I very much enjoy reading AAR's and gameplay examples for turn based strategy games.  I haven't seen many (if any) for GC3, so I thought I'd throw one together.  My plan isn't to create dialog or real story, just to go through a game, posting screenshots and talking about my thought process.  A few things…one, I'm terrible at 4x games.  I mean I really suck, I will make the worst decisions possible, will probably lose at the most basic and dumb AI level, and you will think (accurately) that I have no idea what I’m doing...but I have fun.  I don’t necessarily play to win; I like to have fun and role play the leader of a civilization.  I don’t like to find exploits that guarantee victory and then mirror them on every game.  I’d rather lose after playing a fun, varied game, then win through some boring exploit.  Two, I’m writing this specifically for people who know very little about GalCiv, maybe have never played it before.  It will probably seem very simple and boring to old GC veterans.  Also, I make no claims to be a talented writer.

With that said, I bring you…

THE RISE OF THE KRYNN

My goal for this game is to play as the Krynn, going for an influence victory, smothering the galaxy with my religion, without building any military whatsoever.  Total peacenik, religious wacko style…let’s see how much of the galaxy I can convert before a single enemy fighter destroys my entire civilization. 

My galaxy set up:

I like to set up my galaxies to be huge and pretty sparse.  I want finding colonizable planets to be hard, to keep down the huge rush to grab colonies early.  Although I find that in GC3 with the limited number of races so far, a huge galaxy is kind of big, so I went medium.  It takes forever to find another race, which sometimes I enjoy, but for the goals of this game, wouldn’t work out well.

My race:

The Krynn.  Some of the race traits I’m most interested in are…Fertile, which provides a +10% bonus to growth, Observant, which increases our sensor range…and Adventuresome, which gives a +25% range bonus.

My starting galactic position:

Looks like I’m starting in the galactic southwest.  There are a number of stars to check out south of us, I’ll probably send scouts there first to search for colonizable worlds. 

My homeworld:

Kryseth- Home sweet home.  My little class 8 with a white picket fence.  Let’s take a look at the tiles and bonuses.

Not bad.  Not great…but not bad.  We have two tile bonuses.

Caverns, providing a bonus to our military, and an adjacency bonus to nearby financial structures.

…and Planetfall, increasing our influence structures placed here and again providing a wealth bonus to nearby financial structures.

I think I’ll set my production slider to increase manufacturing and science at the expense of cash for now.  And I’ll put in my build queue a couple of factories and a research center for now.  Later, I’ll probably look into increasing my growth and population cap with hospitals and farms.

I send my scout and survey ship south to the two closest stars, revealing…nuthin’.  Well, no one said it was going to be easy.

At my shipyard I buy a scout outright to get exploration going.

And queue up a colony ship.

Meanwhile my brainiacs in my labs get busy researching planetary improvement, so I can build colonial hospitals and xeno farms to improve growth and pop cap.

Success!

Next on to Xeno Industrialization, to improve my factories and research labs.

Just when I’m beginning to think I’m alone in the galaxy…

Err…I think if I’m going to convince people my religion is the one true way, I’d better start learning some other languages.  I get to work researching 'Universal Translators'.

After a couple of months of exploring I realize there are no colonizable worlds to my south, but a couple of possibilities to the north.  First up is stach 1, to my slight northwest.  A class 10, very nice but no planet-wide bonuses.

Slightly northwest however, is a two planet system, Kairos.  These worlds are only a class 8 and a class 9, but have interesting bonuses.  Kairos II is a ‘ghost world’, providing a +50% bonus to research.  Kairos IV is considered a ‘bread basket’ planet, providing both a +50% food bonus and a +25% growth bonus.  I

I decide on Kairos IV as the first Krynn colony outside of our home system.

And lest things get boring, my new planet Kairos IV contains a super shark.  Not even a normal giant shark, a super shark.  Oh well, I decide on the pragmatic approach and simply kill it, hurting my food production by -10%.

Keiros IV, in addition to being a high growth and food rich planet also has two tile bonuses.

First a wasteland, providing a military bonus (not really useful), and a manufacturing adjacency bonus.

And another planetfall, for an influence and wealth increases.  I queue up a couple of factories to start.

So after about 5 months, the known galaxy looks like this:

My short term colonizing plans are Stach I next, Altarian space is looming close in the northwest, and I want to grab Stach I before they do.  Then I’ll worry about Keiros II.  If someone gets it before me, so be it.  My soon to be enormous culture will flip it before long.  Also I see a bit of another, unknown race's border sneaking into the north.

My research plans are to head down the Krynn and diplomacy paths, and start dropping mega churches in every ones backyard…can a brother get an AMEN!

(to be continued)