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This was one of my favorite games of all time, unfortunately, there is no longer internet support for games (they took down the servers) so you have to run them LAN or by E-mail (like anyone would ever do that).
The relevancy of the bump comes from the fact it is now available, DRM free, for $5.99 from Good Old Games here. Unfortunately this doesn't include the expansion, Alien Crossfire, due to more rights issues, but if it does become available in the future, GoG has a reputation of throwing it in free with the package for everyone that bought the game already, so I wouldn't put it past them.
Seriously, though, anyone who likes strategy games should get this because it's exactly as in-depth as you want it to be. At the higher difficulties, resource management becomes intense, whereas you can largely ignore it on the lower difficulties and focus on army building and tech paths. It's got something for everyone.
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You know what, I might play it again.
It's been a hell of a long time since I last played it. I'd like to go customise my units and build cities on the sea baby lets go lets go LETS GO.
I used to play it with my bro and I didn't get that far through playing it by myself.
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This is the only civ-game I beat on the hardest difficulty, and the reason I bothered is probably because I like it so much better than the other civ games. It is not that hard if you exploit a few things, though. For instance, the Gaians are pretty imbalanced with their ability to take over mind worms right away. This gives you a much larger army in the beginning. Also, if you start near the freshwater sea or the special jungle, their extra food production will get you huge cities pretty early (giving you money and tech production). Starting near the Peacekeepers is also a good thing since they basically won't attack you, and this lets you expand freely.
I actually liked the original game much better without the expansion. I thought the new factions introduced were to gimmicky and didn't fit too well in with the others.
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my copy of the game didn't come with a manuel, so i was clueless as what to do. sadly, i gave up on it .
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I just want to point out that if the game still supports lan, you should try setting up either Hamachi or Tunngle. Maybe you can get it to work, but I don't know, the game is pretty old.
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Does anyone have a quick brief guide for the fundamentals of this game, I bought it from gog.com but it really throws you in the deep end.
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7 year necro?
Still, this game was amazing.
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I've always thought that the fights were so unrealistic. A lot of random events and one unit attacks at a time, right? Then there a lot of annoying things in the game and late-game regularly becomes pretty overwhelming. In the end it's still a great game.
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this is the game that turned me into a geek i think :D
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On June 11 2011 08:55 Perscienter wrote:
I've always thought that the fights were so unrealistic. A lot of random events and one unit attacks at a time, right? Then there a lot of annoying things in the game and late-game regularly becomes pretty overwhelming. In the end it's still a great game.
The fights are entirely stat based. You get really good at predicting them after a while.
Unfortunately, it's a really complex game to just "start" out of nowhere, but if you bought it on GoG there's a PDF of the manual (and it is a loooong manual) in the download folder that you can look at.
Apart from that:
1) Build lots of colony pods early.
2) If you are new, use the Governor for each of your bases. Turn him on Discovery early, Build later, and Conquest if you're at war.
3) Set research focus to Discovery until you (or someone else) gets Secrets of the Human Brain, then switch to Conquest/Explore dual focus till Chaos weps, then swap back to Discovery.
4) Don't make too many enemies early. If you outright refuse too many requests, they might declare on you, so always propose a trade, that will make it less likely for them to declare on you. If the trade is incredibly lopsided their way, don't do it, you're so far ahead of them even if they declare on you it's no big deal.
5) Air Power is awesome.
6) As soon as you get Orbital Spaceflight, Immediately build a Hydroponics Pod (it requires an aerospace facility at the base just FYI) as it reveals the entire map and gives you a huge food advantage.
7) Play Gaians first. The Morgans on a low difficulty setting will be your mortal enemy, but they're pathetic till higher difficulties when economy actually matters. You also can sometimes control rather than kill Mind Worms giving you an early game advantage. When you can research green economics later, it gets to like a 75% capture rate.
That's all I can think of atm.
Edit: Oh yeah, if you can help it, GET THE LONGEVITY VACCINE. It's a decent project in itself, but the cutscene is hilarious.
Oh yeah, lemme list some of the better secret projects that you want to prioritize off the top of my head (not exhaustive):
Weather Paradigm
Virtual World (ESPECIALLY for the University)
Hunter-Seeker Algorithm (^)
Cyborg Factory
Network Backbone
Neural Amplifier
Planetary Transit System
That's all I can think of atm, more probably when I finish my first game in years 
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I have four words for you: Elite Drop Shard Troopers. Seriously, these let you break the game at the highest difficulty level because you can war with the peacetime civics/policies (whatever they're called) because your troops will never technically be outside of your territory on any given turn. Just drop them into enemy territory using your first movement point and attack the target enemy city with your second movement point. You can do this with either University or Spartan factions. If I remember correctly, you have to build the project that gives a morale bonus if you play as University to build elite units.
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That game was really weird and hard to understand when I was like 10 playing it. The voice acting was cool and trying to play and control my people So I understand your confusion it is an awesomely cool odd game.
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Morganites are the best by far in anything more than a normal map. You just BUY everything (rush troops) and bribe close by enemies until you quash them
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This is one of the few turn-based games that managed to capture my friends attention to the endgame. The ability to modify units made for a great multiplayer experience. Also. Planetbusters. I've had countless of great weekends playing this game with pals back when music was still decent...
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Yeah I loved this game. Wish they continued the series with more games.
Instead they keep making more Civ games.
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I keep meaning to buy it, I probably haven't played it in a decade thanks to cd stealing gremlins. Still, every game of Civ I play I forget at some point I can't terraform and cry a little bit.
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On June 11 2011 08:22 BoilOlo wrote:
my copy of the game didn't come with a manuel, so i was clueless as what to do. sadly, i gave up on it .
I can give you a decent starting push. Qualifications (i.e. "what league are you?"): a month ago I managed to beat the game on highest difficulty (transcend) for the first time, and I regularly steamroll through the second-highest difficulty (thinker), and have beaten thinker difficulty with every faction. I've played enough games to see the meteor fall random event.
Start off creating a random map, on a small planet, on citizen difficulty (easiest), and using standard rules. Choose the Hive as your faction.
Why Hive? The ease of building things faster will make things easier since you won't be able to anticipate things you've never learned about. Plus, the leniency of unit supply and police means you won't have to worry about either of those.
Start by building scouts, and send your guys out to explore and pop pods (those things that give you bonuses). Keep building scouts until you have 4 total, should be quick. Then switch to building a colony pod. Any time the pop-up asks you about tech direction, just keep the default.
Once your colony pod is out, find a nice spot to build at. As Hive, your cities can be 2-4 squares apart, with 3 being my favorite early on. Any bonuses (the weird green, blue, or yellow things on the squares) are good, plus rainy squares and rivers are nice. You can build near landmarks (borehole cluster, freshwater sea, etc.) too, as they are all good except for the dunes, but it's not necessary.
If you meet anyone, just agree to trades and treaties. Don't worry about giving away stuff for now.
Once you have 50 credits, open up the social engineering menu. Change to Police State and Planned economy if you have them, accept the payment. (You can now support 4 units per city, and and up to 3 units in each city will act as police.)
Keep expanding following this same pattern until you have four or five cities. Then start adding some formers. Once you have one former per city, have your strongest production city start prototyping the best new unit you have, while the others continue adding 2 military units and one former per new city. Have formers add roads between the cities. You can automate them if you don't want to deal with farms, etc. Roads are the critical first step, though. Think of it as creep spread, and all you have are slow lings (1 movement units). Once your prototype finishes, have all your cities split between building defensive units (e.g. 1-3-1) and the others build offensive (e.g. 4-1-1). Go to your nearest neighbor. Break whatever treaty or pact you have with them, run them over with cheap units.
Did you run them over? Congrats, you just roach-ling all-in'd, but now you have their cities. You can do it to the next guy too, but before you do, start prototyping the next unit.
gl hf.
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I don't get how there is no remake of that game yet.
It was the fucking best civ-like game ever created.
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I think there was a mod for civ 4?
Anyhow, one of my favourite games of all time. A few years ago I replayed it, trying to beat this "impossible scenario" of 1v7AI on transcend difficulty, forced to play cult of planet against all the war oriented factions, on permanent alliances. I learned lots of tricks, but eventually my old computer was not powerful enough to run the scenario as there would be too many units on screen. Anyhow, some tips that I can remember:
- supply crawlers are ridiculously overpowered. You want to have a basic supply crawler design, then a fancy one with as high of a cost as possible. Build the cheap one at your city, then when you get a new tech that unlocks a secret project, upgrade the crawler and contribute it to the project. The cost to upgrade is 1/4 the cost to build, so with this method you'll eventually be able to build secret projects in a single turn!
- the best city configuration is to build as many of them as possible, something known as the infinite city sprawl (ICS) technique. For instance, the university faction gets a free network node at each city - so if you make a ton of cities, you get a ton of free buildings!
- Mineral, energy and nutrient resource tiles are not subject to early game caps, so it is necessary to abuse this as much as possible. You'll want to build lots of formers, and shoot straight for the Weather Paradigm wonder. Then you can build things like thermal boreholes on the mineral/energy resources, giving you 7+ per turn (can't remember the number exactly). Remember the ICS strategy I mentioned above? Let's say you have 3 cities surrounding a thermal borehole - they can take turns sharing that mineral resource to build city facilities quickly, then you can make nutrient condensers on the green tiles as that structure also happens to circumvent nutrient limits. This gives you a cluster of 3 decent cities for each mineral resource in your territory.
- the planetary transit system makes all your new cities start at size 3, but what's less known is that all your cities below size 3 when it is build get upgraded to size 3. So again, build a ton of cities, making sure that they're all size 1-2, then boom, your population suddenly increases by 2-3x.
- for pollution control, you need to understand how the mechanics work. There is a magical number known as the clean mineral limit, which starts at around 17 minerals. Early on, you want to push at least one city past this mark to force fungal blooms. After the second one, an interesting mechanic comes into play: any subsequent tree farm, centauri preserve, etc building you build will increase the clean mineral limit by one. Many make the mistake of playing too eco-conscious early, resulting in many tree farms made before the fungal blooms, and therefore a much lower mineral limit resulting in tons of late game pollution. This is bad, as you'll get attacked by massive stacks of mind worms lategame if you have pollution on transcend difficulty.
- if you want to get super good, you have to learn how unhappiness works. There's a pattern - on a X-sized map, on Y difficulty, you'll get your first unhappy civilian when you build your Zth city. There are these super unhappy citizens, which won't be appeased easily, so if you want to be as efficient about it as possible you should try to calculate which cities those citizens are likely to appear so you can prepare appropriately for them. I don't remember the exact formula, but this is an important part of super efficient ICS styles.
- if you get your growth to +6, you are in population boom mode and grow 1 size for each excess 2 food per city. Since the children's creche gives +2 growth, you'll want to build one in each city, then switch to planned economy and democratic government to quickly saturate your food production. Not all factions can choose those two options though, so for them you have to force golden ages by pumping luxuries for a few turns to get the necessary growth bonus.
Anyhow, it's been a few years since I've played, but once you learn to abuse the game mechanics I've mentioned above, you'll be crushing through transcend difficulty games with ease. Some people used to play the game as one faction, then once it got to #1 score, they would use the cheat editor to switch to the weakest faction. They would repeat this process until finally winning the game using the 8th faction after having played each faction to the top.
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Whoa, there seems to be a ton of strategy behind this :O cool necro.
Random question: this is turn-based, so there really is no micro or any situation that requires fast thinking or reactions, right? One can think for as long as one wants?
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EPT
