Silly things this game does... and why I love it.

[Fulano]

I'm playing on tough in a huge map as a custom Thalans race focused on influence. I manage to fill in my corner of the galaxy and block Yor in the corner with about 8 planets. I proceed to influence the heck out of them down to one planet that refused to flip. It was surrounded by 4 fully upgraded influence bases and two planets filled with influence buildings. It didn't flip until end game for some reason. It didn't even have any influence focused buildings once it did flip...

On the other side of the galaxy was the usual Arceans that I keep around so I can trade for their cool weather and speed techs. Instead, they proceed to bug out and get stuck researching weapons, you know, like this game's AI does once it gets involved in a war. I kept paying their attackers to stop fighting with them so they might turn to focus on their weather techs... but no luck. They expand to a good 15 or so planets, get super far in researching lasers... and suddenly decide to surrender... to Yor... that only had that one planet that refused to flip. They were for sure the weakest AI in the round at the time. I guess I'm not getting the weather control building this round...

It's goofy stuff like this that keeps me playing, just random enough that it stays interesting. If only I could mod some of the random events to be less annoying... (I'm looking at you Jagged Knife!)

[RJS]

Haha someone that plays similar to me :) I play giant map with 8 players and the Arcean tech is a must. They're always my best buddies until I get it every game and then it depends on geopolitics or my mood.
The past 5 years or so I have actually taken to notching them up a skill level or even 2 past everybody, they have a weaker game than everyone else especially early. It seems to help ensure I get MY weather control tech and don't have to restart game #99,999.

[Fulano]

No idea why... but some 40 turns later the Yor decided to surrender to the Iconeans. They have so many ships still, and the ones from the original empire that I converted are still swarming everything because they've been stuck by my starbases moving 1 square per turn sor ages. Guess it's time to mop those up now that they all turned pirates.

Ya, I'm surprised at how weak the Arcean AI seems. I'm even using that community mod thing that I wish fixed it. They often won't even build ships for an incredibly long time in the start, which ends up with everybody declaring war on them because they have the weakest fleet. Too bad the planet quality tech from the Alterians and Drath isn't share-able.

I was thinking... if the Jagged Knife was able to convert uninhabitable plants and set up their empire, the event would be awesome, but as it is now, it's no fun just randomly loosing a quarter of your empire. Maybe I need to look into modding.

[RJS]

Yall play with surrender enabled? I don't think the devs even ever did, everything else is highly polished surrender has always been screwy.
I also either disable or set random events to rare, either rare or uncommon seems to pretty much disable the Jagged Knife event and leave all the others, but higher it seems to happen every time which isn't very random.

[Fulano]

Hmm disabling surrendering might save some late game headache... usually I like such a mechanic because in other games it means you don't have to waste the time finishing off the last few worlds when you've already won... but in this game the friendly AI's always surrender to their attacker, and when I'm the attacker they always surrender to their friends, which in the end makes things drag on longer.

I do usually like the random events, when I get the more broken ones I just reload the auto-save.

[Virgil]

Originally posted by RJS:

Yall play with surrender enabled? I don't think the devs even ever did, everything else is highly polished surrender has always been screwy.
I also either disable or set random events to rare, either rare or uncommon seems to pretty much disable the Jagged Knife event and leave all the others, but higher it seems to happen every time which isn't very random.

You know, I always left it on (as I do in Civ 4, my other favorite 4x) as I mistakenly thought the game was balanced around this mechanic, but it really does seem to just make things drag on rather than really alter the outcome of the match in any significant way. Vassalizing your enemy works really well in Civ 4 from a gameplay and pacing standpoint, whereas it just feels like a punishing mechanic here aimed at giving the AI a bit more of an edge.

I'm glad to know I wasn't going insane, but the surrender mechanic always did seem a little less refined to me than all the other mechanics in this game. For a game from the mid 2000's, GalCiv 2 has incredible polish and still holds up remarkably well today, but the way surrendering is implemented always left something to be desired with me. I'll disable it next time.

[RJS]

I wouldn't mind jagged edge or events being turned up so much if it didn't always seem to happen during early game colony rush before I was militarized or developed enough to do anything but wave my limp colony ship at them.
Half of my developing planets with no military secede and suddenly they are armed to the teeth.