OK I'm still a newbie to this game, and the genre in general really. Last 4X game I played was Civ I and I mainly picked this up because it reminded me of TradeWars 2002.
I've only played one game so far also, so please bear with me if I am missing something obvious.
I played a scenario (not campaign) game with all the defaults. Chose Terran against Drengin, Yor, Alteria?, Arcea and Toria.
The game went really well overall, I ended up completely dominating the economy early on and eventually won by diplomatic victory after wiping the next most powerful good race (Alteria), forging alliances with Arcea and Toria and then wiping out the Drengin and Yor (and they claim I don't have the warrior instinct, pshaw).
Really though, I wanted to win more peacefully. I wanted to win on influence but I guess I got impatient since I coveted some of the other race's planets and the influence strategy didn't seem to be working.
Soo.. with all that useless info out of the way, what's the best method to cultural victory? Does morale affect IP in any way? Does my approval rating affect IP? I had started building influence bases (by Yor, mistake) but they didn't have much effect that I could tell. I also built the restuarant of eternity or something like that and an embassy on a bonus tile, but again, I didn't see a big effect on influence. That world bordered the Yor btw, was that why it had little effect, because they are resistant to influence?
I think my next game I'll go for a much larger galaxy so things stretch out a bit. I got real impatient once I ran out of room to make planetary improvements.
