Is it possible to restart a stage?

[cephalo]

One thing that's really making this painful is that in the civ stage and the space stage it is possible that an early mistake can make winning impossible. I've already started from scratch after failing the space game, now I'm in the civ stage, starting from a religious city this time. I didn't build my economy enough and I joined a very bad alliance, and now I can only defend my cities. I can probably fight for another month if I wanted to, but the scale is tipped and I will never again be able to go on the offensive. I lost the game in the first few minutes without realizing it, and I sure wish I could start over. If you lose the civ stage it just reloads the last save.

Is there anything I can do to save this game? Also, don't join an alliance in the civ stage. Your ally's enemy will completely focus his attacks on you and ignore your ally.

[SimonL]

Originally Posted by cephalo

One thing that's really making this painful is that in the civ stage and the space stage it is possible that an early mistake can make winning impossible. I've already started from scratch after failing the space game, now I'm in the civ stage, starting from a religious city this time. I didn't build my economy enough and I joined a very bad alliance, and now I can only defend my cities. I can probably fight for another month if I wanted to, but the scale is tipped and I will never again be able to go on the offensive. I lost the game in the first few minutes without realizing it, and I sure wish I could start over. If you lose the civ stage it just reloads the last save.

Is there anything I can do to save this game? Also, don't join an alliance in the civ stage. Your ally's enemy will completely focus his attacks on you and ignore your ally.

Apparently, you can't do that, which is a shame. A simple "restart stage from scratch" option would be nice. But what you can do is start a new game on a new planet at the civ age and import your creature on it. If you import the latest version of it (After you put civilian clothes on it or something), it retains the traits that you acquired in the previous ages. It's only sad to say goodbye to the home planet you played on from the beginning.

[GoodGame]

If you die in tribe or civ phase is does restart. Not sure if there is a time penalty in 'years' for doing that. I think if you screw up in space phase you can always just try to be another space civ and enslave your screws ups. I plan to do that as I terraformed a worthless story plot planet and colonized a near valueless T0 planet with the first $300,000 credits I earned. Evidence that sleep deprivation impairs intellect.

[cephalo]

Originally Posted by GoodGame

If you die in tribe or civ phase is does restart. Not sure if there is a time penalty in 'years' for doing that. I think if you screw up in space phase you can always just try to be another space civ and enslave your screws ups. I plan to do that as I terraformed a worthless story plot planet and colonized a near valueless T0 planet with the first $300,000 credits I earned. Evidence that sleep deprivation impairs intellect.

Actually, I found in the civ stage that it simply reverts to your last save, so if you don't save, you're ok. Saving before you realized you lost is the killer.

BTW, I actually was able to come back and win. I'm glad too, because I was thinking about quitting the game for good rather than start over a third time.

When you are starting with a religoius city and you are at war with a military civ ( or two military civs in my case) you have to let your turrets defend, and always use your units to attack undefended cities. Having your units help with defense will get them killed too fast for you to build an attack force, and you won't be able to afford turret defense if you keep buying new units. It's better to keep buying turrets. Fortunately, the AI is too dumb to defend his cities, so you can keep his attackers busy with turrets while you go around his back to take his cities.

Religious units can attack military units, but it takes 3 at least to take out 1 military unit, and one of your units will be lost or have 90% damage. Better to avoid the military units altogether if you can. Also, religious units can take spice mines extemely quickly, and those can really help when constantly replacing turrets.

[SimonL]

Something annoys me here. When you fill up your evolution bar at the bottom, there is no way to tell where you are on the scale anymore until you actually evolve and leave that stage of the game. Which means that if I'm trying my best to be "adaptable" (blue) in creature stage for instance (which means I have to befriend AND kill), and I forgot to check where I was on the scale just before I filled the bar... well I'm screwed.

In a previous game I was attempting to follow a particular path along the evolution line just to see what trait I"d end up with in space (ended up being a knight...). So at the end of the creature stage I wanted to see where I was (trying to be in the blue "adaptable"). And I saw that the button which usually brought the history now made me evolve instantly. Good thing I had saved so I could just reload and do something because I had just skipped the threshold to "aggressive"... Same thing happened to me from CIV stage to SPACE. That was even more annoying because I was once again just off the treshold and I was sent to the "design the spaceship" screen, and could not quit the game from the screen.. I had to build and save a ship and skip the cutscene and bla bla before I could quit. Forget it I just alt-F4'ed out of it.

In any case, I find this whole 'treshold' thing one of the problems with the game. Instead of having some subtle measure of what you have done and a subtle measure of how it will impact your future, you are just suited into three big fat categories that are rather wildly different from each others, and if you hover around the threshold between two, you might be tagged as something you didn't feel you were. Like when you were trying to make friends in tribal stage and you randomly got attacked by the last tribe and that made you more "evil" than you expected because you killed some of those guys. Whatever. I'd rather have a continuum from green to red, instead of three big categories. But I guess that complicates the game mechanics. And god forbid anything almost requiring one full minute of patience and reading in order to understand in this game.