Would like to hear opening strategies for your race

Set up an Immense galaxy, with abundant stars, planets, resources, anomalies, etc. Starting races start Very Far apart. (Allows everyone to build up their base of operations before being forced to deal with nosy neighbors.) Usually 7 or more major races, with 8 minor races.

I always play a custom race. That way I can pile on the Research advantages: Creative, Research +20%, +10% on planet quality, + Morale, Technologist Party in control. Starting tech focuses on ship propulsion systems, research, and production strength. Set race to Adaptive as trait and Hive for Super Ability. The combination gives you more planets to colonize (Toxic and Aquatic) and makes your people more productive.

Start: Set tax to a level where Morale drops to 52%. (The people are slightly more happy than unhappy.) Set production to 100%. Split production to 20% military/20% social/60% research. Set Espionage to where a Spy is produced in 10 turns. (An expensive pain, but necessary in the long run. You _will_ need a stockpile of Spies eventually.)

This arrangement _should_ generate a small Treasury increase to begin. By Turn 20, though...

Set the Miner on Automatic. Aim the Colony ship with an eye towards going as far away as possible. This is because its hardware lets it go further away from your controlled planets than anything that you are likely to be able to build for quite a long while. It seems a waste to expend it on a nearby planet. The Flagship should be unmasking planets and making a serious effort to hit any non-wormhole anomaly that gets spotted. (The occasional bc windfall will help the Treasury immensely. You want to stay solvent as long as possible without reducing production.)

Do NOT settle any planet below a quality of 10. Having that +10% planet quality racial trait translates into a +1 world quality, minimum. (Your homeworld will be an 11 while everyone else starts with a 10.) A 9 quality planet becomes 9.9, and rounds _down_, so you get no benefit. And the higher the planet quality, the more buildable squares you'll have available. Note that even being adaptive, settling a Toxic or Aquatic planet will give you more squares, but your planet productivity **sucks**.

For Research, start hammering on propulsion systems, with sojourns into Trade, Diplomacy, Research, and Productivity. The propulsion gets your ships to other and more planets faster. And you _will_ want to colonize other planets ASAP because each one automatically feeds your Research 7-12 points, _immediately_. When you can research something mundane like Sensors or Stellar Cartography within 2 or 3 weeks, do so.

Build Colony ships ASAP. When you finish researching faster engines, design a faster Colony ship, and skip the sensors, weapons, etc. You want the fastest Colony module available, so use a Cargo hull, add the Colony module, and pile on the engines. If you have 5 points left over after engines, add Life Support. Ships will spend more time in construction, but they'll make up the difference during travel. Build Survey ships later when you have excess production available, or a LOT of nearby anomalies to gather.

Run this pattern until your Treasury is about to go into the read. By then you should have an impressive library of techs already researched, and your Trade/Diplomacy value should be respectable. Go to the Diplomacy screen. Contact one of the other races. Check your list of techs that you have that they don't. Excluding Trade, Diplomacy, Production, Propulsion, Research, and Weapons, see what you have that is at least two levels beyond what the alien has. Choose one or two such techs. Then offer to sell those for cash. (Do NOT succumb to the temptation of trading several techs for one of his! It will cost you less to research it yourself.) You _should_ have a negotiating advantage, so each such tech offered should yield several hundred to a couple thousand bc's. Transaction completed move on to ALL of the other available races, offering only the same techs you just sold. (Better you should get the profit than the opponent that would turn around and sell it on instead.) If another race is short on cash, make up the difference in Influence.

Aside from all of this, resist the urge to waste time and money building warships. Wait until you actually need them. If you do, switch to 100% military production until you have enough ships to meet the crisis. Just remember that anything you build will very quickly become obsolete.

I find that this strategy works quite well for me.

How do you set the custom races "Trait"? I've looked through entire custom menus and cannot any button along those lines.

Actually, instead of "trait", it's "abilities". (Third page of customization, second tab.) The special ability (right side of panel) of "Hive"-something makes you more productive while "Adaptive" allows you to settle Toxic and Aquatic worlds. So, it's one or the other, but not both (as I erroneously suggested). My first run through, I went with Hive, but I decided having Adaptive gave me a significantly greater number of worlds to colonize. And since colonizing rapidly increases your research rate, I believe it's more valuable.

[Note: In my current game, it's about Turn 200-250. My ships fly circles around anything the others can throw at me. I'm on more planets than anybody else. My Trade/Diplomacy skill is almost godlike in comparison to nearly all of the others. My weaponry packs a bigger punch than anybody else. And I'm lightyears ahead of anyone else in the number of techs learned....I'm inclined to believe this is practically a foolproof strategy.]

When you say that races start very far apart - are you able to set that as a variable somehow? or did you make a custom map? or do you re-start until those are the race positions?

When you set the size of the galaxy and the number of major races, you can specify if you want them to start close to one another, or far apart. The idea is: close, conflict starts sooner, when the race is still shaping up; far apart, they get to establish themselves before serious hostilities break out in the mid-game. The wild card are the minor races: the greater the number of minor races, the more likely you'll bump into one or too in the early game, effectively cramping your resources. OTOH, more minor races translates into more customers -- _after_ you've discovered them.

Where do you specify this? I cannot find the setting.... I see the size of the galaxy (obviously) and on the last screen where you can set # of opponents but not the spacing of races in the universe - is this on a custom map or on a computer generated game? Still confused - sorry.

Hmm. I'm at work now, so I can't check. But now you've got me wondering if I'm crossing memories with "Lost Empire: Immortals". [A pathetic game; don't bother with it.] That game also has Immense galaxies; like 5,000 _stars_.

I'll get back to you this evening.

Probably just keeping the stars in clusters instead of scattered and the # of races down. That'll give more room between planets.

There is no such setting. The game will automatically space them out for you. On the larger maps, they will naturally be farther apart.

Home. The "Close"/"Far Apart" options were in "Lost Empire: Immortals" (which I had been playing heavily just before ToA became available). Though LEI was a somewhat pitiful game, it had a couple things I wouldn't mind seeing in GC2: Up to 20 minor races. Close/Far start placement. It had up to 5,000 solar _systems_, whereas ToA may have as many as 5,000 _planets_, of varying quality. (Anybody ever count how many 0-quality planets are in the 5,000 count mix? Seems like about 50% to me. And what's the point of having them? You really can't **do** anything with them -- in which case they have about as much game impact as the nebulae background.)

Sorry for having confused you.