What are your favorite playstyles and do you have any suggestions for a challenging galaxy setting? In game like these I usually go for the Research rush but I decided to try something different.
I played a normal difficulty game with 15 normal enemies in an excessive galaxy. Most of the settings were untouched - so occasional, apart from habitable planets which I set to uncommon.I wanted to focus on trade and tourism as much as possible but found out that is pretty much just a waste. Trade routes in particular are absolutely useless. In my game I get about 12000 income of which 600 are from 13 trade routes. Trade routes start as low as 10/turn . Now the highest is at 64 which is not even from my designated trade capital because the age of the route playes a big role and the other is like 200 turns ahead. Another blatant design error is that they start from the destination of the shipyard you built it in. It is very annoying to set them up. Is a simple "Set trade route" too much to ask? Tourism is not that stunning either. I get about 1100. But you can see that as a small bonus compared to actual work you have to put out for trade.
What I found out that anomalies are way too overpowered. I basically had no research for the first 100 turns as I was starting with different stuff and just slowly setting them up, yet I was always on spot 1 in tech power. Every few turns I would get a 25% to the next lvl. Apparently the other races didn't use much survey modules. Now combine that with the occasional tech trade and I was miles ahead of everyone. I usually didn't even get stuff I wanted/needed because in my path I was ahead anyways. My suggestion here is to uncheck the tech trade and take a rarer anomaly setting.
So what are the playstyles you prefer or find interesting? Do you have feedback combined with used settings to make it somewhat challenging? And does someone know what the Game Difficulty changes apart from the AI strength? Because I can set them myself from beginner to gifted i.e or does anything else change?