That "WTF" Moment in a Noob's Game....

from GalCiv3 Forums

I fire up a game in an immense galaxy with the default number of races for that size, and then everything else including difficulty is at normal level. I go with the Arceans as my race.

I'm initially happy because there are three decent 10< size planets around to colonize. Great. Building colony ships takes forever, but okay, I assume this is normal. I find some resources doubled-up next to each other that lend themselves to mining starbases. I queue up a factory and then a research station, and figure I need to repeat those iterations. Again, building seems to take way too long. When my influence expands to encompass an asteroid, I spend the 500 to mine it.

To my mind, I seem to be doing everything that you do in a 4x game. BUT, don't you know it, I start meeting races and surprise, they're all 6-10 techs ahead of me and I don't have anything they don't have. Sure enough, by the time I meet everyone, I'm firmly mired in last place in both tech and military. Only two things can really account for this:

1) I'm failing to do something very important.

2) The AI races start with significant advantages.

I'm not really asking how to min-max, I'm just asking about basic keeping-up-with-the-joneses stuff. The game doesn't strike me as that obtuse. I don't want to give up just yet, so can anyone enlighten me?

 

20,941 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Asteroid mining is a waste unless you're rolling in cash mid or late game.

Go to govern.  Play with adjusting your spending.

I rushing Manufacturing improvements and colony ships early can get you out the gate quicker.

Econ starbases are HUGE.  Especially for you homeworld or anywhere you can cluster planets.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yeah, indeed adjusting the wheel for your needs is important. Very early I go mainly for social prod., but every time I discover a good planet to colonize I immediately ramp up ship production to get a colony ship asap. If needed I rush-buy, though rushing a completely new one is very expensive, so for me a last-resort thing. Partly completed ships are way cheaper.

 

If there's no planet to colonize, I adjust the wheel back to build your worlds, but don't forget to start building your military at some pt.

Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Turn the difficulty down until you are familiar with the mechanics. This will handicap the AI slightly.

The AI will trade Techs with each other at every opportunity, giving the impression they can research quicker than you. Turn off Tech trading this will slow them down.

 

I generally only build factories on my home world to start with, this will speed up your ship building.

The next world I colonise I build a couple of factories and the rest research.

 

I find it more efficient to leave the wheel alone and use the focus buttons on a per colony basis.