Newbie Questions: Ships and Starbases

Upgrading and Defending

March 22, 2006 8:55 AM from

Galactic Civilizations II is the first turn based strategy I've ever played so I'm very new to this. Think I'm getting the hang of it now, but I have a few questions:

1) For a starbase, is there any way to see a list of modules that can be installed. It gives a list of modules that are already installed but I would like a simple way to check if there is anything useful left to install before building and sending a constructor out.

2) Upgrading ships seems to be very expensive. In my current game I just have nine small ships (one orbiting each of my planets). I researched more stuff so designed a better ship and would like to upgrade them all, but it's going to use a lot of my cash supply. It seems it would be a lot cheaper just to build 9 new ships the normal way then scrap the old ones. Is that the best way to do it? Is there no option where it's cheaper to upgrade the ships but it takes more turns to do so? Or is there something else I'm missing?

3) Does, for example, sheilds still defend a ship against missiles but just not as effectively as against a beam, or are shields just completely useless against missiles?

4) While I'm here, I keep seeing people on this forum calling GalCiv2 a "4x game", what does that mean?

3,567 views 2 replies

Reply #1 March 22, 2006 4:00 PM from

GalCiv2 Forums Top

Glad you're getting into it. I myself played a small bit of the first GC, but for one reason or another was never really able to get into it totally. I debated whether or not to pick up GC2, but my ideological support for online distribution and lack of DRM won out. Boy am I glad, too! GC2 rocks. Anyway, I'll stop prattling and see what I can do to answer your questions

(1) As far as I know, there's not a way to see that, although I agree it would be very nice. I run into the same issue, not wanting to send a constructor out if there's nothing for it to do. Anyway, I can't say for certain one way or the other on this one.

(2) From what I've gathered by perusing the forums, you're not missin anything. Upgrading your fleet en masse is usually too expensive to make it worthwhile. I've seen plenty of folks clamoring for the slower/cheaper option to be put in, so I assume it's not an option currently (although I haven't really reasearched it myself, so again: no definitive yes or no from me

(3) Here's where I can start to give you some better answers. From the FAQ in the Databanks on this site, all defenses do something, but obviously, they do the most when countering their specific weapon. To quote from the FAQ: "In the original game, ships had an attack and defense. When a ship attacked another, each would roll an attack value and a defense value with the difference being subtracted from the ship's hit-points.

In the sequel, there are 3 types of weapons: Beam, Missile, and Mass Drivers. And defending against those things are Shields, Point Defense, and Armor.

When a beam weapon hits a shield (shields being the optimal defense) then it's the same as the first game.

But when a beam weapon hits say, armor (or point defense), then the defense only rolls between 0 and the square root of its value."

(4) "4X Game" refers to the four Xs that are your general goals in turn-based strategy games like this: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. For more, check out Wikipedia's page on it.Link

Reply #2 March 23, 2006 8:44 AM from

GalCiv2 Forums Top

Thanks chinp. Very helpful. I think I'll have a read through the rest of that FAQ too.

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