kreaturen

I haven't tried the highest difficulties yet, as I find there is nothing wrong with AI expansion, growth and aggression in early stages of the game. There is always a couple civs way ahead of me in pretty much every field. I fear that if I increase the challenge, I will not live to see a late game at all [e digicons];P[/e] Don't know, it takes forever to complete a game on insane maps, but I'll try to tweak the settings next time around. I only play on Challengi

In my opinion, this penalty seem to hurt the AI more than it does the player. The AI simply does not know how to develop its planets properly and largely ignore relics (for god knows what reason). After reaching their cap they either stop expanding altogether, or simply crumble upon themselves due to high unhappyness, whereas my empire finally flies through the roof in late games unopposed. Wish the late game would be more challenging... :(

If you are not willing to go to war with an influential neighbor, you can attempt to raise the local influence modifier of your border planets so that their influence growth per turn are greater than that of your neighbor's planets. If it is not possible to build any more influence buildings on those planets, you can build and develop a culture space station nearby instead. Altarian Resistance and Iconian Refuge generally have high global influence. You can also attempt

I find a good strategy is to up the population as much as possible, as they generate enough wealth to support all buildings and then some. If there is room for it, I add economy buildings. I also add space stations near every colony and add economy modules to those. After a while, the economy shoots through the roof! A good tip for local space stations is to design a stripped down version of the constructor ship, as they get very expensive after a while as they automatically upgrade..

I often see that the AI votes contradictory to it's ideology, power or otherwise affiliations. The way they vote seems almost arbitrary. The most recent event in memory is when the Iconian Refuge, the most powerful Benevolent voted for Krynn Syndicate to be head of U.P, even though they are at war and hate each other. I voted for the Iconians, thinking they would vote for themselves, and thus win, but alas. They've been good to me, despite I'm being Pragmatic... Speaking o

+1 Impossible to keep track of on larger maps

[quote who="Taslios" reply="2" id="3542734"] Click mouse in minimap and then move mouse while holding mouse button down.... seems to move just fine for me. [/quote] This will move you around in the world/galaxy, not re-position the minimap. I for one have an empire located near the border of the galaxy right now, and ever since I zoomed out, I can't get the map to focus back on my empire when I zoom back in again. I can't figure out how to pan the map towards the edg

I just discovered Thulium. It is not a dead planet though. It looks like a planet, but has its own unique resource icon. Discovered another resource in the same system that also looks like a planet (gas giant), called Promethion. Placed a mining station between both and got access to both resources, so the issue is most likely resolved. The OP is old anyways.

All I know is that Thulium is required for adding Survey module to ships... I have so far not seen a single planet that has it (although I haven't played for that long). I was in fact surprised to hear that it is a planetary resource (as such a thing wasn't even mentioned by the tutorial)... I was wandering what the hell it was, because I could not find it... I guess I just have to play a bit more, and hopefully one or two such planets turns up (hopefully some close enough to other re