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The Galactic Civilizations Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Document. Jan 11, 1995

By Mark Anderson
Some editing by Brad Wardell (just an itty bitty tiny little
bit). (actually, if there is something that sounds real
authoritative and deals with some of the intricacies of OS/2 and
GalCiv, it's Brad's fau... handiwork.)


Please Feel free to contribute to this document!
My internet address is: wombats@nmrfam.wisc.edu

Send in all your wishlists, cheats, questions, etc.!

=================================================================
Copyright and Distrubition - type Notice

This document can be freely distributed as long as you
give credit where credit is due. Please carry forward
any attributions from work done by those mentioned in
this document.

The following may or may not be mentioned, but if they are,
they are copyrights of the appropriate companies. I may have
missed one or two. Sorry.

Galactic Civilizations, Drengin, Drengin Empire, Yor, Altarians,
and Torian Confederation are trademarks of Stardock Systems, Inc.
SDS is the abbreviation for Stardock Systems, Inc.

AIMs and AIMsBBS are trademarks of Advanced Idea Machines.

OS/2, REXX, MMPM/2 and IBM are trademarks of IBM Corporation.

Windows 3.1 is probably a trademark of Microsoft, Inc.

Civilization, Masters of Orion are trademarks of
MicroProse Software, Inc.

Empire is probably a trademark of ... just guessing...
New World Computing.

=================================================================

This document is broken into the following areas:

[1] The Game
1.1 Description
1.2 Hardware Requirements

[2] Frequently Asked Questions
2.1 Questions, Answers and other tips
2.2 Where is/are the ????
2.3 Strategies from Front
2.3.1 The John Martz Strategy
2.3.2 The Brad Wardell Stategy (Draginol)
2.3.3 List of Various Stategy Hints
2.4 Reference to Shaun Burnett's Walk-thru

[3] Cheats and Other Black Holes

[4] Insights into the AI of GalCiv

[5] Data and Numbers (incomplete)
5.1 Technology Tree
5.2 Projects
5.2.1 The BIG List
5.2.2 Project Comparisons - level 1
5.3 Galactic Achievements
5.3.1 The Achievements and Super Projects
5.3.2 Strategies Associated with the Above
(rather empty right now)
5.4 Technology and Ships

[6] Wishlist

[7] Where can I get GC?

[8] Where do I report problems? Get help? Praise the
glorious designers of this truly astounding game?
Get the updates and bugfixes?


****************************************************************
THE GAME
Chapter 1.1

GalCiv is an interstellar strategy game that puts humanity in the
position of getting a fresh start with chance to re-direct the
path of humanity for good, evil or shades thereof. The premise
of the game has an interstellar colony ship from Earth jumping to
some other galaxy via a freak wormhole. This forms the core of
humanity. The new galaxy is already inhabited by one to five
(player selectable) other space-faring races. The
"personalities" of the races can be determined randomly or they
can be chosen by the player, but the range of variation is less
if this is done. The human player (the actual "alien" in this
setting) directs the research paths of humanity, the planetary
construction and the ship building endeavors of the planets.
More importantly, various "events" occur that require the player
to make distinct choices between good, evil or neutral. These
choices can affect planetary production or budget levels, but
they also affect how the various alien races interact with the
human player. The game is allows the player to win by either the
classic, total conquest mode or a more cooperative mode of
allying with all of the factions of the galaxy.

One of the greatest appeals that the game has over other strategy
games is that the multi-threaded, multi-tasking architecture of
OS2 permits the use of real (whatever that means :) AI. In play
terms, it means that your opponents actually use better strategy
at the harder play levels, rather than relying on various
"cheats" to give them enough advantages to make the game a
challenge. The level of "smartness" is adjustable for each race
in the game and varies from "brain-dead" to "incredible" in 6
steps. The smartness levels less than "genius" are actually
handicapped. Brad Wardell's discussion of this feature is
detailed below.

The game features economic and population growth models that take
into account the level of taxation and the level of happiness of
the people. The level of happiness is related to the level of
social amenities on the planet as well as the degree of freedom
that is availible within the type of government. The game
designers admit to being influenced by "supply side" economics,
so your strategies in the game should take this into account.
The more democratic forms of government (Star Democracy and Star
Federation) have a senate that has elections every decade. Your
level of popularity determines your level of support in the
senate. The senate has the power to reject declarations of war
_or_ changes of governmental form. They actually vote on these
decisions and are not a rubber stamp for or against your
decisions.

Hardware Requirements
Chapter 1.2
SDS recommends at least a .... (i will look this up), about 14 MB
hard disk free (plus the swap space requirement of about 8 MB,
but remember that this is a SYSTEM swap space, not just for
GalCiv), 8 MB of RAM and all the speed you can get. (not that
you need the speed to run GalCiv, it's just that it's more
interesting to drive a Lotus than a Yugo.) This is, more or
less, the full installation with .avi files, sound and help.

*****************************************************************
******** QUESTIONS, ANSWERS and OTHER HOT TIPS **********
*****************************************************************
Chapter 2.1

How do I ????
The on-line help files actually make some of this faq a bit
redundant. Most of the button, menus, windows, etc. appear to
be nicely arranged in a hypertext file. Since this is an OS/2
program, help is just another window you can consult during
the game. Play with it, it's informative. This is not to say
that the help is complete. It is missing some of the "Data
and Numbers" stuff I've outlined below, and has two large
sections wherein it explains that something goes in this spot.
{this was the original on-line docs, there is a new release of
the help docs that i've not seen, so this may have changed}

How do I find the best planets?
Scouts seem to be the best way of locating any planets of
worth. Sometimes, if the geometry of the situation is
right, you might be able to predict where another race's
colony ship is headed and beat them to the spot.

John Martz suggests using 2 scouts to block another race from
colonizing a choice planet before you do. This strategy works
until impulse when you need 3 scouts. There are seldom any
planets left to colonize once you get Warp Drive.

Other than this, send your scouts out on an ever increasing
spiral and send out the colonists. The scout can be sent on
a diagonal sweep through a quadrant to pick up >50% of the
area in one pass or send it on a U-shaped course to pick up
100%. The path of the "U" can be adjusted to have the
scout adjacent to the next target quadrant when it finishes.
Two scouts could be used to map a quadrant in one pass.

OK, I've found a planet, how do I colonize it?
First, build a colony ship, then plot a course for near the
system. Upon getting to the system, move the colony ship onto
the system/star marker. The planet window pops up and then
you can pick which planet to colonize. It used to be that if
you had chosen autopilot and marked the actual system as the
destination, it would automatically colonize the "best"
remaining planet. This may be what you wanted, but I would
use a colony ship to rename my planets so I had to plot the
final move manually.

A minor warning here: don't use autopilot to land directly on
a star system, especially if you're trying to boost the
population of that system. Land _near_ the system. Sure, you
might lose some of your movement, but that is better than
colonizing what you don't want to or putting a ship in orbit
around the wrong planet.

What about the uninhabited planets in a system? I want to use
them!
Actually, you do, but not directly. The "unused resources" in
the system are used as part of the calculations that determine
the productivity of the inhabited planets in the system. This
is most easily seen in how much a resource allocation icon is
good for when flipped between various projects.

How does the economic system function?
There are four factors that affect the economy directly.
1) the tax-n-spend icon [$]: This icon gives you access to two
sliders that control the taxation rate and the spending rate.
Each represents the percentage of the availible that you are
tapping into, be it taxable income or spending capacity. Set
the % at 100 for taxes and you're taking all of the peoples'
money. They will not like this. Set the % at 100 for
spending, and you are spending at your maximum ability to
spend. If you take in more money than you spend, it builds up
in a treasury. Aside from overt taxation, your government
sponsors inter-galactic traders that give you a cut. This
helps fund your ambitious goals of ....inter-species alliance
or galactic conquest. It should be noted that Dean Iverson
first proposed a model similar to this one to Brad and
company. Continuing effors on the part of Steve Lamb, one of
the beta testers, helped convince SDS to implement this model
in the game. This is a compliment to Dean and Steve since the
previous one was a bit...less flexible.

2) the allocation icon [three horizontal sliders]: This icon
gives you access to three slider that control the % of your
spending that is going into military projects (star ships,
including colony ships and freighters), social projects
(entertainment centers, antimatter plants) and research
(technology advancement).

3) the planets [planets]: Each planet can handle building one
project or one ship at a time. If no planets are actually
building something, then you are not actually spending any
money and any reserve goes into your treasury.

4) the individual planets on the view window have local
resource allocation buttons. The four types of buttons are
social projects (the cornucopia), military projects (the
open-end wrench),research (the OS/2 terminal), and morale (the
microphone). By default, the morale icon is chosen whenever
the another icon becomes available (this may change in a
future release). These buttons are the best control one could
have over the spending of your galactic funds. An important
note: the microphone is "free", but the others require extra
funds to support. Also, the planet's morale is reduced most
by choosing the military or social allocations, and less