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Reply to AI (Torians) not building up planets in Twilight of the Arnor GalCiv2 Forums

The same happens with all AI civs, not just Torians. It might be a bug but on the other hand if you build up all your planets during your colony rush period (on immense maps at least) then your economy is going to be on the red badly and for a long time. Many have played like that themselves (i.e. not building anything on those newly conquered planets) with supposedly good results. Haven't tried that myself yet but 2.02 compared to 1.97 your turism revenue picks up so slowly that it seems tha

Reply to Absolutely Sick of the AI (inverted comas) in Twilight of the Arnor GalCiv2 Forums

The AI is not definitely very strong what comes to military strategy, but the deal making is by far its biggest shortcoming (this is on TA v2.02 and masochistic/obscene). They sell their planets for tech, ships etc. You don't actually need to colony rush much, just buy the damn planets from the AI. They can sell an undeveloped class26 planet for some lowly tech in early game. That just blows. I guess it's easier to give the AI a 400% bonus to production than to fix the trading algorithms etc.

Reply to Gal Civ II: Twilight of the Arnor 2.03 Update in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

Will this update corrupt saved games as did the patch 2.02 when updating from 1.97? Wouldn't want to start my game (again) from scratch. Thanks!

Reply to What's the optimal setting to enjoy the game most? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

17 opponents on a tiny map? :) That sounds pretty tight. Just tried the all labs strategy on a tiny map with 2 opponents and still everything was colonized in the first 10 turns or so. Probably not much room for colonization with 1 opponents. :) Btw I yesterday patched from 1.97 (which came with the package) to 2.02. As it corrupted my old saved games I had to start a new game. It seems that the new version is somewhat harder or at least requires more effort to play competitively. I'm

Reply to What's the optimal setting to enjoy the game most? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Yeah that's very true and creating even something close to as good as a chess AI is very hard if not impossible. Knowing something about neural networks and computerized learning I'd guess that a 4X AI could be much better than it is today. Chess on the other hand has received a very large amount of resources for AI development as it has been some kind of a benchmark for how "bright" a computer can be. Perhaps after ten or twnety more years of development also 4X AIs will be significantly sma

Reply to What's the optimal setting to enjoy the game most? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

That's what I've gathered by reading this forum and other stuff on the web. I'm wondering what is the level you can more often than not beat with the balanced build strategy. Well, obviously at least masochistic as it was no challenge at least on the biggest map. I guess I need to try the all labs thing on suicidal but it feels that the game wasn't meant to be played that way. It might be of course that on suicidal the game might actually be more fun but having to use tricks and starting over

Reply to What's the optimal setting to enjoy the game most? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Thanks! Gotta try those. I took a look at the medium galaxy and it seemed somewhat small (I hate to have an empire that spans just a few turns of space flight :)) but it'll also make it a lot faster to play. I'm surprised at how unbalanced the tech trading actually is. In GalCiv1 you could sell techs to AI for leases and cripple them. In GalCiv2 you can sell them to buy all their colonies which is even worse. In my current game the AI wouldn't trade barren world colonization for aquat

What's the optimal setting to enjoy the game most? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I'm a newcomer to GalCiv2 but have played countless hours of 4X games and GalCiv 1 in the history. I've completed one playthrough with GalCiv 2 so far and wanted to ask people who've played the game a lot one "simple" ;) question: what's the optimal startup setting to enjoy the game the most? With this I mean what settings enables the AI to play the smartest so that you really need to play well to win (and I DON'T mean boring tricks like the all factories strategy people use to outproduce the