Dev Journal #106: Organic Difficulty in GalCiv IV
Galactic Civilizations IV’s depth is its greatest strength, but it can often be the biggest barrier to entry for new players too. I don’t think any long-time fan of the series will disagree that to get the best out of GalCiv, you kind of need to have played GalCiv a fair bit first.
GalCiv IV is no exception here, and after talking to people who struggle with the game, and reading comments online I see a lot of misunderstanding about how the game is put together in terms of it’s design decisions. I think with a game as deep and complex as GalCiv, that also offers such a variety of gameplay lying anywhere between “intense challenge” and laid-back, chilled out “city-builder” style play, showcasing that depth off to newer players in an effective way is a difficult task indeed.
For a start, everybody plays these games for a different reason and expects a different experience from them. Because of this, if the gameplay presented is rather wide and expansive, it’s not that easy to put a best foot forwards to each player when the kind of shoe they prefer differs so radically between them. The established 4X community with all their decades of legacy skill and taste is particularly difficult in this respect, and newer gamers with more varied preferences are entering the genre all the time.
While discussing Stardock's games in various places over the years, in videos I’ve made for Stardock Games’ Youtube channel, on social media or directly here in developer blogs, I’ve often touched on the topic of organic difficulty as it intersects with various other game elements and mechanics in our games.
Today I want to address this topic directly, as I think understanding this one point really unlocks the full potential of the GalCiv games and helps newer players fathom its depth before having to play it for hours to begin that journey of discovery for themselves.
Firstly, I’ll give an example of a game you’ll all likely know outside of strategy gaming that clearly illustrates this principle and cement this idea in your mind properly, before I go on to describe how this particular design paradigm has been applied in Galactic Civilizations IV.
FromSoftware’s Dark Souls, a dark fantasy action role-playing game with a reputation for brutal difficulty, has no classic difficulty settings. Instead it provides the player with a CRPG-style progression system to build their character to play however they want to play, along with an extensive selection of weapons and equipment to further diversify playstyle.
Gameplay and challenge both change dramatically depending on player choice of build, combat style, weapon and armour sets, and general playstyle in any given situation. Coupled with this extensive in-game character customisation, Dark Souls has a semi-open world layout that allows players to pick a route through the game depending on their skill level and desired challenge.
The important take-away here is that GalCiv is designed in much the same way, where the player picks the challenge they want from a near-infinite combination of in-game mechanics, builds, path routing and environmental choices, creating almost limitless gameplay regardless of player skill level.
Galactic Civilizations IV also adds classic difficulty settings into the mix, to further adjust for skill level depending on game options and the scenario chosen by the player.
Where GalCiv differs from Dark Souls is that in addition to in-game routing, where the player has a wealth of choices as to how to approach each situation as it arises, there is also a very extensive set of choices to make in game setup, that will dramatically change how the game plays before you start playing it.
Players coming from other 4X games, which don’t have such wild variations in gameplay depending on setup options and instead push players towards one fixed, developer intended playstyle, might be a little blindsided by this design principle.
Game setup is very important in GalCiv IV.
The choice of Civilization, whether one of our pre-made Core Civilizations, a completely new AlienGPT generated custom Civ, or even a player customised Core Civ, is the first choice you’ll make. Each Civ’s various Traits and Abilities, along with Citizen type, preference of Ideology and so on, make them all play very differently.
The Yor have to produce their own Citizens from Durantium but have a high Manufacturing Output and tend not to have too many friends: picking them means you’re more likely to be playing a war-focused game where expanding out to find more Durantium will be of prime concern.
Meanwhile, playing the more peaceful Altarians will be quite different: the Altarians are better liked, and while they can aggressively push their Cultural borders out and take enemy planets that way, they can also play a more diplomatic game, making friends to trade with and allies to protect them from bullies (like the Yor).
Note that these playstyles are not fixed: you can play the Yor peacefully and diplomatically, and the Altarians very aggressively, but these are not necessarily their most efficient way to play. Immediately we see here an opportunity for the player to pick a playstyle to select their own challenge: “pacifist Korath Clan” is not the easiest way to play.
Map generation further tailors the starting game state, and potential challenge for the player. Larger maps with more colonisable planets generally take longer to play and require more management from the player, while smaller ones with less habitable worlds play faster but bring their own challenge as resources tend towards scarcity, and resource scarcity is the prime motivator for the declaration of war in GalCiv.
Sectors and the relative clustering of stars determines Civ starting locations, and if you’re playing a less war-focused Civ such as the Mimot, and you’re sharing a small cluster of stars with the Korath Clan, Cosmic Contaminent or the Yor, you’re likely going to have to switch to a war-focused style of play very quickly.
The Mimot will have a hard time playing in a small sector with few worlds to colonise, as their high reproduction rate will force them into a very focused playstyle as they try to contain their population growth, but if you set the game to be very large and with few Civs populating it, oh boy! can the Mimot explode in power. That game may be light on pressure and feel fairly easy, but be incredibly fun in terms of optimising your management of Core Worlds, Colonies and economic development, if that’s your thing.
In the above example, you’ll see that the challenge may be set so that pressure comes not from AI Civs, but from working out an efficient and controlled Mimot territorial and Citizien Growth explosion. There’s little initial pressure from opposing Civs and so you’re free to play in a chilled fashion, taking the game at your own pace.
From questioning the 4X community over the years, I’ve found there are loads of players who enjoy this kind of colonisation-based, economic/industrial gameplay while not enjoying tonnes of warfare and fleet combat, and this is one example of how you can dramatically change GalCiv to suit your own tastes that way. Much like overcoming a difficult challenge in Dark Souls by grinding for levels first, and then enjoying a much more chilled experience in traversing a level or boss, GalCiv facilitates this kind of choice in the same way. In GalCiv with a large map and few opponents, you can “grind” for resources and build an exciting playstyle around that.
On the contrary, if you want a real challenge, set yourself as the Terran Alliance on a small map and then populate it with a larger number of aggressive, ugly Civs like the Drengin, Yor, Korath Clan and so on. You’ll have barely any room to expand and diplomacy is only going to be a temporary fix to the threat of impending invasion. Every decision made over every turn will be critical because in this kind of tight, constrained and high pressure environment, one wrong move could spell disaster for your game.
This is a very high pressure counter-example to the rather low pressure, more sandbox or Grand Strategy style of gameplay you’d get playing the Mimot on a large map with loads of room and habitable worlds to expand into.
Classic difficulty is easy to understand, and in terms of how it affects a game of GalCiv, it simply provides various modifiers to game elements, such as the rate of resource acquisition, the movement speed of Ships and Fleets, and so forth. This is the final way to tweak the game’s difficulty up or down, once you’ve tailored the other game settings ready to start playing, but before you make those in-game decisions as each individual challenge arises. If you want to play that Mimot Growth curve optimisation campaign, but want the AI to be a real threat too, ramp the difficulty up really high. If you want to try that Terran Alliance knife-fight survival game, but the difficulty was a bit too fierce, drop it down here and see if that makes the game more fun.
Finally, we have the Dark Souls-style organic difficulty that comes from in-game player choices: this is well covered in GalCiv, and the cause of much confusion from players coming from less sandbox-like 4X series. “Routing” through a game of GalCiv is much like Dark Souls, and once you know the mechanics better, you’ll come to understand whether attacking that neighbouring Civilization on turn 50 is a good idea or not, and whether or not it’ll turn the rest of the game into an easy win, or a difficult slog.
This is a huge topic, worthy of a dev-journal alone, but I have to cover it briefly so I’ll stick to just a handful of examples.
GalCiv presents the player with several ways to approach economic development on planets. Manufacturing is required to build anything, but building Manufacturing Districts causes Pollution, which in turn slows Citizen Growth. Citizens also contribute towards Manufacturing (and the generation of other resources), and the player has a choice to focus mostly on Citizen Growth and use them for a cottage industry style planetary Manufacturing, or to go heavy into on-world Manufacturing District industry, find a way to deal with the Pollution or just accept you’re going to be bringing people from off-world instead.
Those off-world Citizen Growth planets need less Pollution of course, so you can send Supply Ships built at your heavily polluted manufacturing worlds over to build up infrastructure there, exchanging them for the Citizens that cannot be easily raised on those factory planets.
You see here that GalCiv’s mechanics are designed to give you a choice: Citizen industry, or Manufacturing District industry? Neither are always the obvious optimal choice, and some Civilizations prefer one over the other, but no Civ is hard-locked out of either option. And that choice is yours, whether for optimisation purposes, because you think having a cottage industry of powerful Civ Ability enhanced Citizens is fun, or because it’ll make the game more or less challenging in some way.
There’s also the option of managing more Core Worlds or less, perhaps instead supplying fewer player-managed planets with more resources from feeder Colonies you don’t want to manage yourself. Not only does this provide an interesting optimisation puzzle for those who enjoy that, but it allows players who don’t like manually handling lots of worlds themselves to manage less, while still remaining competitive in the game. This is an option that most other 4X games that singularly reward optimal play generally do not offer.
Again, taking one option or another may or may not be the best course of action, and strong players may deliberately pick a sub-optimal choice. Playing tall (managing just one or two player controlled Core Worlds instead of many) is rarely optimal, and is a very fun challenge game for strong players, without having to raise the difficulty settings too high. And sometimes, you may be forced to play tall, which is what happened to me when I tried that “Terran Alliance squished into a small map with lots of evil Civs” scenario, where I had just two Core Worlds and had to find a way to victory with almost nothing to work with, and turned out to be one of the best games of GalCiv I ever played.
In terms of dealing with neighbours, you can decide to build a military and go to war with them, knowing it damages your relations with certain other Civilizations in play. Or play Altarian-style, by broadcasting your species' equivalent to obnoxiously loud techno music, brain-rot TV or cult of personality propaganda out to the people on-world, causing them to rebel from their original owners. This will have diplomatic consequences too, and you best be prepared to go to war to defend your gains. Or, you could try to keep everybody friends by keeping trade relations strong, as many Civs will be less likely to start wars with you if it means losing valuable trade route income.
Finally, games of GalCiv can be won in various ways: the Prestige system is there to end the game roughly when the game should be ending, once one player has a large and overwhelming monopoly on some system or another, or is at that point where they’re going to snowball out of control and run away with the game. This can be deactivated or ignored if you want to pursue a specific goal, but it does serve to help bring the game to a close and stop that situation where you feel forced to mop up just to see a victory screen.
Alternatively, you can choose to conquer the entire map, or to try to force the rest of the Civs in play to ally with you for a diplomatic victory instead, something that is not as easy as it sounds unless you picked a game full of very passive, friendly opponents.
It is a sad fact that most sandbox-like strategy games struggle because they lack any real direction towards the endgame. If the player is not very disciplined in making their own goals (as you have to be with Paradox style grand strategy games), they eventually lose their focus and drop the game completely. In Galactic Civilizations IV, we’ve given you all the tools you need to set up very specific, focused situations that provide immense challenge if you so want, or dial that difficulty back so you can play a more chilled out, sandbox style game instead.
As you can see, the game mechanics of GalCiv are carefully designed to allow players to set up their own perfect gameplay experience, the right challenge to go with those settings, and detailed mechanics to engage with that game in meaningful ways. By utilising a mix of pre-game setup options, tweaking of rules and Civ Traits and Abilities, and then the choices you make once the game is underway, you can create limitless game experiences.
And no, GalCiv is not “the Dark Souls of 4X”…
GalCiv IV is no exception here, and after talking to people who struggle with the game, and reading comments online I see a lot of misunderstanding about how the game is put together in terms of it’s design decisions. I think with a game as deep and complex as GalCiv, that also offers such a variety of gameplay lying anywhere between “intense challenge” and laid-back, chilled out “city-builder” style play, showcasing that depth off to newer players in an effective way is a difficult task indeed.
For a start, everybody plays these games for a different reason and expects a different experience from them. Because of this, if the gameplay presented is rather wide and expansive, it’s not that easy to put a best foot forwards to each player when the kind of shoe they prefer differs so radically between them. The established 4X community with all their decades of legacy skill and taste is particularly difficult in this respect, and newer gamers with more varied preferences are entering the genre all the time.
While discussing Stardock's games in various places over the years, in videos I’ve made for Stardock Games’ Youtube channel, on social media or directly here in developer blogs, I’ve often touched on the topic of organic difficulty as it intersects with various other game elements and mechanics in our games.
Today I want to address this topic directly, as I think understanding this one point really unlocks the full potential of the GalCiv games and helps newer players fathom its depth before having to play it for hours to begin that journey of discovery for themselves.
Firstly, I’ll give an example of a game you’ll all likely know outside of strategy gaming that clearly illustrates this principle and cement this idea in your mind properly, before I go on to describe how this particular design paradigm has been applied in Galactic Civilizations IV.
FromSoftware’s Dark Souls, a dark fantasy action role-playing game with a reputation for brutal difficulty, has no classic difficulty settings. Instead it provides the player with a CRPG-style progression system to build their character to play however they want to play, along with an extensive selection of weapons and equipment to further diversify playstyle.
Gameplay and challenge both change dramatically depending on player choice of build, combat style, weapon and armour sets, and general playstyle in any given situation. Coupled with this extensive in-game character customisation, Dark Souls has a semi-open world layout that allows players to pick a route through the game depending on their skill level and desired challenge.
The important take-away here is that GalCiv is designed in much the same way, where the player picks the challenge they want from a near-infinite combination of in-game mechanics, builds, path routing and environmental choices, creating almost limitless gameplay regardless of player skill level.
Galactic Civilizations IV also adds classic difficulty settings into the mix, to further adjust for skill level depending on game options and the scenario chosen by the player.
Where GalCiv differs from Dark Souls is that in addition to in-game routing, where the player has a wealth of choices as to how to approach each situation as it arises, there is also a very extensive set of choices to make in game setup, that will dramatically change how the game plays before you start playing it.
Players coming from other 4X games, which don’t have such wild variations in gameplay depending on setup options and instead push players towards one fixed, developer intended playstyle, might be a little blindsided by this design principle.
Game setup is very important in GalCiv IV.
The choice of Civilization, whether one of our pre-made Core Civilizations, a completely new AlienGPT generated custom Civ, or even a player customised Core Civ, is the first choice you’ll make. Each Civ’s various Traits and Abilities, along with Citizen type, preference of Ideology and so on, make them all play very differently.
The Yor have to produce their own Citizens from Durantium but have a high Manufacturing Output and tend not to have too many friends: picking them means you’re more likely to be playing a war-focused game where expanding out to find more Durantium will be of prime concern.
Meanwhile, playing the more peaceful Altarians will be quite different: the Altarians are better liked, and while they can aggressively push their Cultural borders out and take enemy planets that way, they can also play a more diplomatic game, making friends to trade with and allies to protect them from bullies (like the Yor).
Note that these playstyles are not fixed: you can play the Yor peacefully and diplomatically, and the Altarians very aggressively, but these are not necessarily their most efficient way to play. Immediately we see here an opportunity for the player to pick a playstyle to select their own challenge: “pacifist Korath Clan” is not the easiest way to play.
Map generation further tailors the starting game state, and potential challenge for the player. Larger maps with more colonisable planets generally take longer to play and require more management from the player, while smaller ones with less habitable worlds play faster but bring their own challenge as resources tend towards scarcity, and resource scarcity is the prime motivator for the declaration of war in GalCiv.
Sectors and the relative clustering of stars determines Civ starting locations, and if you’re playing a less war-focused Civ such as the Mimot, and you’re sharing a small cluster of stars with the Korath Clan, Cosmic Contaminent or the Yor, you’re likely going to have to switch to a war-focused style of play very quickly.
The Mimot will have a hard time playing in a small sector with few worlds to colonise, as their high reproduction rate will force them into a very focused playstyle as they try to contain their population growth, but if you set the game to be very large and with few Civs populating it, oh boy! can the Mimot explode in power. That game may be light on pressure and feel fairly easy, but be incredibly fun in terms of optimising your management of Core Worlds, Colonies and economic development, if that’s your thing.
In the above example, you’ll see that the challenge may be set so that pressure comes not from AI Civs, but from working out an efficient and controlled Mimot territorial and Citizien Growth explosion. There’s little initial pressure from opposing Civs and so you’re free to play in a chilled fashion, taking the game at your own pace.
From questioning the 4X community over the years, I’ve found there are loads of players who enjoy this kind of colonisation-based, economic/industrial gameplay while not enjoying tonnes of warfare and fleet combat, and this is one example of how you can dramatically change GalCiv to suit your own tastes that way. Much like overcoming a difficult challenge in Dark Souls by grinding for levels first, and then enjoying a much more chilled experience in traversing a level or boss, GalCiv facilitates this kind of choice in the same way. In GalCiv with a large map and few opponents, you can “grind” for resources and build an exciting playstyle around that.
On the contrary, if you want a real challenge, set yourself as the Terran Alliance on a small map and then populate it with a larger number of aggressive, ugly Civs like the Drengin, Yor, Korath Clan and so on. You’ll have barely any room to expand and diplomacy is only going to be a temporary fix to the threat of impending invasion. Every decision made over every turn will be critical because in this kind of tight, constrained and high pressure environment, one wrong move could spell disaster for your game.
This is a very high pressure counter-example to the rather low pressure, more sandbox or Grand Strategy style of gameplay you’d get playing the Mimot on a large map with loads of room and habitable worlds to expand into.
Classic difficulty is easy to understand, and in terms of how it affects a game of GalCiv, it simply provides various modifiers to game elements, such as the rate of resource acquisition, the movement speed of Ships and Fleets, and so forth. This is the final way to tweak the game’s difficulty up or down, once you’ve tailored the other game settings ready to start playing, but before you make those in-game decisions as each individual challenge arises. If you want to play that Mimot Growth curve optimisation campaign, but want the AI to be a real threat too, ramp the difficulty up really high. If you want to try that Terran Alliance knife-fight survival game, but the difficulty was a bit too fierce, drop it down here and see if that makes the game more fun.
Finally, we have the Dark Souls-style organic difficulty that comes from in-game player choices: this is well covered in GalCiv, and the cause of much confusion from players coming from less sandbox-like 4X series. “Routing” through a game of GalCiv is much like Dark Souls, and once you know the mechanics better, you’ll come to understand whether attacking that neighbouring Civilization on turn 50 is a good idea or not, and whether or not it’ll turn the rest of the game into an easy win, or a difficult slog.
This is a huge topic, worthy of a dev-journal alone, but I have to cover it briefly so I’ll stick to just a handful of examples.
GalCiv presents the player with several ways to approach economic development on planets. Manufacturing is required to build anything, but building Manufacturing Districts causes Pollution, which in turn slows Citizen Growth. Citizens also contribute towards Manufacturing (and the generation of other resources), and the player has a choice to focus mostly on Citizen Growth and use them for a cottage industry style planetary Manufacturing, or to go heavy into on-world Manufacturing District industry, find a way to deal with the Pollution or just accept you’re going to be bringing people from off-world instead.
Those off-world Citizen Growth planets need less Pollution of course, so you can send Supply Ships built at your heavily polluted manufacturing worlds over to build up infrastructure there, exchanging them for the Citizens that cannot be easily raised on those factory planets.
You see here that GalCiv’s mechanics are designed to give you a choice: Citizen industry, or Manufacturing District industry? Neither are always the obvious optimal choice, and some Civilizations prefer one over the other, but no Civ is hard-locked out of either option. And that choice is yours, whether for optimisation purposes, because you think having a cottage industry of powerful Civ Ability enhanced Citizens is fun, or because it’ll make the game more or less challenging in some way.
There’s also the option of managing more Core Worlds or less, perhaps instead supplying fewer player-managed planets with more resources from feeder Colonies you don’t want to manage yourself. Not only does this provide an interesting optimisation puzzle for those who enjoy that, but it allows players who don’t like manually handling lots of worlds themselves to manage less, while still remaining competitive in the game. This is an option that most other 4X games that singularly reward optimal play generally do not offer.
Again, taking one option or another may or may not be the best course of action, and strong players may deliberately pick a sub-optimal choice. Playing tall (managing just one or two player controlled Core Worlds instead of many) is rarely optimal, and is a very fun challenge game for strong players, without having to raise the difficulty settings too high. And sometimes, you may be forced to play tall, which is what happened to me when I tried that “Terran Alliance squished into a small map with lots of evil Civs” scenario, where I had just two Core Worlds and had to find a way to victory with almost nothing to work with, and turned out to be one of the best games of GalCiv I ever played.
In terms of dealing with neighbours, you can decide to build a military and go to war with them, knowing it damages your relations with certain other Civilizations in play. Or play Altarian-style, by broadcasting your species' equivalent to obnoxiously loud techno music, brain-rot TV or cult of personality propaganda out to the people on-world, causing them to rebel from their original owners. This will have diplomatic consequences too, and you best be prepared to go to war to defend your gains. Or, you could try to keep everybody friends by keeping trade relations strong, as many Civs will be less likely to start wars with you if it means losing valuable trade route income.
Finally, games of GalCiv can be won in various ways: the Prestige system is there to end the game roughly when the game should be ending, once one player has a large and overwhelming monopoly on some system or another, or is at that point where they’re going to snowball out of control and run away with the game. This can be deactivated or ignored if you want to pursue a specific goal, but it does serve to help bring the game to a close and stop that situation where you feel forced to mop up just to see a victory screen.
Alternatively, you can choose to conquer the entire map, or to try to force the rest of the Civs in play to ally with you for a diplomatic victory instead, something that is not as easy as it sounds unless you picked a game full of very passive, friendly opponents.
It is a sad fact that most sandbox-like strategy games struggle because they lack any real direction towards the endgame. If the player is not very disciplined in making their own goals (as you have to be with Paradox style grand strategy games), they eventually lose their focus and drop the game completely. In Galactic Civilizations IV, we’ve given you all the tools you need to set up very specific, focused situations that provide immense challenge if you so want, or dial that difficulty back so you can play a more chilled out, sandbox style game instead.
As you can see, the game mechanics of GalCiv are carefully designed to allow players to set up their own perfect gameplay experience, the right challenge to go with those settings, and detailed mechanics to engage with that game in meaningful ways. By utilising a mix of pre-game setup options, tweaking of rules and Civ Traits and Abilities, and then the choices you make once the game is underway, you can create limitless game experiences.
And no, GalCiv is not “the Dark Souls of 4X”…
