Having a blast playing this after a long time away. I played a few games with the AI set to gifted, and found that pretty comfortable, so I figured I'd step it up to Genius. Well, holy moly, Immense Galaxy with 9 opponents, I'm just barely keeping my nose above water, and only doing that by being a real kiss-a$$ to my vastly more powerful galactic neighbours. I'm the Iridium, and the Krynn are causing me all sorts of grief, taking planets and destroying starbases, and even though I've bribed other races to go to war against them they show no signs of weakening or slowing down.
I'm just about at turn 300, and my power is about 1500 - (dead last) while the top two, Altarians and Torians, are both 6000+, and the gap between us is growing, not closing. I have the most planets, and influence is OK(second), and my economy is second or third thanks to trade, but my military/research & production are really lagging.
Should I be concerned about the power rankings and numbers, or are they a bit meaningless? I suspect that I don't have enough population on my planets, which are typically 3 farms - but when I build more, approval becomes an issue. Any general tips to improve my situation, or, having gone this far and being stuck in this bad a position am I doomed to defeat?
I'd be OK with being doomed, actually, I enjoy playing rogue-likes and hardcore modes in other games, and I'd grind this out to the last ship and last planet. But, at the same time, I'd prefer to win (if possible!).
Ok if you have other races at war with them, did you remember to gift a starbase or two to those races? so their ships have range to your area?
Also you should be giving worlds to your allies as well to create buffer zones and draw allied ships to your area because they will want to defend those planets.
But what you really need to dig yourself out of the hole is marauding ships that are fast to attack enemy asteroid mines. It also distracts the enemy from attacking you so much by chasing those ships. Also you need sneaky fleets with transports to sneak around and steal poorly defended enemy worlds. You need to keep hitting them this way, they retake the worlds, so what? Jump the population out ahead of them as much as possible.... keep taking other worlds, keep them on the back foot. If you cannot succeed to produce those sneaky fleets to take poorly defended enemy worlds then you know its time to give up.
I'm having the opposite problem. I have a custom race, that is not likable, am playing an immense galaxy on Genius level, and despite the other races demanding that I give them things, and my consistent refusal, none of them will attack me. Of the 5 major races I've encountered, I'm the weakest with a 258 rating compared to the others from 360 to 1312 and they are all furious. I have a minimal military, mostly just the ships from anomalies and a couple capital ships to take out pirate bases, since i'll build ships if someone declares war. Plus the enemy ships I've encountered are all slow as hell, the max I think I've seen is 8, whereas I have ships in the upper 30's. My focus is on technology and social manufacturing.This is the third game in a row where this has happened: I'm weak according to the game scores, and just keep expanding to get planets, anomalies and resources, and the supposedly pissed off aliens just leave me alone until my score vastly exceeds them. When that happened, I just quit the last two games. In those games, I chose the Pragmatic "Neutral" skill, and thought that maybe the game did not remove this after 50 turns, but I haven't done it this game and still they hate me but leave me alone. I even travel through their territory without problems. I'm on turn 178. So, is it possible that this is due to playing a custom race? I had similar problems as Stimpson in GC2, but so far not even close in GC3.
The other two games were on Genius, and then the lower intelligence before that.
I get both problems actually!
I will get bored and quit because i am too powerful, or i will quit because the enemy is too powerful.
I am yet to encounter a game that is even slightly balanced in challenge, this is the biggest problem with the game in my opinion.
I am in this category. My rule of thumb is: if I live to turn 150, they are doomed by turn 250 at the latest. A lot of that is my play style that creates an accelerating come-from-behind triumph type of victory. Otherwise, I get mercilessly overwhelmed, often by multiple opponents. Some of that seems to be an unintended effect of high level bonuses. They seem to affect early game play more than later. Whatever the causes, it is almost always lopsided one way or another. I have had very few drawn out games because of military or economic parity. However, those were the most fun and challenge and satisfaction. It is my hope that later game mechanic adjustments and continuing later AI development will help re-create that ongoing challenge effect. I am especially interested in more balanced battles, which is where the lopsided nature of things shows up the worst. Big ships beating up little ships is satisfying, but big ships beating up other big ships is actually even better!
One thing I think the AI needs to learn to do is gang up on the human if they are running away with the game. I don't care if it is unfair human-focused AI behavior or not. It would make the game more fun to play than rolling over 40 little factions one by one. If you had an overall clumping up behavior, it could also group up diplomatic negotiations for alliance victories, etc.
I had a few balanced games in GC2, and that was fun to play. Not yet in GC3. I guess we can hope the developers work to fix this.One thing I noticed is different in the new game is that you cannot set the game to randomly determine the number of major races. You have to pick 9 or 5 or 3 at set up. The galaxy is supposed to be a mystery, so why do I know how many aliens are out there? That too was fun. Or am I missing a setting?
Yea, well you have to come from behind because the AI is all about the early game. Surviving that, is pretty much all the game is about, then after that its time to quit because the challenge is gone.
My long time idea has been 'incremental difficulty levels'. After x number of turns, the difficulty level increases.... then again after so many more turns.... just imagine how much that would liven up the later AI game while allowing you to survive the early game??? wow!
Your "'incremental difficulty levels'" idea is a good one. But it seems that the problem is baked in. I still don't understand why they aren't attacking me early on, as they do to you guys. Any one else use a custom race? I've never played one of the canned races.
All my races are custom, via xml. They goto war alot, with player, Minor and AI.
I use a custom race with likability penalties, do no diplomacy, and leave myself militarily weak, like zero warships except from anomalies. All bad habits. I consider the early attacks to be mostly my fault.
It depends actually.... if for example i set 'no tech trading' on, usually the AI will be stronger in that game and hit me hard.
But usually i set tech brokering only, in those games the AI is usually not attacking me if i do well, and i usually do well. Also my standard difficulty level is genius with Drengin set to the next level up.
Now what i am thinking of trying next is to put anomalies on 'none', and that should stop me tricking up my technology and building ships that scare the AI!! lol
Also the new set of well defended anomalies (DLC), some of the rewards seem overpowered to me? So probably best not to have them.
Ok what else? Well, one of my other strategy i used to use which worked all too well in making the AI more aggressive was to find a map with a smaller isolated cluster of worlds in order to prevent my excessive expansion. I never was able to survive that scenario however! lol And now with the special ship components you can get when colonizing worlds.... i don't want small clusters anymore!
They are overpowered, but not how you think, the AI doesnt explore them, so its one sided.
More specifically its the percentage boost to production that i think is overpowered, everything else is not so bad, dousn't really impact the game so significantly, i can live with it, and i can live with the AI not exploring them. If they were to change that production boost one to precursor ship components, now that would be much more fun!
It can give the player a massive advantage, to the point it can be game breaking. Say the game generates 20 of these anomolies, the AI does not explore them. Player get them all, say you get lucky(and it does happen) get 4 Production ones, 4 Manufacturing ones, 4 Logistic ones and the rest at what ever, that puts you at a huge advantage over the AI, even at higher difficulty levels. It need addressing. As a matter of fact, the way the AI handles Pirates (anomolies, colonies or shipyards) needs a complete re-work.
Yea, mostly its the production ones... production/manufacturing.... not good.
Are there logistics ones?
In my current advanced game, i have cleaned up all the advanced anomalies long ago, and i have traded ALL trade goods to myself, no one else has any at all.
Plus i have my Hyperion logistics on a powerful military bonus and surrounded by powerful military adjacency.
Plus i have a custom race with extra logistics.
Total logistics i am allowed is 72, total Drengin is allowed is 76
This is the closest i have ever been to their cheating logistics and look at all the crap i needed to do it!
Mebe i did not happen to get any logistics anomalies? Its possible? but as things stand, logistics anomaly bonuses don't bother me one bit.
There is a Logistic Anomoly, +5 bonus per anomoly. This adds up if you get lucky
Yea, no good.... but just imagine how much more fun this anomaly would be if it gave you a one off logistics ship component instead of a fleet wide bonus? Make it at least + 10 for that though!
That is pretty much how I play too, erischild.More info on my game: I finally got to my first United Planets meeting (turn 192) and after electing the chair, i moused over the other races, which include the minors, and the tooltip states that they are "At War" with me. So, the UP has them at war, but in the game they don't attack and will even trade with me? Sounds like a bug that should be fixed. How do I report that?
Go to this Forum thread. There's a link there that will take you the GC3 knowledge base. Towards the bottom of that page are instructions (or a link, I forget) on how to open a support ticket to report a bug.
Just an update on this game, still going, work and real life getting in the way of more important things like dominating the galaxy, so haven't gotten that much further on than my original post (turn 412), but....
I'm still weak relative to the most powerful races, but I'm no longer last (6th of the 10 majors), and I no longer feel doomed; it's still going to take awhile, but I will win this game. My strategy of kissing up to neighbours and the most powerful races has worked; no-one is at war with me, and everyone I need to be 'close' to me, is 'close'. Meanwhile, bribing enough races to go to war with the Krynn (and each other) meant that the Krynn declared peace on me because I was no longer worth the effort, they had much bigger problems to deal with. The self-righteous Altarians, who were briefly the most powerful race, have been more than happy to go to war with whomever I paid them to, and though they dealt some serious damage to their foes initially, the weight of fighting so many battles on so many fronts is dragging their whole empire down. Meanwhile I am rapidly building up my military and some invasion fleets in preparation of starting to pick off what's left of the stragglers, and all my other stats - economy, production, research, population, are starting to accelerate at faster rates than my rivals.
I enjoyed having a real possibility of defeat as long as it lasted ;it gave every decision and event more weight, more meaning, and will make the eventual victory more satisfying! Might take a shortcut or two and make prudent alliances to avoid dragging it out longer than necessary ( pragmatic trait after all!), then want to see if roughly the same strategy could work playing malevolent, or if I'm going to have to get MUCH better at min/maxing...
Turn 412? wow!
There are a few tricky things i did not know for a long time playing this game which greatly improved my game if you don't happen to know already, here they are;
1) Trade goods stack
2) switch your technology research to something very expensive before claiming any yellow diamond anomaly, then switch back after claiming it.
3) put your shipyard projects - hyperion shrinker especially on a level 3 military resource and then surround it with + military adjacency structures, the higher the better
4) The race attributes (+ or - speed, sensors all that) in Galciv2, i thought they disappeared in Galviv3 for a long time. Only last month i found them all hiding in the custom race set up! Now i can reduce things that are not useful to my strategy and increase things that are, and is amazingly brilliant!
Edit: so the big one is trade goods.... game says "one per race"..... bulshit!
So if your playing a larger map, you can acquire ones that make your ships more powerful.... especially the one that increases capacity, if nothing else, get as many as you possibly can and your ships massively improve, its huge, and for so long i did not take advantage due to in game description "one per race".
Stimpson: That must be satisfying. Makes you feel like you accomplished something. Mystikmind: The yellow diamond anomalies are Artifacts? Yes, they will sometimes do a full tech of any size, and the Capsules will sometimes do 25% on your current tech. That, and money, is why i try to get as many survey ships out there as possible. And that is a good idea on the Shrinker. On my game, I did contact the developers and sent them one of my save games. I have another UP coming up in a few turns, so this time I'll take notes on who is "at war" with me there and contrast that with their actions in game. Hopefully, they can restore balance to the Force.
Update on that bug I reported: They had me send my save game to them, and they found the problem. They said they'll fix it in update 1.84. Maybe that will help with the flip side of the problem too.
Thanks very much for reporting the bug and helping to get it fixed!
The one per race I believe is a setting for planets, so you can't get more than a single one on a planet.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
