Galactic Civilizations IV News

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!

[h2]Galactic Civilizations IV v2.6 Reinforcements Update Brings Visual Overhauls and Gameplay Enhancements[/h2]

The latest update for Galactic Civilizations IV, v2.6 Reinforcements, is now available, and it's packed with a host of changes aimed at enhancing both the visual appeal and gameplay mechanics of the game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1357210/Galactic_Civilizations_IV/

View the full changelog here.

[h3]Visual Overhaul on Ships and New Ship Parts[/h3]
One of the most notable changes in update 2.6 is the major visual overhaul of the Terran Alliance and Terran Resistance ships. These updates bring a fresh look to some of the game's most prominent fleets, likely to please fans of the series. Additionally, the update introduces a plethora of new ship parts, allowing players more creative freedom in designing their vessels.

[h3]Improved User Interface and Strategic Controls[/h3]
The update introduces new strategic zoom controls that enable players to decide when different categories of strategic icons are displayed on the galaxy map, directly from the main game UI. This should make managing expansive space empires a bit more manageable. Also, loading screens will now offer tips and tricks, potentially helping both new players and veterans alike refine their strategies.

[h3]Gameplay Adjustments[/h3]
Update 2.6 includes several gameplay adjustments aimed at enhancing the player experience. These changes address various aspects of the game, from balancing and stability improvements to tweaks that refine the overall mechanics. Players can expect a smoother and more engaging gameplay experience with these updates.

[h3]Multiplayer Enhancements[/h3]
For those who enjoy multiplayer, the update promises improved turn time speeds and fixes for desynchronization issues that could occur when ship designs are obsoleted on one client but not the host.

[h3]Localization and UI Improvements[/h3]
The update also brings numerous localization enhancements, making the game more accessible to a global audience with adjustments to tooltips and text displays in multiple languages to prevent clipping and overlapping.

[h3]Warlords Expansion Updates[/h3]
The Warlords section sees improvements in the UI, such as an updated War Aims Tooltip that now includes a scrollbar for lengthy descriptions, ensuring better accessibility for players in different languages.

Overall, update 2.6 for Galactic Civilizations IV focuses heavily on refining the existing systems and adding visual flair to the game, while also addressing some long-standing community feedback regarding gameplay mechanics and UI issues. Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting out, these changes might just enhance your galactic conquests.

There’s a new update incoming for Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova and with it we’ve got some really cool new ship models to show you for the two human civilizations in the game: the Terran Alliance and the Terran Resistance.

Taking a quick peek at the Galactic Civilizations IV Metaverse game statistics page, the Terran Alliance and Terran Resistance are the most popular Core Civilizations in GalCiv4, although the AlienGPT custom civ system currently draws the most players of all!

Every ship model fielded by the Terran Resistance has been completely remade to match their story as a tough splinter group who survived untold horrors in the name of protecting humanity.

Meanwhile, the original Terran Alliance ships have been redesigned too. There are a few exceptions there: the Probe, Survey Ship, Constructor, and Supply Ship already fit the retro-futurist style we were going for and so we’ve designed the other ships to look more like them.

We’ll turn to the Terran Alliance first.


Here’s their new Transport, with a rotating centre module that I had to freeze-frame for this shot!


And onto the warships, here’s the TA’s new Carrier.


This new Dreadnought model has four large engines reminiscent of the fuel boosters you see on today’s spacecraft.


And here’s a Battleship.


Let’s not forget the medium-sized hull ships too: this is a Destroyer, or a Cruiser if you prefer.


This is one of our new Terran Alliance Frigate models. It looks super sleek and I think it really fits the overall retro-futuristic theme!


And here’s a Fighter! Again you can see the fusion of retro and modern-day, real-life fighter designs in there, I think.

Let’s move over to the Terran Resistance now, where you’ll see how this ever-resourceful civilization has modified their original designs to meet the challenges they found in humanity’s darkest hour.

I’ve picked the “Rebellion” colour-scheme for them this time.


First you can see their take on the Colony Ship.


I can’t wait for you to see the little animated arms on the TR Constructor moving!


Here’s their Transporter, with those large dropships to the side, ready for an invasion.


I really like this Siege Ship, again with an animated central portion that just looks wild when you see it running!


Onto the first of the combat ships, here’s the TR’s Carrier: it’s really meaty and powerful looking, as befits such a gargantuan vessel.


Woe-betide any Drengin fleet that see this Dreadnought bearing down on them, with fury in its wings!



And here’s just one of many Terran Resistance Battleship designs.


This Cruiser shows that the TR have a thing for fins…


As does this Terran Resistance Corvette, one of the new Ship Types added in our recent Warlords expansion.


Finally, here’s one of the Tiny hull sizes, this one is a Bomber but you can set it to be a Fighter too.


Remember, you’re not limited to the colour-scheme set for the Core Civilizations, you’re free to make them more (or less) colourful as you like.




There’s no room to show all the ship models here, this is just a handful, but I think this gives you a taster of some of the new features in v2.6 of Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova. Don’t forget, the old legacy Terran shipset is still available in-game too.

I hope you enjoyed this showcase. Cheers!

Since v2.5 “Ares” and the Warlords expansion were released, we’ve put out a short series of developer journals describing the new features added to the war system in Galactic Civilization IV: Supernova.

Today we’ll look at the last component of the Doctrine system we’ve not covered yet, Targeting Priority.


I’m aware that I’ve already indirectly discussed this feature three or four times over since the updates landed, as it’s a core component of the new Ship Class and Doctrine mechanics and you can’t talk about any of that without the TP system being involved. So, rather than rehash all that information in laborious detail yet again, I’ll summarize it briefly in its context of creating a Doctrine for a Ship Class and then we can talk tactics!

For those of you that missed the previous journals, a Ship Class is a Ship Type plus a Doctrine, and a Doctrine is an Operational Ability plus a Targeting Priority.

A Targeting Priority is an ordered list of Ship Types that your Class is instructed to fire upon and destroy in a fleet combat action, sequentially one by one, until all Types in the Targeting Priority list are eliminated in their order of appearance. At this point your Class will be free to engage anything else in the battle.

Each Ship Type comes with its own default Targeting Priority but if you own the Warlords expansion, you’ll be able to change the Targeting Priority for the Ship Classes you create. Warlords also adds four new Targeting Priorities for a total of eight, giving you greater control over battles by instructing your various Ship Classes to target specific enemy Types in order.

This all sounds like a lot of GalCiv ship-design jargon without an example, so here’s one to better illustrate the point. We’ll take a look at a battle between two fairly even fleets and show the different combat results when we change the Targeting Priorities of a single Class.


Here we’ve got two fleets, Korath Clan and Baratak Grove, each with 10 fighters, 10 bombers, 6 frigates, 3 cruisers and one battleship. They’re loaded out with the third tier weaponry (Neutrino Emitters, Railguns, Avengers) and equivalent defenses, no special modules. They work out about the same Combat Rating with roughly equivalent values in attack and defense too.

I’ve made an effort to ensure the fleets were evenly balanced in terms of ship number, weapon loadout and other combat modifiers coming from Techs, Civ Policies and so on. There was a small HP difference but the other fleet got some defensive bonuses to compensate, and testing showed they got pretty even results.

Firstly, I’ve kept the Targeting Priorities as their Type-based default: remember, with the Warlords expansion you can change each Classes Targeting Priority to something new but each Type has a default setting. The Fighter defaults to Smallest Combatants (targeting Fighters first, then Bombers, then Frigates, then Corvettes and afterwards whatever else is left), the Bomber to Largest Combatants (Dreadnaught -> Battleship -> Destroyer -> Cruiser), the Frigate to Bombers (Bomber -> Corvette -> Destroyer -> Battleship), the Cruiser to Smallest Combatants and the Battleship to Largest Combatants.


The two opposing fleets prepare to engage, showing an estimate of the final result. Baratak look to come out on top this time…


The two fleets engage, with the combat Phase limit of 100 being reached.


Here we see that the Baratak Grove come out on top with their six frigates largely untouched. I can’t show the whole battle in picture format but the bombers spend most of the battle taking down the battleships, then go for the cruisers, but at that point have mostly been mopped up by the fighters, frigates and cruisers who’re all set to target those smaller craft.


Now we’re going to try changing the Targeting Priority of the Korath Clan’s Bombers to Frontline Combatants (Frigate → Corvette→ Fighter) to see if they have a better result trying to take out some of those anti-bomber ships first.


Off they go!


The Baratak lost all their frigates this time as they were targeted down by the bombers, but their badly damaged battleship did survive the encounter. I’ll let you decide if that’s a better result for the Korath Clan or not, but what’s important here is that by changing the Targeting Priority of just one Class, we’ve had a rather drastic change in the outcome of the battle. Bombers have a default Operational Ability of Giant Slayer, which was wasted in this battle targeting those Frigates and Fighters before the larger ships, so perhaps this wasn’t the best strategy for them.

Let’s try something else. This time, we’ll set our Bombers to Capital Ships (Cruisers → Destroyers → Battleships) and see how that works.


Turns out it doesn’t work very well! This was the worst result for the Korath Clan yet, with the bombers neatly defeated before they could kill a single Cruiser, again not utilizing Giant Slayer.


Let’s try setting the Korath’s battleship and cruisers to Gunships to target the Frigates and Cruisers first.


Still no luck for the Korath but the result was different again, this time many more of the Baratak’s tiny hull size craft survived, but they lost their three cruisers and all their frigates.

I’d argue that these four different outcomes we’ve seen here would be best judged depending on what other fleets both the Korath and the Baratak have in the area. Taking down a wounded battleship and three cruisers with no fighter or bomber cover might be easier for a second fleet to achieve than trying to kill a single battleship with a swarm of fighters defending it.

These results changed quite significantly with just minimal changes to Targeting Priority, usually to just one or two Classes. Imagine how different it’d be if with both sides picking the targeting priorities for all their Classes in the battle? And then consider that each has its own Operational Ability too, and you’ll see that the Doctrine as a whole will make a huge difference.

Just for funsies, I tried to win the battle as the Korath Clan using a mix of Targeting Priorities and Operational Abilities. Here I threw everything I had into killing those Baratak bombers as fast as possible, tailoring the Doctrine of each Class I had in action for that purpose.


That’s a bit better I think! Not an overwhelming victory but better than the sad, crushing defeats that the Korath were subjected to before. My intuition that the enemy bombers were the big threat wasn’t too far off the mark: here the Korath Clan have traded well, with more ships left over at the end of the battle than their plant-based rivals. I expect that focusing on the Frigates and Cruisers could also yield better results too.

Operational Abilities make all the difference when it comes to fleet actions with very balanced sides.

In most battles, you’ll not be fighting with such even forces. A Class’s Doctrine, carefully selected to complement the roles of other Classes in your fleet, will determine whether you’ll emerge as the triumphant victor or face an ignominious defeat!

As we’ve seen in the past couple of developer journals, Ship Classes in Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova consist of a Ship Type plus a Doctrine. I’ll summarize it again in case you didn’t read those.


The Ship Type is a kind of model organized around its hull size and suggested combat role: for example, a Cruiser is a medium hull-sized Type and has an inherent bonus of +10% Weapon Range, as opposed to the Destroyer, the new medium hull-sized Type added in Warlords with its -10% Weapon Cooldown bonus.

All else being equal, the Cruiser will generally engage targets more quickly while the Destroyer puts out more firepower over the course of the battle. With the Warlords expansion, each hull size, from Tiny to Huge, now has two Types.

These Ship Type abilities don’t change but further performance of each Ship Class can be customized quite extensively with both its components, a standard feature in most space 4X with few exceptions, and with our new Doctrine system.

A Doctrine has two player-selectable settings: an Operational Ability and a Targeting Priority. With the Warlords expansion, you can change both of these settings on a Class by Class basis, with more options available to each over the base-game too.

Today we’re going to look at a few of the Operational Abilities available in Warlords and suggest some hypothetical scenarios where they might be useful, in tandem with the other mechanics that constitute a Ship Class. To make this clearer, we’ll look at just a single Ship Type the Destroyer, and see how varying its Operational Abilities drastically alter how it performs in a battle.


Here’s our base-line Destroyer Ship Type.

Let’s say we’re being swarmed by lots of small, hi-tech Bombers which are proving difficult to destroy because of their advanced Armour or Shielding components, and are killing a lot of our larger ships. Furthermore, we don’t have a lot of shipyards to justify building a lot of Fighters, which are cheap to build in terms of the Construction Cost but are inefficient in terms of Shipyard turns: with our two Shipyards, we can build two Destroyers over two turns, or four Fighters…


Looking through the Operational Abilities available, there are a few options but the best one for targeting Bombers is Sentinel, with it’s +75% Attack Against Bombers ability. This will help reduce shielding and armour, and do more HP damage once they’ve mitigated those protective measures.

Set an appropriate Targeting Priority and field just enough weaponry to be able to reliably kill even an advanced bomber in a couple of rounds, and you’ve got yourself a bona fide anti-bomber warship. The Destroyer is a reasonable pick for this role as the rapid weapon cooldown rate gives it an edge over the Cruiser (although in some cases the extended weapon range on the Cruiser might work better here, it’d depend on the relative loadouts on each Type in play).

Alternatively, if the civilization fielding these bombers had skipped the Evasion boosting techs, but were instead fielding them as part of very large swarms, Skirmisher might be a better bet: the Destroyer here would be less accurate when it fired, but wield a massive -85% Weapon Cooldown rate, almost doubling its fire output.

Pair this with Kinetic weaponry components and you’re putting out a hell of a lot of firepower very quickly: the -25% Accuracy penalty here will hurt and so it’d be essential to boost it back up with two or three Targeting Computers: at just 2 Mass and 5 Manufacturing Cost each, you’ll kill those Bombers in almost half the rounds any other ship could.


Throw in substantial shielding (hope you’ve found some Elerium!) and an Ion Canon to negate the Bomber’s evasion and now those big swarms of terrifying capital ship killers are going to be easy prey for your deadly Destroyers!


Remember that a Ship Class’s doctrine can be changed at any point during play using the Edit Doctrine button in the ship designer, without the need to redesign the ship itself, meaning you’re free to experiment and repurpose the role of your Classes to adapt to an ever shifting battlefield.

I hope this quick overview gives you some ideas on how Operational Abilities complement your Ship Type’s natural abilities, and use this knowledge to face the various tactical challenges GalCiv IV will throw at you during the course of a game.

Cheers!