Old Imperium Galactica II player here.... looking for advice!

[TaxFreePwnage]

I've played about 3 hours of Galactic Civ 3 so far.... just trying to wrap my head around what to do at this point.

Even on Easy mode, why am I always last in production... ALWAYS?

Why is it SO HARD to increase the population of your planets?

Should I be focusing on just settling worlds as fast as possible?

Any advice would be great!

[evilMoo]

research more food production techs or steal a planet with better quality. start out with a race that has better planet quality. your only able to build so many farms on a planet but you can increase their production through techs..

techs is mostly how they beat you in production. and having a high quality planet somewhere so they can place a bunch of factories along with research buildings then that allows them to research a higher production building like a power plant ect increasing their production even more.

[blackphoenixx]

Easiest way to get production up at the start is researching Space Elevators, followed by the Xeno Manufacturing tree for factories and power plants.
That and the first 2-3 terraforming techs to let you take better advantage of adjacency.

Then you just place everything you have that grants adjacency to all construction buildings and surround your space elevator with them (because it gets +1 production per adjacency).

Similar for research or wealth - find a building that gives a flat bonus with adjacency (computer core, learning center, central bank) and surround it in buildings that grant adjacency (and ideally multipliers to whatever you're boosting).

As for increasing the population of your planets the usual issue is that most of the bonuses you can get are multipliers. The base population growth rate is only 0.01 pop/turn however so even getting 200% or 300% faster growth does very little.

The trick is pretty much the same as with production - find a way to get a flat bonus so you actually have something to multiply. For population that's the Colonization Center (+ 0.03 pop/turn and another 0.01 per adjacency), the Open and Stellar Immigration techs (+ 0.03 and -10% morale each) and the Tyron's Destiny achievement (+ 0.1 pop/turn with +10% growth per adjacency).

If you put a Colonization Center and Tyron's Destiny on the same planet and research the food techs (most of which add growth multipliers) you can easily get a pop every 2-3 turns. You can then use colony ships to ferry them to other planets.

If you have trouble getting enough population for colony ships in the beginning there's two tricks to help out - the free colony ships you get from the Benevolence ideology and Tyron's Destiny are both loaded with 5 population - land them on your capital and take off again with only 1, now you have 4 extra pop for more colony ships.

As for settling worlds as fast as possible, at the beginning yes. At least until you have a few decent planets in your empire, you can slow down after that.
In general you want to use your available administrators ASAP because they're not doing anything for you otherwise. Which means building colonies and starbases.

[jonnin]

production... IMHO military (ship) construction is what matters. Why? there is a ship you can make that dumps a TON of construction onto a planet to get its first few buildings done in a turn or two. So making ships quickly is a big goal. To do that, you want to get buildings with +all construction or +ship construction next to each other, and next to the city as well if possible.

population: for non robots, the more you have, the faster it increases. Do not drain your planets way down spamming colony ships, take it at a steady pace you can maintain. Ideally, colonize from a multi-planet system: you can transfer population in a colony ship so shuffle it around to have 3+ planets with 3-4 population each and a shipyard. That can refill the 1 population taken from all the planets relatively quickly. You can build the supply ships between colony ships at this yard to avoid draining your population down.

Yes, colony rushing is a critical thing on most maps. If you are too small the AI will overwhelm you eventually unless you are a skilled player, even on easier difficulty settings. However, colony rush is a dark art not a formula. You have to consider your government size limits, your population management, the quality of the planets, the cluster you want to control (its far easier to control a circular area than a very long straight line of colonies). Placing star bases and high influence on a planet will capture it if the AI takes it, which saves a colony ship. Taking over your nearest neighbor early game by rushing military is also as good as colony rushing.


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I can't stress enough that custom made factions solve a lot of problems that you encounter playing the very weak "role play setup" default factions. You can beef up population growth, production, or whatever is giving you trouble. Its a crutch, sure, but you may as well use it because once you get above gifted your own custom faction is going to be more and more useful to defeat the higher difficulty AI.

[MikeHawk]

Man default population growth is ganked as Terrans. By turn 125, I only had 11 colonies - 4 of them new. Torians already had 47!!! WTF.

[jonnin]

Originally posted by MikeHawk:

Man default population growth is ganked as Terrans. By turn 125, I only had 11 colonies - 4 of them new. Torians already had 47!!! WTF.

I can't stress enough that custom made factions solve a lot of problems that you encounter playing the very weak "role play setup" default factions.... :P

If all you care about is breeding like flies, it can be done at the cost of something else.
I don't recommend going all in on that, but never, ever penalize it (synth can, since they produce instead, you want to take negatives in food, reproduction, happy with those).
Terrans have normal reproduction.
Torians have +2 fertile perks.
They will out breed you, but you should not be that far off. This is partially due to something you did, unless you are above gifted level.
The thalians have -2 and are the worst breeders.
if you customize fertile 2 & prolific, you can rush population. But even so, if you drain it to 1, it takes time to recover. If you really want to go big, scavenger, xenophobic synthetic can make 1 population/turn per planet after a short time and populations of 20 or so is not uncommon without needing extra buildings to hold them.