Newbie: They declare war very early, are faster with social stuff and not really nice to me!!!

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:sniff!:

Defense versus Colonizing
Towards the end of the 'grab all planets possilbe'-phase where I try to get as many colony ships out as possible - without going too deep into debt - most relationships with my neighbours drop and pretty soon they declare war. Usually that happens before I researched defenders so that pretty much ends the game.

Question: If I colonize a planet in a sector they lead in influence, does that affect their standing towards me?
Question 2: How do I intelligently colonize as many planets possible if I have to take care of my defenses with defenders?

Sending colony ships
The game seems to suggest about 30-50% of planet pop. to go onto a colonizer, that is quite a bit. In the early game, doesn't it slow down production of the initial planet? In the late game I realized that starting out a colony with a high number (1.5+) of settlers kills their morale on the new planet
Question 3: What the 'best' number of settlers for colonization?

Production levels
When colonizing a planet, I think I saw planets starting with 1 or 2 social/military/research.
Question: how many citizens does it need to get adequate production levels? Is it depending on citizens at all or is it planet quality?

Build Queue
I usually start out with Soil enrichment to improve the planets and then News Network or Habitat Improvement. But quite a few planets take ages to complete that. Buying the stuff would bankrupt me.
Question 3: What are the best initial production queues?

Stacking ships
Question: Couldn't find it in the manual - do stacked ships also share hitpoints or does one ship fight after the other?

I'm quite used to 4x games and to be kicked that hard on 'simple' level is tough, but promising, the only game where it happened before was Civ3, and I'm still playing it (well, now I kick back. Big time).

GalCiv is an awesome game!
cheers
Serge

~SDC~
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
To answer a few....

I like to start the game with military production in the 45-50% range. That way I can get a lot of colony ships without having to pay extra for rushing them.
In the early part of the game, I usually have planets send around 35% of their population (up to 350 million) on colony ships. 300 million gives a planet a decent start in my humbe opinion.


I usually don't change the spending %'s until I've produced a few constructors to get the resources near me and a few defenders so that the AI doesn't think I'm an easy target.

I do my first research in this order:
1. Industry theory (Manufacturing Center)
2. Communication theory (News Network)
3. Universal translator (Banking Center)
4. Defense theory
5. Deflectors (Defender)

My first social production is in this order:
1. Soil enrichment
2. Manufacturing Center
3. Banking Center
....
then whatever i can, but "Planet Improvement" / Economy / Production is always on the top of my priority.

I don't think stacked ships share hitpoints. I think the stacked option is only to help you move large fleets around the map. Pls correct me if I'm wrong. I usually disband a fleet when I want to attack someone with it. Otherwise all the ships in the fleet will use up their movement points as 1 ship in the fleet is attacking a target.