Newbie help

The game manual is sadly out of date. I don't have a link to a game guide to give you, but I hope someone else will post one since I have seen similar requests in the past.

To address your specific questions, the production wheel was removed a while back (after many complaints that it forced micromanagement) and the manual never updated.  One way you can still shift civilization focus from social manufacturing to research to ship production etc is to use Leader type citizens, and move them from one focus area to another on the first page of the civilization window.  When you trade a new leader it automatically gets assigned to the top focus area on that page.  Click on the leader to move it to the bottom (unassigned) then click on an empty slot on the focus area you want it assigned to.  More focus areas become available as you research their enabling techs.

I don't see any downside to Open Borders treaties.  Having one will raise the disposition of most opponents, while not having one will make them view you unfavorably if any of your ships are in their zone of control, but will not stop them from sailing into your zone of control.

And yes, the trade offers the AIs make to you are usually terrible trades.  I usually just offer them open borders for cash, and turn down all their offers.  There are diplomatic techs and ideology perks that can improve the balance of the trade offers.

Manual:

The original one is entirely useless. Even the official Wiki is hopelessly out of date. Stardock released an updated manual for Version 3.0 (I believe) early this year. I don't know where to download it from, but for me it was downloaded to my game files automatically because I've set it to automatically update everything to the newest version (GOG release). Unfortunately, even this version is only of limited use, depending on which version and DLC you're using.

The only advice I can offer is starting a few games or the scenarios at a low difficulty level and just try stuff. Then ask here in the forum on any particular

Guides:

I too have searched for guides, but unfortunately, due to the many patches and updates and DLCs, it's near impossible to find one that is relevant for the exact version you have.

The Wheel:

was removed - I don't know when, that was before I started playing. There used to be an administration building that you could build on a planet to unlock the wheel again, for that planet. But I'm not sure it is still available in the current version. Depending on the version you have installed it might be there: you could try load a game and look for it in the tech tree. However, I've learnt to do without it, and find it's not a big issue.

Trade:

Here are a few tips from my own limited experience:

- Before you start the game, unselect the setting to allow tech brokering. This prevents others from trading the techs you trade to them to others. (I typically only trade techs to Minor Civs, but of couse, they too could trade these techs on to Majors)

- Never trade techs to other Civs that grant a Diplomacy bonus, that just makes future trades even worse

- Trade all techs (except diplomacy) to minor civilizations for cash

- only trade for techs that you cannot obtain otherwise, it's too expensive. There are effectively two types of techs that you can't get, special tech branches that are not in your tree (e. g. the Gravitonics tree), or tech alternatives in specializations where you have already picked another specialization

- sometimes it's fine to trade techs to major civilizations, but only if you intend to pull them into an alliance or similar - alliances can pay off way more than what you lose by a 'bad' trade in the short run

I have to agree with @Franton on his trade recommendations.  And his recommendation to turn off trade brokering (which I also do) reminded me of another setting that often trips up new players.  Each planet has a setting on its Govern window to "Auto-Upgrade Improvements".  While this does cut down on micro management, I always turn it off (on each and every planet) because it can drain resources you'd like to prioritize elsewhere. For example, the higher tiers of factories require durantium to upgrade, and I often would rather use that durantium to upgrade a starbase or build something else rather than have the game automatically use it to get me a 2.5% improvement to a factory.

Ok thanks for the help.

Next question that I'm wondering about is where and when to use an influence starbase?  Can you take over an opponents planet and/or starbase with influence.  Is it good to use an influence starbase to fend off who is influencing you?

If you are using a influence starbase, is there a tactical advantage by putting it in a specific location or is anywhere in the general vicinity just as good. 

An example in my current game is my opponent has a mining starbase close to one of my planets.  Our zones of influence are touching each other.  My opponent is mining Durantium, but I have a finger of my zone of influence between the mine and the starbase.  Can I use influence in this case to take over the Durantium mine, or his starbase?  Is it a waste of time trying to do either?  Do I have to worry about my opponent taking over my planet via influence?

You can take over planets and asteroid mines with influence, but not starbases or mined resources.  So you can't take over his mining starbase or his durantium resource.

Generally I use influence starbases to try to flip an opponent's planet or defend my own from flipping.  As far as I know the best placement is so that the planet involved is within the starbase's range of effect.  I suspect that further away works also but not as effectively.

Note that building a consulate on your planet and/or other influence improvements is an alternative to using an influence starbase.  Expanding your zone of influence is also important for tourism income, although I think you said that you only have Crusade and I can't remember whether tourism is as big a deal in Crusade as it was in the Intrigue and Retribution DLCs (before the recent partial nerf).

You can take over asteroid mining fields wuite easily if you boost your influence in the area by whatever means you have available. I did this quite a few times, and the other AI didn't even comment on it. I haven't seen any starbase flip however. I'm not sure this can happen without special abilites (IIRC there is one in the benevolent ideology tree).

If you build an influence starbase next to an alien planet, this will be viewed as an offensive act and lower your diplomacy rating towards that race, evn if you only do so to protect your own planet from flipping. If you are in such a situation where your two planets are close, it's better for diplomacy to use cultural buildings on your planet.

That said, I've read a tip somewhere to build influence starbases near planets that you intend to colonize later, i. e. rather early, and presumably before another planet in the vicinity gets colonized. That way the alien AI cannot complain to you for building a starbase if it decides to colonize a planet there. If another one beats you to colonizing the planet, chances are that it will flip to you thanks to the starbase. Otherwise, once you colonize the planet it will be well protected from being flipped.

One basic tip- learn to use the starship editor early. Many default designs can be easily optimized by simply removing unnecessary parts- thus making them easier to build.

For any combat, even 1 defensive device of the matching type (i.e shields for beam attacks) on a ship cam make a big difference in survival rates.

When building improvements, use special tiles and adjacency bonuses- those can stack and make a huge difference in the overall planetary output

Lastly, use cargo hulls to make wide area radar picket ships to keep yourself from being surprised. Even in the beginning, a cargo ship with a few sensors and engines can help you on the exploration- to find useful planets and resources before the other folks find them. The default scouts are too small/slow for effective exploration...

The AI treats open borders treaty a kind of peace treaty. If you declare war on that faction during the duration, everyone gets mad at you and you will see a negative "You know what you did" modifier with every faction.

The first time I saw this I had no idea what I did...

Thanks for all the info and tips.  It's helping a lot.  I have also started watching the GC3 Crusade Let's Play you tube series.  That seems to be pretty good so far.

So I flipped a planet recently (it took a while to flip it even after my influence completely enveloped the planet), but it doesn't seem like I gained complete control of it.  If I try and move a ship onto it, I get a message about starting a war and the shipyard built by it is still controlled by my opponent.  I can control the tile improvements and I believe I get all the planetary resources; wealth, construction, etc.

I also have recently had war declared against me.  Looking for any tips/help on what to do/think about as far as defending myself, and also strategies about invading my opponents planets.  Not even sure where to start as far as offensive and defensive operations are concerned (I haven't gotten that far in the Let's Play series hopefully that will help). 

war- Basic ideas

build radar ships to keep track of your space- as you expand and build more move those out to see what the bad guys are doing as well

build at least 1 small warship per planet and station them on each of your planets- If you have no ships stationed at a planet, the enemy can send a single troop ship to your planet and conquer it with ease. Such defensive ships need have only a point of attack to stop unarmed transports.

You'll want to research techs for your military ships, but don't overlook the engineering stuff to make those ships larger, faster and further ranged and as well to support larger fleets.

It takes 1 movement point to make an attack- so the max number of attacks any ship is limited by their movement

It happens a lot where civs from across the galaxy will declare war on you, even if they cannot reach you.  This may not even be an issue, if you grow some fleets and attack one of their scout ships, they may ask for peace.  Or, they might start building starbases to reach you.  Don't be too annoyed by the graphs, fleet strength is often no true measure for how well they will hold up to an actual war.  I have found, the best way to up your fleet graph is to go for Kinetic weapons, which is the smallest, cheapest, no-resource weapon in the earliest parts of the game.  Beef up some ships with nothing but kinetics, and if it is early enough in the game, it'll skyrocket your fleet graph.  That may be enough for enemy civs to ask for peace.

I agree with the idea of protecting all planets with at least one basic attack ship, no matter how weak it is, just to prevent easy planetary takeover.

I have had Civs on the verge of declaring war with me, then if I buy a ship from the Bazaar that has some high hit points, suddenly, everybody is my best friend! How about that...  It can be anything useful-- Ysengaard will do the trick during the early game.

I think the game only looks at hit points to determine an opponent's strength., If so, that's a limiting factor for the game AI and that's probably why the AI Civs make dumb mistakes.

Wow. I too wondered what that "You know what you did" meant. No I definitiely did not know what I did! I had no idea at all! This should either be stated clearly in the tool tips, or 'open borders' should be renamed appropriately. How are you supposed to know what it means otherwise?

I really want to like this game, but I just keep stumbling over things that don't work as advertised or expected, because SD failed to provide adequate and up to date information in game.

OK so I recently researched Planetary Invasion and made a Transport ship.  Now it's asking how many Legions to load on it.  I have no idea how many I should load?  I may be a bit premature building one now that I think about it, as I suspect my ships (quatity and quality) are probably not enough to take on the ships in orbit on the planet I 'm thinking of invading.

So a few more questions.  Can you load and unload legions from transports, or are they stuck on it once loaded?  How do you determine how many legions you need to successfully invade a planet?  I suspect it depends on a number of variables, but how do you factor all those kinds of things together to determine on many legions are needed?

As for ship to ship combat, is comparing the total number of weapons, shields and hit points vs your opponents numbers a good way of determining if you can successfully take out their ships in orbit before sending in transports/legions?  Or is there anything else to factor in?  Should the Transports be in the main fleet or should you hold them back until you have defeated all the defending ships?

I recommend getting off the classic version. Play the latest version. I think it is 3.7, even opting into betas as long as they work. That is best for balance. Crusades is better for tourism. I recently played crusades only in multiplayer. If you don't have mercenaries installed I would recommend rush buying paxton emporium. As far as mercenaries I use them for exploration the most. I recommend the prospector, super, or sabel. Remember the prospector is a survey not a war ship. 

I would build the space elevator as soon as I colonise a planet. Right after I build my first shipyard. I use constructors to build the other shipyards, unless I start with a constructors. If that is the case use it to build a shipyard. No more than 7 spaces away from at least 1 planet. I try to get it connected that way to as many planets as I can. You can move it later to do this. I don't move it out of star systems it's to slow. So you can load colony ships. As far as distance decay I use an arbitrary number of 50 percent. Make sure all your planets are sponsering shipyards.

A good way to get raw production is build asteroid mines. 

I would explore with custom built cargo hull survey ships. 

My own experience is very limited, so the following just reflects the little I've seen so far:

1. You need to take out any defending ships before you can invade a planet.

2. To win against another fleet, it's advantageous if your fleet has at least a basic defense against the main type of attack that your opponents has: shields against lasers, point defense against missiles, armor against kinetic attacks. Likewise you should focus on attack types that your opponent has no defense against (but that is easy, especially early in the game, the AI rarely employs defenses)

3. The chance of invasions winning depends on several things: if there is no defending legion, it's a certain win. Otherwise it depends on your soldiering level, and technology advantage. Apart from that, I've heard the attacker seems to be favored, but I can't say anything on that, since I've always had such a big tech advantage that it didn't matter.

4. AFAIK you can not unload Legions from your transport.

5: One more thing: as long as you have legions remaining on your transport, the ship (and legions) will remain for further invasions. You may be able to conquer a dozen planets with just one transport, provided they are undefended (no ships, no legions)

You can decommission the transport and the legions return to your pool.  I only build and keep transports when I need them.

Ah, yes, that reminds me: You can upgrade the transport to one that doesn't have a transport module: when the upgrade is finished, the legions are returned. I actually used this to extend my colony ships when trying to max the pop bonus from Prolific.

I signed a peace treaty with the Drengin, so I won't be attempting to invade for a while.

I'm now trying to understand colony improvements.  Specifically affects and adjacency bonus.  On the wiki there are 3 columns for each improvement; affects, level affects, and neighbor bonuses.  Not sure what the difference is between affects and level affects?  Is the level affects multiplied per level of the improvement?

For example a Basic Factory is listed as Colony Manufacturing +15% for affects, Colony Manufacturing +5% for level affects, and Colony Manufacturing +1 for neighbor bonus.  While a Xeno Factory is listed as Colony Manufacturing +25% for affects, Colony Manufacturing +5% for level affects, and Colony Manufacturing +1 for neighbor bonus.  I'm assuming that a Basic Factory is a Level 1 while a Xeno Factory is Level 2 (I don't see the levels listed in the wiki)?  So does a Basic Factory get a 20% [15%+(1*5%)] increase to manufacturing while a Xeno Factory would get 35% [25%+(2*5%)]?  Then if you put 2 factories next to each other would you also get a +2 bonus to manufacturing (each getting a +1 from each other for adjacency bonus)?  And if you put 3 next to each other in a triangle fashion, would you get a total of +6 bonus (+2 for each one)? 

I have not found this kind of detail explained well anywhere.

Example:

Factory

Effect = 2.5% All Construction

Level Effect = 1% All Construction

Adjacency = +1 All Construction (Applied to Level Effect of adjacent improvement type, All Construction, +1 level)

So a Factory next to a Factory would give a total of 3.5% to both factories for a total of +7%.

Thanks Horemvore, but your reply still has me confused.

The numbers you posted are different than what I posted from the wiki.  Did I get the info incorrectly from the wiki, or is the wiki incorrect/outdated?

I also did not follow your explanation.  Could you or someone break it down further?  I take it you came up with 7% for factory next to factory by adding Effect plus Level Effect (2.5% + 1% = 3.5%) for each factory and then adding each Factory (3.5% + 3.5% = 7%)?

I guess I'm still not sure exactly what the difference between Effect, Level Affect, and Adjacency are?  Does Level Affect only apply if adjacent?  Where does the +1  for adjacency apply  in the calculation?  What if the Adjacency was a +2?

It is an example, made up numbers.

Effect + Level Effect = Total.

Level Effect = Adjacency.

Level effect is a stackable effect, more adjacency = more level = More level effect.

No Adjacency = No Level effect.

Adjacency comes from Improvements, Trade Resources or planet tile Features and the occasional event.

Edit

The system is basicly a Hub system. You have one Grade A Improvement (Flat Value) surrounded by Grade B improvements (Precent Values) each Grade B improvement levels up the Grade A improvement.

There are the odd Grade A improvements that actually give a % value, they are usually Civ unique or Event Improvements and give a large increase to both Effect and Level Effect.

OK, thanks that explanation helps.

Grade A's also usually level up other Grade A's so you can, if the planet has enough tiles, have 2 hubs overlapping making a super hub

Effect - what bonus the building gives on its own, with no adjacency bonus

Adjacency - the number of levels given to buildings next to it, of the appropriate type

Level - the number of levels given to that building, by adjacencies (or special tiles)