Let me run you through a situation that I played through recently: I'm going for a victory by conquest against a race of psychopathic machines called the Yor Collective, because it eventually became apparent that seeking an alliance with them was akin to presenting a box of chocolates to the funnel cloud of a tornado. So I gave up trying to bribe them while they were still content with allowing me to occupy space, and instead used the funds to construct a line of space stations along the connecting borders of our territories, as a forward post for an attack fleet and a line of defense in case they reacted poorly to being invaded.superstringz said:
So I constructed a fleet, and relations between our two civilizations began to deteriorate, because I wasn't giving them money anymore for them to blow other people up with. When I launch the attack, I have three good-sized groups of ships that I'm using as the main focus of my attack. For reference, earlier in the game, two similarly sized fleets of my ships were able to reduce one of the largest empires in the galaxy to this game's equivilant of Luxembourg.
However, when I started landing troops on the planets near our borders, I discovered that my soldiers began dying more often than is expected of a healthy population. This was because the amount of defending soldiers on the planets were much higher than they should have been. However, some scouting ships I had sent forward discovered that the troop levels on the planets farther inwards were normal- and there was a transport ship bringing more troops to the outer planets. By the time I actually got some of my troops to the inner planets, the Yor had realized what's what and had sent their main fleet to intercept me.
In short, they realized what I was up to and bolstered their defenses for the invasion, even before I had sent any warships near them. The Yor realized that this weeks money shipment wasn't lost in the mail after all, saw me putting up a picket fence, then put two and two together and decided to set up their own Maginot line. But they also realized that setting fleets to guard their borders would be spreading themselves thin, so they decided to take the initial losses and repel me from whatever direction I decided to attack.
In shorter, Galactic Civilizations is not merely smart. It is probably self-aware, and it is probably mad that I'm typing this instead of playing some more. So send help if I ever stop posting.
