Lockerage, thanks for wanting to join the High Command! I have sent you an invite, go ahead and sign up. This empire has only been around for only a month, and has already made it up to 7th place! It will be good to have you, thanks.

Thanks for your words Vulcan2. It has taken a little while to get things rolling, but once it started our empire has really taken off.

AA, good job organizing us all. Let's keep the push!

I wanted to give a thanks to everyone who has joined this weekend, we have agian pushed our score up a lot! I also want to give a congrats to Zydor for breaking 200,000, and pushing into the top 25! The Qourth Empire is in our sight, lets see if we can take that 5th place spot! Good luck playing! Also, don't forget to vist our forum.

Up to 5th place, and so close to 4th! We managed to jump above the Qourth Empire last night, and push real close to taking out the Galactic Empire. I want to wish everyone good luck, and lets keep our push going!

In response to the economy question...

I waited till 1.4 so it is 1.4 advice. I play Suicidal, so I figure if it works for me, it ought to work on lower settings. So my best planet grab was 5 in the start game. The strategy may not work on denser settings.

Q. How do I balance my early economy?[/B]
A. You don't. In fact, start with a morale of at least 75% for population growth.

Q. How do I survive negative cash flow?
A. You get a 5K cash cushion to start with. You burn 2-4K buying colony ships. If your Surveyor finds 1K you can buy a factory. If it finds 2K, buy 2 factories. . The key point is that you can operate at a defecit all the way down to 0.

Q. What happens when you hit 0?
A. Freighters.

[B]Q. So how does this work
A. The races value military over social techs. This means you need to specialize in a tech tree and trade it for all the social techs you can. The most imprtant social tech is trade, once you get it, allocate a small percentage of military to building freighters. Once you get advanced Trade, stop researching Speed and research Master Trade. Once you get Master trade, stop researching altogether. This should happen before you hit 0%. Put your best manufacturing planet to work on the Galactic Privateer. Allocate 50% to building Freeighters and 50% to Social. Send one freighter to each race as the freighters come off the line, this keeps them freindly. Once your economy is back to positive cash flow, commit 100% to galactic privateer. Once GP completed, resume researching with focus on invasion. Build out all freighters, then convert to transports. This strategy will get you financially solvent before the advent of enemy planetary invasion and thus before they will declare war on you.

Thanks Douglas Perr.

Good afternoon! I just wanted to remind everyone to register and join some of our discussions on the forum. Thanks and good luck!

lordpinko: The first thing you need to do is create a character, that can be done under your account. After that you just start up the game and select Metaverse, then select the character you want to play under. Then the rest is like starting a normal game. When you're done with your game you will be prompted to submit your game to the metaverse, thats it. To join our empire just vist it on the metaverse, here on the site, and select join empire. Hope this helps!

yep, me too. but in GALCIV you must pay for everything. Bonuses increase the amount you can pay for, not how much you get. As a result, no matter what you want to do, you can't do it without economy.

Fortunately, those freighters run more than enough of a surplus to offset the federalist bonus, so it should still work with research bonuses. At least thats what I was going to test after playing each of the races.

I would also point out that In spite of being a technologist at heart, I acquire over 70% of my techs through trade. At Suicidal I can only begin to match the AI research rate when I have over half the universe. Earning technology the old fashioned way is not feasible for me.

Thanks for the invitation. Haven't played for a while, but I'm gonna try out 1.4x now.

ok i'm on the empire statistics page i click on join empire
a dark sort of box comes up then nothing happerns
were am i going wrong?

Greetings, salutations, and thanks for all the fish... I mean, for the invitation!

It gets lonely running 'your own crappy little empire' as the diplomatic screen says, so I elected to join my current (and best) character TickTock Man to the fledgling Hegemony.

It looks like we're within shouting distance of third place, but still quite an underdog for the top two spots. But hey, where I live we have the Redskins, the Capitals, the Wizards, and the O's, so I feel right at home. And sometimes the underdog ends up having the biggest bite after all!

So how do you get to be a Senator around here, anyway?