I don’t know if a starport makes a difference.
Q4: They’ve changed the combat system a couple of times, so I’ll go with what it was the last time I played. Every time an individual enemy weapon fires on your ship, you roll the targetted ship’s total defence score against that weapon type. You subtract your roll from the damage and the weapon roll is subtracted from your defences.
So an enemy ship with two mass drivers with 2 damage each will have a mass driver rating of 4. A ship with 4 armour (and no other defences) has a defence against mass drivers of 4. So,
attacker rolls 0-2: rolls a 1
defender rolls 0-4: rolls a 3 --> defence reduced to 3 (for this round)
attacker rolls 0-2: rolls a 2
defender rolls 0-4: rolls a 1 --> defence reduced to 1 (for this round), 1 damage
What tends to happen is you can expect 10 defence rating to block about 16-18 points worth of the appropriate attack rating in a given round before failing. If you have a bunch of small ships facing a large fleet, they will tend to burn through each of your ship’s defences fairly quickly. If you have a big ship facing a not-so-big fleet, they might not be able to burn through your defences in a single round, in which case your defences are back up to full next round.
Q5: None of the versions of the game let you capture starbases, as far as I know.
reading this just reminds me how massively galciv 2 kicks ass. I may have to reinstall it and have a blast. I much prefer galciv 2 to civ 4 in every possible way, but then i love games with spaceship design and silly named weapons.
I think there’s a technology that helps repairs, a trade good that helps repairs, a racial ability that helps repairs, and a military starbase module that helps repairs. These things aside, it’s my impression that the poorest repair rate is in enemy territory, followed by no-man’s-land, followed by your own territory, followed by friendly orbit (the best). You might also get a faster rate of repair for ships that skip their turn. I don’t know any of that for sure because when my ships are damaged, I either write them off (“don’t worry, boys, we’ll send another wave”) or send them back to base. It’s possible that you don’t get the benefit on planets without starports. Again, not sure. Starports are great places to send your shattered fleets, because they can get replacements right off the production line while they’re being fixed up.
Q5: None of the versions of the game let you capture starbases, as far as I know.
Couldnt you gain them from influence though? I know thats not really capturing them but still.
I don’t think starbases flip. Mining bases in the expansion do, but I don’t think regular military/culture/trade starbases do.
I keep on trying to get into Galciv 2 but each time I stop playing after a hour. The game feels sterile compared to civ or alpha centauri. I agree about how there is alot going on and your not sure how, even though I’m horrible at civ, I understand the majority of how things work. The advertisement of unique tech trees for each side with the new galciv expansion might help things for me, but I wish the game was as interesting as the blog that was posted here a few weeks ago.
It’s too sterile for me as well. The very generic tech trees just leave me cold; when I try to play, I just find myself wanting to play Alpha Centauri instead.
I wouldn’t have thought you could make conquering the galaxy seem boring, but GalCiv does it for me. Alas; I wanted to like it, since I love the company.
I love both games, but Civ4 is with out a doubt my favorite 4x-TBS of the two. I haven’t stopped playing Civ4 since it launched, and the new expansion “Beyond the Sword” is superb and adds to its longevity. The best phrase I’ve read to describe Civ4 is: " It’s complex, but not complicated" and thats Civ4 in a nut shell, anyone can jump right in and have a blast; this isn’t true of GalCiv2, unfortunately.
GalCiv2 is a great game, but things like the generic tech tree and no MP eventually degraded my enthusiasm for playing it, but I still consider it one of my favorite 4x-TBS games.
Yeah, Galciv’s number one problem is a lack of character. Trying to get into it, it seems bland as shit. However, when you’ve played for a while, you’ll realize that you’re now drawing that “character” impression from stuff you’ve seen other races do. For example, twice now I’ve seen the Torians go through Torian 9/11, break their Alliance with me, and declare war. Nobody else has ever done this. Now I see the Torians as dubious allies, cloaking their desire for conquest behind an initial pose of neutrality, weakness, and even friendship. And sure enough, in later games I’ve noticed the Torians beating up on the minors and going after vulnerable civs.
I have no idea to what extent this is actual Torian-specific stuff as opposed to the luck of the draw and my own capacity for self-delusion. But it FEELS like it has more character now, and for something as nebulous as “character,” there’s really no other way to measure it.
I’m loving learning the new races, their proclivities, and seeing how subtlely the devs use the game mechanics to explicate and display the behaviors of the various races.
Question 6: Is there any ‘next ship with moves left’ key? I’m getting tired of looking all over for ships on paths, finding their autopilot destinations and clicking those. I like to sheperd them along their routes because frequent detours may be necessary, especially in the early game as you’re zipping past various star systems.
Tab. It won’t select ships on autopilot, though. I don’t know if there’s a way to do that.
Edit: Have you considered using a system of rally points for common destinations? It may not solve your “guiding autopilot” problem, but it could be helpful in other ways. I like to have staging worlds where I combine the production of several planets into fleets suitable for the front lines.
I haven’t gotten fleets that are large enough to justify the need for rally points yet, but once I get more militaristic, I’m sure I’m going to want to set up a series of perimeter defences, and rally points will probably serve my purposes well.
I just started a new game and am following the Paths to Victory guide very closely. It has a TON of useful advice, and though occasionally I wish it explained the details of certain systems more thoroughly, it is a remarkably straightforward and helpful guide. I feel finally like I’m getting a handle on what my various priorities should be, how to set up production vs. research vs. economy and so on, and how to establish a firm foundation for later in the game. It’s great stuff, so thanks, y’all.
Okay, new question, number 7: Is there any reason not to trade Alliances with other races? I’m playing on a Large map with 9 other races, and they’re all excited as hell to get Alliances from me, often trading several lower level techs AND several hundred bc for the right to have Alliances…
Alliances are awesome and you should generally take them if you can get them. If your opponents are eager to ally with you, it means they see you as being in a position of power. Maybe you’re huge, maybe you’re militarily capable, maybe you have tons of diplomatic techs, maybe you’ve got a huge tech lead. All these things make everybody take you more seriously.
You’ll also have an easier time allying with civs that share your alignment or alignment tendency. Particularly as Good. Like Jews in Civ4, Good civs tend to form a powerful voting and fighting bloc as the game goes on. (In Civ4, it’s because Judaism is founded early, so that “they’re part of our faith” or whatever bonus pops up pretty fast. In GC2, every alignment is tracking right from the start and all of them require Xeno Ethics to go active, but Good is just more inclined to alliances. Good is a buddy squad, Neutral is a commerce partnership, and Evil is, at best, a loose truce dedicated to killing everyone else.)
There are, however, some reasons to avoid alliances. Here’s my attempt at a complete list:
The civ in question is a hot conquest prospect. If the war won’t be too costly, it may be better to take over than just shake hands.
The civ in question is too friendly/tradey/already allied with a civ you can expect to go to war with.
The civ in question might take advantage of a partnership to grab all the good bits in a coming war. (Seen it happen a million times. You fight down the planetary defenses, you invade, your invasion falls barely short, you re-route a troop pod from someplace else to finish the job, but just before you get there, the fucking Arceans sweep in. Ancient and honorable society, my ass.)
The civ in question is a cultural threat. If you ally with them, they can still flip your planets.
The civ in question is gunning for a victory that they can attain while allied. (Cultural, Scientific, Diplomatic.) This is REALLY bad if you won’t share the victory.
There just isn’t anything in it for you. Many small civs don’t have anything to offer and wouldn’t be useful to ally with. If you’re not going for a diplomatic victory, why bother?
Wait 'til you get Dark Avatar and discover Treaties. Some arm-twisting goes on there, let me tell you.
Edit: Yeah, there were more. I forgot two very important ones.
The civ in question is a bunch of bastards and they’re gonna BLEED god dammit! Man, when somebody’s given me trouble in the early game and then comes crawling for an alliance after I make it big, my impulse is to refuse, extort them, and then attack. I don’t always follow that impulse, especially if I’ve still got a bigger boot on my neck and I need the help, but nobody plays realpolitik all the time. Sometimes it’s got to be about the sweet revenge.
If they’re the Torians. I’m not saying never ally with the Torians; sometimes it’s a good idea. But the Torians typically abuse my patronage to drag me into their incredibly greedy wars of conquest, and after all that grief, there’s still a pretty good chance that they’ll have Torian 9/11 and put a jihad on you. Fucking Torian ET mother fuckers.
Oh poop! That’s a ton of good info, Unicorn, and thanks! But I wasn’t clear enough. I meant the other civs just want to trade the Alliances TECH with me, and offer a lot for it.
But you made me wonder about some other stuff, mainly how you get an alliance with someone! I think you have to have Friendly or better relations with them? Then what? How do you establish an alliance?
Also, I just thought of what I guess is Question 9: Do the maintenance costs for spacecraft go to the culture at large, or are they paid by the planet that built them, like in Civ? I want to garrison all my planets, but only have starports in a few locales, and hope to build defenders at those places, then ship them around the galaxy to defend where needed. Will that screw me like it would in Civ?
They want the alliances tech because they want to be able to make alliances, and also because it’s a diplomatic tech which will help them in all their diplomatic relations. And it’s part of the road to better governments, too. If you’re comfortable with giving a civ these capabilities, go ahead. Note that giving somebody the tech is often a good opener to maneuvering for an alliance with them.
You have to be Close to forge an alliance, which is a step beyond Friendly. Sometimes it’s very hard to get there, even effectively impossible. Some civs are just not interested in playing nice with you. Once you have Close relations, you can just open up the diplomacy screen with that civ and suggest an alliance. They may be willing to give you stuff for deigning to ally with them, or you may gave to give them stuff to get them to throw in with you. This depends on your relative diplomative standing, which is a question of power and diplomatic bonuses.
As I understand it, ship maintenance is paid from your empire budget. I don’t recall a ship maintenance entry in any planetary details screens I’ve seen, and even if there was, planets don’t have individual budgets. The income listed for a planet goes into the general treasury, and the expenses listed for each planet go out of the general treasury. (Yes, even in a Star Federation under a Federalist government. Go figure.)
I like to garrison each planet myself, often with just a token ship on the rockballs. This deters casual invasion – no lone troop transports taking my planets. Obsolete defense ships from your key worlds are perfect for this.
I think the main virtues of GalCiv 2 are the excellent AI in a general sense, the correct balance between the macro and micromanagement overall, and the diplomacy of the games (i watched alliances flow and break, back-stabbing, extorsion, bullying, exchange of favors, cries of help, trust and mistrust, etc, and on top of that diplomacy affected by UP resolutions or changes of moral alignment) which gives the game character and affect the “meta-game” in a more superior level than the normal management of the planets/armies.
If the games is hard for you, just remember there are 9 difficulty setting, nine. And the first ones are braindead. :)
But yeah, the economic system is a bitch to understand.