Galactic Civilizations IV News

[h2]The Species Pack and free v2.7 "Taxonomy" update are coming in just a couple of days, June 20th. Let's have a look into some of what they are bringing.[/h2]

AlienGPT is a remarkable system in terms the technology that runs it, and its ability to rapidly generate a believable custom civilization with minimal input from the player. Given a simple prompt, and tweaking a few extra settings, AlienGPT generates a unique faction to play, with its own name, background lore, selectable leader picture and Civilization Abilities and Traits to match.


Not so long ago, AlienGPT was updated to include the generation of a unique Citizen name and background, and then a general type selected as a best fit from a fairly large stock of premade Citizen types. Each Core Civilization has its own unique Citizen type that can be repurposed for Custom Civilizations.

Furthermore, we’ve included a fairly wide range of generic sci-fi and fantasy-themed creatures to add to this pool, covering the most popular themes that you guys tend to pick when using AlienGPT.

Vampires, Catgirls, Elves, Dwarfs and various animals are all very popular, but AlienGPT still had to pick one of these pre-made Citizen types regardless of the prompt, and this sometimes resulted in somewhat unsatisfying results as it tried to make a best guess as to what you wanted, but missed the mark due to lack of options.

Our new free update v2.7 titled “Taxonomy” and the Species Pack DLC aim to fix this problem and add some great new gameplay features surrounding a civilization’s Citizens. As always, there’s free content to improve the base-game for everybody, and then the DLC will add even more cool features on top of that, and I’ll make it clear what’s available with each.

The big news for v2.7 is that Citizens and a Civilization’s Biology have been reworked, with the introduction of the concepts of Species and Phenotypes. Citizens are now members of a Species, and each Species has a Phenotype, which in turn is a member of a Biology (as the Citizens were before).


Species now have their own UI element within the AlienGPT system, with each Species’ various characteristics available for view. Because your ideas can be bigger and more abstract that the GPT tech can keep up with, it’s great to be able to adjust the suggestions made by AlienGPT and giving this system a better interface makes this a lot more fun.


Here I’ve deliberately done something a little confusing: my prompts asked for humanoids that have an ethereal element that give them extra lives after death. Does AlienGPT pick Humans, or Humanoids? Or Vampires? Zombies? Space Demons?

All of the above are reasonable choices, but here it plumped for Humans and I want to change that to make my critters a bit more interesting.


Here’s the new Species UI, where you can scroll through the various premade Species on the left and check their in-game statistic modifiers. These range from Stats (Intelligence, Diligence etc.) to Approval and Expectations, effects of Pollution, Growth rate and Food Consumption. You’ll also see the Citizen and Leader art available when they’re picked.


You can check their Phenotype and Biology here too. Some of the phenotypes are similar to the generic Human type, but others have some unique gameplay effects.


For example, the Lizard Species here are part of the Reptilian Phenotype which prefer living on Desert Worlds, and those are Carbon Based (as usual, they’ll need to eat Food and probably won’t like Pollution much).

The Species Pack adds more Species to choose from, and the ability to create your own from scratch, which should greatly expand your ability to customize your Civilization to your tastes!

Following are a few of the new Species on offer if you own the Species Pack:


The Star Nautiloids Species belong to the Molluscoid Phenotype and are Carbon Based: they’re more Dilligent than your average species, grow very quickly and consume less food. These guys will be great for power-housing Citizen-based manufacturing strategies as you’ll quickly gain a lot of workers, and they’ll work very hard too. They’re more sensitive to Pollution than usual but not excessively so, and so some limited Manufacturing Districts and Improvements will greatly enhance their output.


If you’re a fan of more abstract life, we’ve got Conscious Clouds to show you! As entities with little substance to them they have no need for Food, instead thriving in Pollution. They’re not so strong in combat and struggle to use tools, but they’re as smart as they come and form strong social networks.


They’ve also got a very interesting Phenotype.

Perhaps the most exciting feature of this new DLC, for those of you that enjoy making your own content to play with and share, is the custom Species maker.


“And here’s one I made earlier”, to quote a famous old British kids TV show. These are the Naxari, a name that AlienGPT came up with to match a Custom Civilization, while I added the Species Description. You can add your own Species Traits here too.

You’ll need to add your own Citizen pictures in 128x128 pixel PNG format: I created my own portraits, and cropped them down in Photoshop afterwards. The whole job took me less than 30 minutes to do: small effort, I think, to get your own unique custom Species into the game.


For those of you who don’t want to go to that effort, you can download and use other custom species shared by other creators on Stardock’s own site for Epic and Steam players, and on the Steam Workshop for Steam users. This feature will dramatically increase the amount of alien species available for you all to play with.


With the addition of more unique Species and the ability to add your own custom creations too, the Species Pack really allows you to go wild with your imagination and conjure up some truly weird and wonderful Species to add to your GalCiv campaigns.

We’re really excited to see what you guys come up with when the DLC and update become available!

Attention all Galactic Civilizations IV fans! We are thrilled to announce an exclusive livestream event that you won't want to miss. Dive deep into the Species Pack DLC and v2.7 Taxonomy Update.

[h2]When?[/h2]
June 20, 2024 at 1PM ET - 3 PM ET

[h2]Where?[/h2]
Right here on our Steam page.

[h2]What to Expect?[/h2]
We'll showcase live gameplay of the new Species Pack DLC, including the new species, customization tools, and phenotypes. We'll also explore the v2.7 "Taxonomy" update features like the new search bar, enhanced map generation, and species diversity.

See you there!

I was reading some interesting feedback from a community member on Discord the other day, and that feedback read something along the lines of “Citizens seem like a superfluous system, they don’t really add much to the game and could probably be removed without much loss to the gameplay.”

I considered that statement for a while, and it was an interesting thought experiment to consider what GalCiv would be like without the Citizens.

I thought I’d talk today about why they’re important and discuss some of the reasons why Citizens go a long way towards making GalCiv’s gameplay really fun and exciting.


One thing that people might not consider is that these complex strategy games do ask the player to indulge in a hefty dose of suspension of disbelief. Without a vivid fantasy of taking the lead role in an epic sci-fi drama, guiding your people (or sentient rocks, catgirls or murder-droids) to victory against your opponents, you’re kind of just sitting there, responding to a series of algorithmic prompts from the computer, with more algorithmic prompts back.

In a previous developer journal, we covered the idea that 4X games tend to add diplomacy mechanics, often as a bit of an afterthought, to tick the “has diplomacy box”, as I put it. I was being a little hyperbolic there, perhaps, but this whole idea of maintaining a fantasy for the player to feel like they’re part of a living, breathing world and not just playing some sterile strategy game against a stone-cold, emotionless CPU is one (very good) reason diplomacy is usually included.

The same goes with Citizens: sure, we could abstract them away into numeric statistic sliders for the player to push around as you might do with some of the older genre classics, but a 4X game is very numbers-based and only a relatively rare breed of gamer (like myself, admittedly) enjoys staring at spreadsheets and data-heavy games for fun without the heady-candy you get from seeing little guys with faces and names on-screen.


So, Citizens kill two birds with one stone: we get more immersion for the player, and we still get the fun of manually handling economic and industrial modifiers on a colony-by-colony basis, with a system that’s a lot more fun to use than sliders and spreadsheets.

Several years ago now, Frogboy wrote a dev-journal covering the Factions system that described this very idea (and it’s still a great read in terms of how these mechanics have developed with each iteration of the GalCiv series).

In terms of gameplay, Citizens fulfill several critical functions: they represent the size of your colonies, meaning that they grow at a certain rate, and you can interact with that growth rate using various improvements. If this was all they did, then that could easily be replaced with a few numbers representing these ideas in a more abstract fashion, for sure.

That’s not all they do, though.

Citizens themselves have their own statistics and become a secondary form of industry that processes a Core World’s Planetary Input values into Planetary Output. Since each Citizen has its own Expectations and Approval score, keeping them happy is important since Approval is a direct negative multiplier that reduces your overall Research and Manufacturing scores, respectively.

Again, if we had a Core World’s industrial and research values solely represented as numbers generated by districts and improvements, for example, you could probably have Approval cut that production in the same way. Surely, we could just scrap the individual Expectations for the Citizens, aggregate them as a flat value, and do away with the Citizens completely, right?

What’s cool about the Citizens, beyond the immersion of dealing with little people in your empire, is partly that they’re a vehicle for other mechanics to be added on top that works thematically for the population (such as Pollution), and partly because they can be moved around from world to world where their individual Statistics can be used to stack heavy bonuses where they are needed.

Put simply, they are an entity in of themselves, and that gives the player more tools at their disposal when they’re making those interesting decisions you expect to be making in a good 4X game.

I’ll use the Baratak Grove to illustrate these points in one example.

The plant-like Baratak Citizens really don’t like Pollution, and they suffer a fairly big Approval penalty for living in a polluted world, as they choke on fumes generated by even a very light industrial development.


You can see here that what would be a relatively reasonable level of Pollution for other civilizations is reducing this guy’s Approval by 25%, a huge penalty.

This serves to give you some interesting choices when you’re playing the Baratak Grove: while you can just build your Core Worlds up into dirty, smog-ridden industrial hell-holes as you would with other civilizations, and just suffer through the Growth and Approval penalties until the Techs to reduce Pollution (or improve Approval) are researched, this is often a sub-optimal way to play them. That certainly won’t win you a game on the higher difficulties.

Since Citizens act as a kind of cottage industry, with their own Manufacturing values in themselves, they can work as a replacement for Manufacturing Districts and Improvements until those Pollution-cleaning Techs arrive.


Here, you can see I’ve avoided building too many Manufacturing Districts or Improvements on their homeworld, focusing instead on Population Growth improvements and Housing so I can cram more clean-living little Baratak Workers in to build all those warship parts we need. The low Pollution helps keep them happy, and the non-workers will generate a good amount of Income and Influence too.

Sure, you’re not gonna outpace the Yor in terms of Manufacturing Output, but don’t underestimate the power of cramming dozens of Citizens onto a single world to harvest the fruits of their labor!

Since you can shuttle your Citizens around using the Citizen Transports feature, there’s some interesting fun to be had in a developing Pollution-free world, perhaps a nice Arboreal or Paradise class planet, into a Citizen growing powerhouse.


It might look a bit like this one, although I’m sure you can do better than me. Getting these Growth planets up and running will require a lot of Supply Ships unless you’re happy to build a network of industrial improvements and then tear them down again once you’ve gotten up some critical infrastructure: more choices!

Then, as the Growth rate slows or you reach your Population Cap, you can shuttle them off to places with higher Pollution that can’t grow their own Citizens effectively. This can be handy if you decide you do want at least one big, dirty, heavily polluted manufacturing world from which to build your fleets.

Of course, you’ll want to send your Workers with the highest Diligence scores over to those manufacturing centers to make the most of their skills! And if you’ve got a couple of great Entertainers, those will be most welcome to keep those Pollution-hating workers a little bit happier (and more productive as a result) while they’re toiling away.

Another example of why Citizens are really cool would be the Drengin and their ability to gain big Manufacturing and Research bonuses from prisoners: again, you’ve got choices because that Torian you’ve captured might be better off contributing his other statistics to the output of the world he’s located on rather than toiling away in a Labour Camp.


Even so, if you’re role-playing the bad guy, it’s fun to do stuff like this, right? This Torian ain’t too happy, but he’s churning out ammunition for your battlecruisers to kill other Torians with, and so he’s doing his part for the Drengin Empire.


And who can forget the Festron’s most notorious ability, making Citizens of other species their dinner! Yum!

We’ve not even touched on Ideology or Invasions, or several other key features that Citizens partake in.

As you can see, tangible Citizens aren’t just there for immersion or to make the various civilizations feel a little more distinct from one another; they’re stuffed full of their own gameplay mechanics that give you multiple options in approaching how you play your campaign.

Hope you found this helpful, and I’ll catch you next time!

Cheers!

There’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that a lot of really exciting new content for Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova is coming very soon! The bad news is that, unfortunately, I cannot talk about any of it quite yet. Frogboy has been disseminating bits and pieces over on our GalCiv Discord channel, though, so I invite you all to take a look and get involved in the discussions going on there.

As an apology for teasing you, I’ll make amends by showing off a core game feature you can play with right now. I personally believe it is one of the highlights of the GalCiv series and a big part of what sets it apart from many other space 4X games.


When discussing 4X games with other gamers and developers over the years, one of the most startling revelations I had was that so many people played their games in a way that I never would have.

It turns out that pretty much everybody who plays these games has their own idea of what makes them a fun experience, and even if a particular title has a rather rigid intended way to play, you can bet there’s a whole lot of people out there just playing it completely differently, or modding it to all hell to make it do something it was never intended to do.

The GalCiv series has had this idea baked into it from the very first iteration. I can still fondly remember reading the instruction manual to the first version of Galactic Civilizations that Stardock released on Windows way back in the early 2000s, and this guy called “Brad Wardell (Designer)” had written a little piece in there.


He was showing how he’d set the game up to reverse all the preset alignments of the Civilizations so they’d act the opposite of how they would play if left to their default settings and then try for a cultural victory.

This was the first time I’d seen a 4X game really go out of its way to highlight some of the wacky stuff you could do, and this rather extreme example illustrates a more subtle point that these are games we’re playing, and play is, by definition, a creative experience.

Getting back to Supernova, I want to briefly describe the “Pressure vs. Sandbox” scale and then give you a couple of examples of how you can set the game up very differently depending on the intended playstyle or experience you’re going for. We don’t need any mods for this; we’re just going to use the base game and adjust the map setup options.

We can roughly equate the experience you’re going to get with a strategy game as a two-pole scale: on the one end, you’ve got pressure-based play, and on the other end, you’ve got sandbox play.

Pressure can come in a variety of forms: enemies that want to kill you, time limits that end the game if you don’t win first, limited resources, and so on. Very competitive RTS games like Starcraft in high-level multiplayer games would be an example of a game high on the Pressure-end of this scale.


On the other hand, sandbox games tend to give you a bunch of tools and say, “Have at it!”. Non-competitive city-builder games like SimCity and Minecraft in the sandbox mode are examples of this.

4X games usually have a mix of sandbox elements (they’re empire-building games, after all) with pressure from AI opponents who are trying to win first. Some players like the time and space to build their empire up high and mighty before finishing the game by beating the AI when they’re good and ready. Others prefer a high-pressure game, with the AI or environment trying to kill them, forcing them to adapt their plans on the fly to meet increasingly dangerous challenges.

Most gamers are likely somewhere in-between these extremes. To cater to both, let's take a look at how we can setup a high-pressure game with lots of early action, and a more sandbox-oriented experience where the player has lots of room to explore, expand, and exploit, without much threat of extermination by a determined AI player.

[h2]A High-Pressure Game[/h2]
For a high-pressure game with lots of tense action and critical decisions, we want lots of aggressive Civilizations crammed into a small map, with limited resources to fight over and, therefore, plenty of excuses to start picking war targets early on.


Let’s pick a Small, Single Sector map with Resources and Habitable Planets both set to Uncommon. Set the Civilization Proximity to Close and then jump on over to the AI selection. The key points here are to select dangerous AI civilizations and have more than the recommended number all squished into a smaller map.


This is a bit of a cliched selection of civilizations that tick the “dangerous AI” box, but I’m sure you get the idea: we want a motley crew of disagreeable, xenophobic bullies who’re going to be starving for resources and habitable worlds to expand out into, and have absolutely no excuse not to go to war when someone else has what they want.

If you want a bit less of a meme-ish setup here, you can swap out a couple of these civilizations and replace them with the Krynn or the Terran Resistance, and you’ll have a similarly high-pressure game.


I’ve got the AI to play for me as the Terran Resistance here (the light blue civ in the southwest of the map), and we can see what the game looks like on turn 50.

Here the TR have only two Core Worlds, with the dreaded Korath Clan to their southeast, and the Drengin to their north. The Drengin are expanding well and have already enclosed the Yor, although whether they can hold those worlds once the machines get going is another thing entirely. The Festron and Cosmic Contaminant are doing their own little dance over in the northeast, and its too early to tell who’ll win that one.

With only two Core Worlds, you’re gonna have to plan your game out right from the off and figure out a strategy that navigates your civilization between being crushed by one of your more powerful neighbors in the early game or being outpaced by everybody in the long term and lose because of a Prestige Victory later on. This is a challenging start and would require you to expand steadily enough that you can keep yourself alive while not being so big that the various AI players realize you’re winning and dogpile onto you.


Here’s the game state at turn 150. The Terran Resistance is holding on,n but the Yor and Festron are looking very strong, having mostly eaten their neighbors. This is the AI playing itself, of course, but I suspect most casual players would find this scenario fairly difficult. My money is on the toasters.

You’ll note that I didn’t even have to adjust the AI difficulty settings to create a challenging situation to play with here. We’re entirely relying on the principle of organic difficulty, where the player sets their own challenge. Of course, we can use the traditional difficulty settings (Easy, Normal, Hard, and so on) to adjust the scenario either up or down, depending on taste.

Imagine this scenario on a high-difficulty setting like Genius or above. Now, if you like pressure, that one will probably fulfil your desires!

[h2]A Low Pressure, Sandbox-like Game[/h2]
Next, let’s take a look at a more sandbox-oriented approach to playing a 4X. Here, we want lots of space to expand so we can focus on building a well-oiled economic machine, with lots of Core World and Colony management for those players who love to manage huge empires.


We want a big ma, with plenty of space to expand into, lots of worlds to colonize, and fewer pirates and space monsters to get in the way. Now, this is a very big game and requires a fairly good computer. The crucial settings here are the Abundant Habitable Planets and the Common Star Frequency. The Slow Game Pacing and Research Pacing settings can be fun here too, so you get plenty of time on each tech level before advancing further, as there are some challenges to running a large, low-tech empire.


Here, I’ve included settings for a sandbox-oriented game that’ll give you the same experience with a slightly smaller map and is suitable for computers with less RAM or CPU Cores. Really, this isn’t so much about map size as it is about giving yourself plenty of space to yourself before you bump grills with your neighbors.


Again, the AI selection goes hand-in-hand with the map setup options to facilitate this specific playstyle. We’ve picked more reasonable civilizations this time, most of which are more likely to try to win with peaceful means (although I tend to see the Altarian culture push as anything but friendly).


Here, we see each civilization basically has its own sector.


We’re playing the Arceans this time, and this is our starting sector, with loads of space to expand into! This is a peaceful min-maxer’s paradise, and there’ll be plenty of opportunity to develop a big and powerful empire long before you bump into one of the other civilizations.

Now, just because you’re large and powerful, with friendlier neighbors to do business with, that doesn’t mean the game has to be easy, necessarily. There’s the Prestige Victory condition to watch, and at some point, decisive action might be required to take the win away from a bigger, stronger rival.

Now, these are both two extreme cases, and I’ve used them to illustrate this versatility in a fairly blunt way. If you take into account Frogboy’s original point in the GalCiv 1 manual about playing to a player-determined theme, too, I’m sure you can imagine many scenarios where you pick yourself some unusual game settings and selection of AI, set yourself a specific victory type or some other organic end condition for yourself, and then go wild with your creativity!

Cheers!

We’ve recently released a large update to Galactic Civilizations: IV Supernova called v2.6 “Reinforcements”, and for more information you can read the patch notes linked.

This update focused mostly on bugfixes, balance, options to allow you to further customize the user-interface and some awesome new ship designs for the Terran Alliance and Terran Resistance, which we covered last week. This was one of the bigger patches we’ve released in a while and should improve the overall experience of playing Supernova.

Instead of regurgitating patch notes, this week we’re going to look at one of the more interesting nuances of Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova diplomacy system.

There was one small mechanic that came in back with v2.3 War & Peace that I suspect many people missed in the patch notes, but has significantly changed how each game of Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova will play out, and it’s a system that can be used by both the player and the AI alike.

I’m talking about Trade Routes and their affect on diplomacy. It’s worth a second look because there’s a lot more to it now than just sending off a freighter and watching the money roll in afterwards.


We updated the Trade Route screen in v2.5 “Ares”, shown above.


You can access it from the button furthest to the right on the bottom bar.


The same screen can still be accessed from the Civilization screen too as you can see above.


I want to illustrate this system with a game I’m playing as the Baratak Grove. You can see my position here at the top centre of the map in a very light yellow colour. Note how many civilizations there are in this one big sector, and how squashed in we all are. These games can become notoriously difficult if you don’t prepare yourself to deal with the problems they throw at you.

You’ll note too that I have some rather dangerous neighbors close to me, with the powerfully developed Navigators to my west, the Cosmic Contaminant just south of them. With their polluting ways, the CC are the Baratak Grove’s nemesis and I’ve been fighting them all game.

I’m close to the ever-menacing Yor who’re looking to eliminate the Iconians to their south, and the Drengin Empire just south of the CC too. The Intueri to my east are less aggressive and the Xeloxi further south of that still can sometimes be reasoned with, so there is some hope of avoiding a dog-piling here.


With the game difficulty on Genius here, I’ve got my work cut out to keep the wolves from the door. Any one of these neighbors, if freed up from its own external pressure long enough to build a military fleet, could become a threat. Don’t be fooled by the small size of some of these Civilizations, you can take a lot of territory very quickly with a well protected fleet full of transports.

I want to show how important Trade Routes can be now in helping shape the diplomatic situation around you, in tense, crowded situations like this where deadly, potentially game-ending wars can suddenly flare up at any moment.

We’re likely to have to fight the Cosmic Contaminant again eventually, and we can handle a single war, but we need to avoid being dragged into any other conflicts until that one is concluded properly.

You may or may not remember, but establishing Trade Routes now gives you a diplomatic boost with that Civilization, a bonus that increases with the profitability and age of those routes. This means that early trading with your neighbors can be a critical factor in determining the shape of the game’s diplomatic situation as the game develops into the mid and late-game.


As a quick reminder, to set up a Trade Route, you build a Freighter at a Shipyard, preferably one orbiting a Core World with a high Income value, and you pilot it to a Core World owned by another Civilization, preferably as far away from your starting world as you can manage, picking a destination with a high strong Income too.

Let’s take a look at the Navigators, likely the biggest single threat bordering the Baratak Grove’s empire.


Here you can see that the Navigators have a stronger military than I do, and they probably would quite like to be at war with me as they’re not currently engaged with anybody else. At this point of the game, they’ll be looking to expand if they detect weakness. It didn’t help that I went to war with the Cosmic Contaminant early and we’ve got an Aggressive Neighbour penalty that will persist for some months, but the Trade Routes we share have helped to counter that.

Note that their other neighbors, just like me, are trading with them too. Trade Routes do become an important source of income, particularly in games where the Civilizations each have less planets to each colonize between one another and as such get less tax revenue.

Here’s a very quick reminder about how Trade Routes generate income.


In this Trade Route set up between the Navigators world of Luaphcal IV and our homeworld, the Trade Route Value is determined by a few factors: most notably, the income of the Core Worlds in question, the Route Age and the physical distance between the two (it’s presumed your freighters make stops to trade with other ships and other smaller entities as they go).

If you initiate the trade route yourself, you’ll get a 33% bonus, and there’s a penalty for instability and hostiles in the region too. Receiving a freighter from a neighbour is still better than no trade at all though.

This is a really cool system a few reasons: firstly it encourages each player to actively engage in trade as soon as possible as that 33% bonus to Trade Route Value for being the first to get your freighter to your neighbour’s Core Worlds is very attractive.

Secondly, the longer a Trade Route exists, the more money it makes and the bigger the diplomatic bonus you’ll get from trading with them. The longer you maintain the route and your relations with your trade partner, when it comes time to start throwing their fleets and Soldiers into the meat grinder, they’re a lot less likely to pick you as their target. They like that juicy trade income and since GalCiv is not just a war-game, and you can win economically as well as by map-painting, it’s a viable strategy for you, and the AI, to sit around and power up your economy, accumulating Prestige Points.

Playing one of the Trade focused Civilizations doesn’t just give you more money, as it would with other space 4X games. They get the extra cash for sure, but trade is not just a financial system. It’s a diplomatic one too and getting early Trade Routes out shows the other Galactic Civilizations that you’re worth more to them alive than you are dead.


This demonstrates one of the reasons why I think Galactic Civilization’s IV: Supernova has an edge over other contemporary space 4X games, in terms of providing ways for the player to engage in meaningful non-combat interactions to help them win that don’t feel “gamey” or contrived, and fit with the way that real-life diplomacy works out there in the real world.

This is an example: a mutually beneficial interaction like trade can also be used as a way to protect yourself diplomatically, without that mechanic feeling like an artificially imposed rule or system, placed there specifically to band-aid over the inherent imbalance you get when a human interacts with a game AI.

Diplomacy in space 4X has long been accused of being a system that exists merely for the player to exploit and delay being attacked until they are ready to win a war, and there’s some truth to that I’m sure, especially in games where the diplomatic system was tacked on to tick the “has diplomacy” box.

Of course, Sun Tzu might smile upon such a strategy, but whether that issue feels like an accurate depiction of the Art of War or a weakness of a game’s core design largely depends on how natural that system feels in the context of the rest of the player’s interactions with the game itself. If you’re sat there happily immersed and suddenly something happens to throw you out of that immersion, that can be jarring.

Nobody likes being thrown out of a war they are winning when an arbitrary alarm goes off and says “Nope! Time’s up buddy, hand back all those planets you just worked to take!”

GalCiv has always strived to be a game where we balance fun with the suspension of disbelief, but by trying smaller game elements, like Trade Routes, in with the way an alien Civ feels about you and opens it up to being an active game element that can be used to build a strategy around, the game feels tighter as a whole and does a lot to encourage you to experiment with different playstyles.

And with this, there’s no need to add in rules that limit you in some way to mask for the AI not being able to keep up, because the AI can use this system just like you can.


To go back to my situation in-game, it’s not too late to begin leveraging this system with other neighbors I’m hoping to keep sweet. The Baratak Grove aren’t necessarily a trade focused Civ, but with so many dangerous and warlike Civilizations around me, one strategy would be to build my defences very strongly, trade with the friendliest neighbours and let everybody else fight.

Once my economy is in a strong state, enough to either support a large war or to make a serious dent on the Prestige Victory condition enough that I’ll attract one anyway, then I can pick a new target and take some new territory.

Slow and steady wins the race, said Sun Tzu, probably.

I hope you enjoyed this quick look at how Trade Routes can be used to protect yourself in dangerous situations, and how small updates to the game that sometimes go unnoticed in patch notes can drastically improve gameplay!

Cheers!