Hi All,
First post! (Althogh I have loitered silently around these forums for some time).
I've been contributing my points to this empire, mainly because it includes names I recognise from GalCiv I, and also because most of my victories are diplomatic, even the ones which say 'conquest', which usually means I switched off the other three victory conditions.
I thought I'd post to say that I'm impressed by those of you who are getting victories on suicidal/gigantic, and to ask a question - I can cope with crippling, but step up to the 200% bonus the AI gets on masochistic-suicidal usually sees me outclassed pretty quickly. My question - if the AI on masochistic-suicidal settings are all 'incredible' (and therefore getting the healthy bonus, at least if i'm reading the manual correctly), what's the diff. between the three most difficult levels?
I'd also be interested to know if those playing (and winning) on suicidal (Magnumanaiac and E-Stab at least..) are getting into aggo with the AIs relatively early? - My problem, I think, is that I'm spending too much of the early game powering up my infrastructure and using diplomacy to avoid conflict - this works out well eventually, but I realise that the defensive ships I do build is missing out on combat experience (hitpoints) meaning that I am always under-military until late in the game when I suddenly pile out a fleet way in advance of what anyone else owns. This is all fine on challenging, but on Suicidal the AI is noticably more aggro, pumps out huge fleets quickly, and I don't have sufficient diplo-tech advantage to be able to prevent them munching me up well before I am ready to overpower them.
Basically, is it possible to win on Suicidal through pure diplomacy, or am I failing because I am not mixing it up with at least one AI from the start?
PS. I think when the metaverse refreshes we should have diplomats in 2, 3rd and 4th place (with me 4th). This won't last, though, as I think I need to go up to Suicidal to have a chance of staying near the top, I think I milked as much score out of my last game as is possible without facing the 200% penalty, and that included the population boost from one of those 'all planets within 2 sectors are PQ 13' events which happened in a torian area of space. I rushed out an armarda of hyperwarp-engined colonisers, and grabbed more than 40 (!!) PQ 13 planets (abundant everything). At the end of the game, I had around 6,500 billion citizens.
GalCiv2 Forums
Bottom line is that I had a complete system lockup on Monday whilst playing and had to hit the reset button. Now I seem to be getting random CTDs, and strangest of all... if I go straight to "Load game" from the main menu after launching, the loading screen appears for what seems to be an appropriate length of time then CTDs with no debug or event log entries. Happens with every saved game I've got from either before or after the lockup. If I launch the app, go through the new game setup process so it brings up the main interface, I can then load every saved game happily over and over again. 
Stardock Forums