Galactic Civilizations IV News

We’ve examined the Citizens in Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova quite a bit recently, and I’m hoping that one important point was made loud and clear: when added to the myriad of other player selectable or customisable game features, Citizens provide you more options in building your own unique playstyle for that particular playthrough.

This week we’ll take a look at the reasoning behind the variation in Species Traits between Core Species, the generic types and some of the new ones we added with the Species Pack, as I did see some questions and comments regarding this since the DLC released.


Let’s take a look at the Altarians. Note they’re fairly vanilla except for a very large Relative Social boost of +6. Compare this to one of the generic Species like the Lizards.


The reason the Altarians have such a striking difference is to balance out their Core Civilization mechanics and fit to their unique lore. The Altarians are masters of culture generation, and are well suited to the “cultural victory” approach to the game, but this huge Social boost is serves that specific purpose, and is balanced by their downsides too.

The generic Species, however, really need to be less focused towards one playstyle and instead let the player’s imagination decide what kind of creature they are. My idea of Lizards might be ravenous velociraptors with powerful combat abilities, while yours might be more in line with chilled scientist iguanas. If we hardcode Lizards to have very powerful Resolve, as with the Korath for example, then we’d have to balance them out in some other way and while that doesn’t lock them into a specific playstyle, it does strongly inform it, which can be immersion breaking.

There should be no doubt in anybody’s mind how the Korath are supposed to play though, and while you can play them peacefully, they’re certainly oriented towards playing aggressively, and that fits their lore and theme.

So with the generic Species, such as Lizards, Humanoids, Cats, Dogs and so on, while we gave them some gentle bonuses and penalties to give them a bit of flavour, they’re not overbalanced in any one area so you can decide what kind of species they are when you play them.


Now, with the Species Pack, if you do really want to make ravenous velociraptors, or chilled iguana scientists, with Species Traits set to support those playstyles, you can!

You don’t need to add your own pictures, simple hit Add Portraits and you’ll see the default Lizard portraits in amongst the others that Stardock have created for the game. Just add those in, and fill out the rest of the details here, including your desired Species Traits.

While we’re on the topic, you might note that some of the newer generic species added in the Species Pack are a little more wild and unusual than the others.


The Conscious Clouds here are really geared towards heavy industry: while their Diligence is low, they thrive in Pollution and have a rapid Growth Rate. This means they’ll be happiest on very heavily polluted industrial worlds full of Industrial Districts and Improvements, and you’ll pack a lot of them in on those worlds too. That Diligence penalty will be partly offset by their Approval bonus and if you build these worlds right, you’re going to become an industrial powerhouse very quickly!

I’m hoping you’ll see, by way of this one example, how you can build your own Species in a way that supports your own playstyle too.

Cheers!

Stardock has released the anticipated Species Pack DLC for its popular space 4X game, Galactic Civilizations IV, along with the major free update, v2.7 "Taxonomy." This latest DLC and update bring a wealth of new content and features that promise to enrich the gameplay experience for all space strategy enthusiasts.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The free v2.7 "Taxonomy" update introduces significant enhancements to Galactic Civilizations IV, including the addition of distinct species types for all civilizations, a new search bar for easier navigation, and improved map generation for better player placement and more exciting gameplay.

"We're incredibly excited about the Species DLC," said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. "This DLC not only adds a variety of fascinating new species to the game but also empowers players to create and share their own unique civilizations."

[h3]Species Pack Features: [/h3]

• New Species: Discover and interact with several new species, including Gaseous species, Mollusks, Mammalians, and more, each bringing their unique characteristics and abilities to the galaxy.
  
• Create and Customize: Design your species with specific strengths and weaknesses, choose their advisor pictures, and determine what their citizens look like.
  
• Share Your Creations: Use the built-in Species uploading tool to share your customized species with other players online.
  
• Phenotypes: Experience a more detailed classification system for species with new Phenotypes.
  

For more information on the Species DLC and the v2.7 "Taxonomy" update, view the full changelog here. 
 
[h3]Species Pack Screenshots: [/h3]

[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!