laudablepuss wrote:

Playing it again. It's so customizable in the beginning that if you set it all to "random", your strategy can change wildly from one game to the next. My problem is always: how to not go broke early on before I get trade routes established. I gotta expand and colonize plants asap, and research new techs, and build improvements. Any turn that I have my industrial capacity set lower than 100% sets me back. God forbid I get to -500 billion credits and have to stop EVERYTHING for awhile.

So, sometimes I sell technologies I've researched. That works pretty well, except you're sorta screwing yourself in the longterm by helping your future enemies. So I prefer to sell stuff to the "minor races" if possible. Sometimes I turn techtrading off (I feel it's sorta cheating to just get a list of what the other guy has, especially when space combat absolutely hinges on reliable knowlege of this sort) at which point it's a big priority to get anomalies. These are random pieces of space junk, some of which provide tiny bonuses to your civ and some of which provide big bonuses to your treasury. Only one ship can go find em, and you can just set it to find em automatically and forget about it. But it's pretty hit-and-miss.

Anyone have any insight into how not to go broke early on? Or is this what other people do also?

Other thoughts: A civ on the other end of the galaxy declared war on me. There's absolutely no way they can reach me anytime in the next 50 turns. For all the hype about the AI being so smart, this sure seems pretty stupid.

The ethical choices you have to make are univerally stupid. And there's only a small number, so you keep seeing the same ones multiple times in the same game. The goodguy answer always gives you a penalty of some kind and the badguy answer always benefits you in some way. They balance this by having the Space UN bring up resolutions to sanction the "evil" races. But these get voted on, and the baddies get to vote too. Some people might think this is just an interesting design decision, but I'm sick of the platonic ethical questions. "Imagine a virtuous man who gets assraped over and over again." That's your civ if you choose good.