Quite a game
from 
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This could be long, so short version: I'm quite impressed by the game and the support from Stardock 
long version:
I heard favorable stuff about the game from some people on other forums, and took a look at this site (particularly the encyclopedia), and decided to get it. After a bit of confusion with the online store, I managed to buy the game and download it (took a while, but well worth it).
Regrettably I have a very so-so sound card, so I encountered some pretty nasty problems: The first time I tried to run the game, it went to the main menu (or at least it looked like it, there was an unmoving panel where the buttons should be) and my computer froze hard. I tried disabling the menu .biks, but that just caused the buttons to be visible but completely unresponsive (the menu .biks are required for it to work, I'm told). I found and downloaded the RAD Tools and fiddled around with the biks, and they played just fine (video and audio) there, but caused my computer to hard lock in the game ... I eventually emailed support, and I got an amazingly fast reply Cari told me several things to try (fixing codec stuff, disabling the music/sfx etc), but my computer remained adamant about not running the game properly... then it was suggested that I use the RAD Tools to take the music out of the menu .biks, so I did, and the game finally worked After more than a few encounters in the past with tech support people who didn't understand the tech they were supposed to support, it was refreshing to get help from someone who really knew what was going on, thanks Cari
With the game running, the real fun began... (note: the music was still choppy, so I turned all the sound off and just listened to other stuff while playing, but it didn't really detract from the game)
My first game was in a Large galaxy with the other races shifted a step (the Dregnin two) towards good and the Altarian and Torians set to Sub-Normal and the rest to Beginner. I had the impression that money and tech drive the game, so I picked Federalist with +30% Econ and +30% Research. It was a pretty good first run, I was generally a good step ahead of the rest (or so I recall) ... I adapted a trick from another 4x game where I got ahead in tech, then traded non-critical tech to all the other races for per-month payments (12 month terms at the time) that altogether allowed me to run 100% spending with 0% taxes... but later I ran into really nasty morale problems, it seemed impossible to keep morale higher than 50% with a tax rate higher than 10% because of absurd overcrowding on the planets. I eventually just built a very large number of transports and sent them over for use in invading a number of minor races, but the maintenence cost of all the transports and a great number of relatively unnecessary buildings was really dragging my economy down... I figured I had made some pretty bad mistakes, and abandoned the game (I still have the save kicking around, no plans to reload it though).
Before my second game I looked around the forums for info on morale... not much I hadn't seen before, but one critical thing finally got through to me: population growth naturally stops around 50-55% morale. Anyway, my second game was also in a Large galaxy (tight clusters), this time with the other races all set to pure good (I play as good-aligned, I wanted to see what would happen) and to Sub-Normal. I picked the same gov/abilities and fired it up. I started in a fair-sized cluster in the bottom-righthand corner of the map, well away from anyone else, and grabbed all the 15+ planets in the cluster in short order with 100% miltary spending. I then alternated between military, tech, and social spending... not often social, as I was only building 0-maintenence stuff at first (in contrast to my build everything everywhere "strategy" in the first one).
One thing about spending, particularly social spending: if a planet is producing "nothing" in the social box, the social production money for that planet still seems to get spent, even though I'm not getting anything for it... is this a known issue, or even (I hope not) working as designed? ... I would really like some sort of "No, I mean it, don't spend the money" button, or "Trade Goods" setting.
Anyway, I hadn't expanded since the intial rush (there was a rather vast void between my cluster and any other stars, and I didn't feel like crossing it except with survey vessels), so my planets were rather populated and beginning to strain morale-wise, which is a problem when trying to keep the senate. My solution was as follows:
1. since raising taxes can start a death-spiral-like effect on one's economy, I just set it to 25% (palatable to my people at the time) and left it there for the rest of the game.
2. A couple months before each election, I would jack up the propaganda on all my planets to get my approval rating to 80% or so, then take propaganda back down after the election. The problem was that the population growth during the high-morale time caused morale problems when the propaganda went away, so I didn't drop it all the way to 0 at first. The next time I broke my semi-moratorium on social spending and built Entertainment Networks on all my planets before dropping the propaganda... to my amazement, all my planets' morale shot to 100% and stayed there even after I dropped the propaganda and a year or two of 6% population growth went by. Thereafter I used the propaganda-morale building tactic every time I was struggling with morale just before an election, so I had no further problems with morale.
As for the other races... there were lots of things going on, and I don't want to make this a full-blown AAR, so the particularly important bits are: they were all behind me in tech by a good bit because of my bonuses (I had a research-resource starbase up), but I periodically brought them to near-parity... making a rather handsome profit in the meantime ... of more importance were the Arceans, who had managed to secure 3-4 influence-resources (2 of which were in my easy reach). I was unaware of the severity of their influence advantage until I saw a GNN on the matter and switched on the sector-ownership overlay... their color covered the vast majority of the map. This was quite a suprise, as I hadn't expected the AI to really try to win at this level, but there were the Arceans, doing their level best to culturally dominate the galaxy. In any case, I foiled their plan by constructing a number of culture-magnifying star bases and planetary improvements (I was dominating the trade-good/wonder race, too).
About culture star bases... I've noticed that star base social/military production bonuses stack with multiple bases, but when I tried the same thing with culture bonuses I didn't notice any improvement over having just one maxed-out base... is this correct? Which kinds of star base bonuses stack in this way?
I wasn't able to get to the Arcean's level of influence because they had so many more stars, but I was able to prevent them from getting the necessary percentage for victory, and continued teching up the tree (periodically shifting to military production to build constructors or ships to keep the tribute-seekers away). Eventually, though, the Arceans increasing influence started flipping the other races' planets, which gave them yet more influence, which flipped yet more planets, etc... their influence graph started looking disturbingly vertical, and I had to do something...
I had anticipated this, and had bee-lined to Avatar and Overlord tech, and had built a number of them and deployed them on my outlying star bases (near the 2 Arcean influence resource bases, and also a military resource base). With great regret I declared war on my good friends, and proceeded to smash those bases and replace them with my own (I had also built up about 12 constructors for the purpose), then a couple turns later I gave them about 6 techs for peace. The relationship took a while to heal, but large amounts of trade (50% of my income, probably more of theirs) and our similar alignment helped.
After that I had no further worry about the Arceans dominating the galaxy, and after a period of miltary production to secure my borders I shifted almost everything to research and completed the tech tree (and the game) in the late 2220's.
Two important randomish things that happened: very early on in the game, the UP (including me) voted to increase constructor base speed by 7 parsecs/month, which was quite amusing... my constructors made better scouts than my scouts ... having speed 13 constructors towards the end was rather cool too... that bill actually came up again, and I voted for 7 again, but everyone else voted against it, so no speed 20 constructors 
... the other important thing was a random event that said something to the effect of "The declining Dregnin empire has discovered this really haus precursor artifact that isn't doing much right now but will eventually allow them to dominate the galaxy" ... they were down to approximately 1 sector due to being so close to the Arceans, but they got a second wind from this and actually started beating me to some techs and such... but eventually the Arcean influence overwhelmed them and flipped the entire Dregnin empire, and I heard nothing more of the artifact.
Well, this has gone on long enough, and I have a really good start in a gigantic galaxy (I'm in the biggest cluster and I had another yellow star with 2 15+ planets so close I colonized it on the first turn!) waiting for me, so I'll get going... I just wanted to say thank you to Stardock and the team for such a great game and the support to actually get it running
long version:
I heard favorable stuff about the game from some people on other forums, and took a look at this site (particularly the encyclopedia), and decided to get it. After a bit of confusion with the online store, I managed to buy the game and download it (took a while, but well worth it).
Regrettably I have a very so-so sound card, so I encountered some pretty nasty problems: The first time I tried to run the game, it went to the main menu (or at least it looked like it, there was an unmoving panel where the buttons should be) and my computer froze hard. I tried disabling the menu .biks, but that just caused the buttons to be visible but completely unresponsive (the menu .biks are required for it to work, I'm told). I found and downloaded the RAD Tools and fiddled around with the biks, and they played just fine (video and audio) there, but caused my computer to hard lock in the game ... I eventually emailed support, and I got an amazingly fast reply
Cari told me several things to try (fixing codec stuff, disabling the music/sfx etc), but my computer remained adamant about not running the game properly... then it was suggested that I use the RAD Tools to take the music out of the menu .biks, so I did, and the game finally worked After more than a few encounters in the past with tech support people who didn't understand the tech they were supposed to support, it was refreshing to get help from someone who really knew what was going on, thanks Cari With the game running, the real fun began... (note: the music was still choppy, so I turned all the sound off and just listened to other stuff while playing, but it didn't really detract from the game)
My first game was in a Large galaxy with the other races shifted a step (the Dregnin two) towards good and the Altarian and Torians set to Sub-Normal and the rest to Beginner. I had the impression that money and tech drive the game, so I picked Federalist with +30% Econ and +30% Research. It was a pretty good first run, I was generally a good step ahead of the rest (or so I recall) ... I adapted a trick from another 4x game where I got ahead in tech, then traded non-critical tech to all the other races for per-month payments (12 month terms at the time) that altogether allowed me to run 100% spending with 0% taxes... but later I ran into really nasty morale problems, it seemed impossible to keep morale higher than 50% with a tax rate higher than 10% because of absurd overcrowding on the planets. I eventually just built a very large number of transports and sent them over for use in invading a number of minor races, but the maintenence cost of all the transports and a great number of relatively unnecessary buildings was really dragging my economy down... I figured I had made some pretty bad mistakes, and abandoned the game (I still have the save kicking around, no plans to reload it though).
Before my second game I looked around the forums for info on morale... not much I hadn't seen before, but one critical thing finally got through to me: population growth naturally stops around 50-55% morale. Anyway, my second game was also in a Large galaxy (tight clusters), this time with the other races all set to pure good (I play as good-aligned, I wanted to see what would happen) and to Sub-Normal. I picked the same gov/abilities and fired it up. I started in a fair-sized cluster in the bottom-righthand corner of the map, well away from anyone else, and grabbed all the 15+ planets in the cluster in short order with 100% miltary spending. I then alternated between military, tech, and social spending... not often social, as I was only building 0-maintenence stuff at first (in contrast to my build everything everywhere "strategy" in the first one).
One thing about spending, particularly social spending: if a planet is producing "nothing" in the social box, the social production money for that planet still seems to get spent, even though I'm not getting anything for it... is this a known issue, or even (I hope not) working as designed? ... I would really like some sort of "No, I mean it, don't spend the money" button, or "Trade Goods" setting.
Anyway, I hadn't expanded since the intial rush (there was a rather vast void between my cluster and any other stars, and I didn't feel like crossing it except with survey vessels), so my planets were rather populated and beginning to strain morale-wise, which is a problem when trying to keep the senate. My solution was as follows:
1. since raising taxes can start a death-spiral-like effect on one's economy, I just set it to 25% (palatable to my people at the time) and left it there for the rest of the game.
2. A couple months before each election, I would jack up the propaganda on all my planets to get my approval rating to 80% or so, then take propaganda back down after the election. The problem was that the population growth during the high-morale time caused morale problems when the propaganda went away, so I didn't drop it all the way to 0 at first. The next time I broke my semi-moratorium on social spending and built Entertainment Networks on all my planets before dropping the propaganda... to my amazement, all my planets' morale shot to 100% and stayed there even after I dropped the propaganda and a year or two of 6% population growth went by. Thereafter I used the propaganda-morale building tactic every time I was struggling with morale just before an election, so I had no further problems with morale.
As for the other races... there were lots of things going on, and I don't want to make this a full-blown AAR, so the particularly important bits are: they were all behind me in tech by a good bit because of my bonuses (I had a research-resource starbase up), but I periodically brought them to near-parity... making a rather handsome profit in the meantime
... of more importance were the Arceans, who had managed to secure 3-4 influence-resources (2 of which were in my easy reach). I was unaware of the severity of their influence advantage until I saw a GNN on the matter and switched on the sector-ownership overlay... their color covered the vast majority of the map. This was quite a suprise, as I hadn't expected the AI to really try to win at this level, but there were the Arceans, doing their level best to culturally dominate the galaxy. In any case, I foiled their plan by constructing a number of culture-magnifying star bases and planetary improvements (I was dominating the trade-good/wonder race, too).About culture star bases... I've noticed that star base social/military production bonuses stack with multiple bases, but when I tried the same thing with culture bonuses I didn't notice any improvement over having just one maxed-out base... is this correct? Which kinds of star base bonuses stack in this way?
I wasn't able to get to the Arcean's level of influence because they had so many more stars, but I was able to prevent them from getting the necessary percentage for victory, and continued teching up the tree (periodically shifting to military production to build constructors or ships to keep the tribute-seekers away). Eventually, though, the Arceans increasing influence started flipping the other races' planets, which gave them yet more influence, which flipped yet more planets, etc... their influence graph started looking disturbingly vertical, and I had to do something...
I had anticipated this, and had bee-lined to Avatar and Overlord tech, and had built a number of them and deployed them on my outlying star bases (near the 2 Arcean influence resource bases, and also a military resource base). With great regret I declared war on my good friends, and proceeded to smash those bases and replace them with my own (I had also built up about 12 constructors for the purpose), then a couple turns later I gave them about 6 techs for peace. The relationship took a while to heal, but large amounts of trade (50% of my income, probably more of theirs) and our similar alignment helped.
After that I had no further worry about the Arceans dominating the galaxy, and after a period of miltary production to secure my borders I shifted almost everything to research and completed the tech tree (and the game) in the late 2220's.
Two important randomish things that happened: very early on in the game, the UP (including me) voted to increase constructor base speed by 7 parsecs/month, which was quite amusing... my constructors made better scouts than my scouts
... having speed 13 constructors towards the end was rather cool too... that bill actually came up again, and I voted for 7 again, but everyone else voted against it, so no speed 20 constructors 
... the other important thing was a random event that said something to the effect of "The declining Dregnin empire has discovered this really haus precursor artifact that isn't doing much right now but will eventually allow them to dominate the galaxy" ... they were down to approximately 1 sector due to being so close to the Arceans, but they got a second wind from this and actually started beating me to some techs and such... but eventually the Arcean influence overwhelmed them and flipped the entire Dregnin empire, and I heard nothing more of the artifact.Well, this has gone on long enough, and I have a really good start in a gigantic galaxy (I'm in the biggest cluster and I had another yellow star with 2 15+ planets so close I colonized it on the first turn!) waiting for me, so I'll get going... I just wanted to say thank you to Stardock and the team for such a great game and the support to actually get it running
