Galactic Civilizations IV News

In recent developer journals, we’ve examined some of the new Improvements and homeworld Events added to the original Centauron sector races introduced in the first Galactic Civilization’s games way back in the mid 1990s. This week, we’ll ask the Torian Regime to step forwards into the spotlight and take a bow, as we examine some of the new tools and toys they get to use in their own efforts towards becoming the greatest galactic civilization!

The Torians were a peaceful Aquatic species that became subjugated by the Drengin Empire very early on in the history of Galactic Civilizations. After fighting a dreadful war of rebellion, they broke free of their shackles and now are free to take their own destiny into their hands. Never again will they be slaves, and their mistrust of those other civilizations in the galaxy lies at the heart of their core skills. Fertile ensures they expand and populate their worlds very quickly, while Unwavering ensures they’re difficult to Culture Flip and have diplomatic abilities to both Persuade and Threaten when necessary.


Let’s take a look at the new Civilization Achievement and Colony Unique Improvements available for construction on Toria (or elsewhere, if you’re patient and have a plan).


First up is The Great School, a magnificent university attended by the smartest of Torians, immediately grants a 50% research boost to the world, allowing rapid traversal of the Tech trees. As a bonus, it’ll give a +1 to All Adjacency Bonus to reflect the utility in placing a university full of academic swots next to your other various economic and industrial zones.


The Tide Pools is a Colony Unique Improvement that provides a +10% bonus to Influence Growth and Approval respectively. Influence Growth can be crucial to fast expansion of borders, while the Approval bonus can help offset those sad feelings that Aquatic Citizens might feel being stuck mining Durantium by hand on a baking hot, dry Volcanic world long after moisturizer cream supplies have run out.


The next Civilization Achievement Improvement available for construction at the beginning of the game is The Grand Resort, a luxurious dream vacation destination for any sentient creature in the galaxy. This provides a 50% bonus to Tourism and +10 Culture Points, with some additional Wealth and Tourism benefits if carefully located. Again, a +2 Level to All Adjacency Level Bonus ensures that the Torians can squeeze even more out of adjacent Districts and Improvements.


Next up is a new homeworld Event that gives the player the choice between three new Improvements to be placed on their homeworld. You don’t get to choose where these go as they are randomly placed, so you’ll need to consider your existing infrastructure when choosing (remember, these Events can be temporarily set aside by clicking on the “Decide Later” arrow at the top right of the Event window, in case you want to go examine your homeworld first).

Note that to balance out getting a powerful and free Improvement, having it randomly placed will shake up your homeworld’s layout a little and perhaps force a rethink of your usual optimal design plan. These can be deleted afterwards if they’re not so useful and placed in a tile you had planned to fill with something even more important.


The Torian Telescope here gives a +10 boost to Sensor Range, and more if located next to other Research Districts or Improvements, while helping to boost those attached zones too.


The Drengin Tech Cache grants the Torians access to some of the advanced technology left behind during the occupation by the Drengin Empire, granting nice early +5 Research Bonus and allowing the Torians to make a tidy profit from manufacturing and selling these in their financial Districts too, granting a Research and Wealth bonus to attached infrastructure.


The Torians were always cultured lot, and picking the Cultural Revival Initiative will give each Citizen born and bred on Toria a +5 Social Skills boost. This is a powerful effect, especially used in tandem with the Tide Pools colony Improvement, allowing the Torians to mitigate many of the worst effects from Crime, Pollution and other effects that hit Approval hard. Another option, perhaps, is to focus their efforts on building a strong core group of Traders, and the increased Income they generate across your empire.

Armed with these new tools in combination, your options as the Torian Regime open up in a big way. Do you leverage their Fertile trait to rapidly expand your territory, utilizing their increased Influence output to peacefully coerce the galaxy into the Torian way of life? Or stay small but technologically advanced, relying on your new high Intelligence and avoiding the jealous gaze of your rivals until the time is right, striking them hard and fast with your deadly fleets before they’ve realized quite how strong you’ve gotten?

Let us know what you think of these improvements, and we’ll catch you next time!

Cheers!

A couple of weeks ago we took a look at the synthetic Yor Singularity, a civilization of organic-life hating robots with an axe to grind against… well, basically everybody else other than themselves. Playing the bad guy can be fun, but sometimes a civilization can be dangerous without necessarily being so fundamentally malevolent.


This time around we’re going to look at another of the original Civilizations from the Galactic Civilizations series: the Arcean Republic, a carbon-based species of 12 foot tall warriors gifted with nobility and a stalwart, keen-sighted sense of honour. It was the Arceans that spread the Stargate technology to the other civilizations in the Centauron region of space, beginning the great race for galactic supremacy and unleashing the dreadful might of the Drengin Empire upon the sector, a move that ultimately led to their own conquest and subjugation. Liberated once more, and led by a great leader of the resistance to the Drengin occupation, Lord Verga, the Arceans are ready to take their place on the galactic stage once again!

Like the Yor Singularity, the Arcean Republic have some nifty new Improvements available at the start of the game.


The first is the World Engine, an enormous power generator boasting a huge +20% Manufacturing boost and an adjacency bonus of +3 to Manufacturing and Military. Standing as a mighty centerpiece of the Arcean’s industrial might, these powerful bonuses do come at the cost of a huge increase in Pollution and a hefty monthly running expense of +3 Maintenance.


Next, the Neural Link allows the Citizens on the planet to share their thoughts with one another, increasing their individual Intelligence by +3 each, with this number gradually increases as time goes by.

Now the Arceans have a choice: do they kickstart their industry with the huge Manufacturing bonus of the World Engine, which continually scales up in effect along with the growing industrial density on the world it is is located on and suffering the large Growth and Approval penalties that come with part and parcel with such a big rise in Pollution? Alternatively, they could rely on more limited industry, instead focusing on rapid Citizen growth and unleash the huge benefits to Research that they’ll get from populating Arcea, and then the rest of their Core Worlds, with high IQ Citizens?

There’s nothing to stop you building both of these on Arcea at the start of the game, of course, but we feel that these kind of early game choices allow you to play each civilization in different ways, with different playstyles informed by the bonuses you’re picking at the start.


To further shape your playthrough if you own the Tales of Centauron DLC, an early Event gives you a choice between three homeworld improvements for Arcea.

The Expansion Celebration grants a large Approval bonus to the colony and generously supports attached Wealth assets too. Perhaps with some creative use of the Arcean Republic’s Civilization Policies, this might help offset the worst of the effects of the Pollution you’re getting from the World Engine?

Alternatively, you could cut to the chase and choose the Colonization Program, which improves Growth +33% and increases Arcea’s Population Cap by +3 too, with another nice Income boost to surrounding districts and nicely support the flooding of your empire with egghead Arceans.


Finally, here’s the Resistance Center, allowing your 12 foot space-samurai a better than fair chance of surviving an invasion, if do they happen to start close to one of the less neighborly species in the sector, and gives you some early-game Military adjacency boost too.

Right from the very first Galactic Civilizations game on OS/2, the GalCiv series has always been about playing the game your way, and we hope to demonstrate that by combining these early Improvements, along with are enough to inspire a whole new way of approaching a Civilization’s playstyle, game by game.

Hope you enjoy the Arcean’s new toys, and look forward to more Civilization spotlights in the future!

Cheers!

Ends January 29, 2024, at 1PM EST

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

Galactic Civilizations IV continues the legacy of the series, allowing players to guide a civilization to interstellar glory. With a rich strategic layer, numerous alien races, and a galaxy teeming with opportunities and threats, the game offers a complex and engaging experience for strategy enthusiasts.

We've been hard at work improving the game. Recent updates have introduced new features, optimized gameplay mechanics, and enriched the overall experience with additional story elements. These enhancements make for an even more immersive journey through the stars.

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova updated to version 2.3, titled "War & Peace" last week, let's dive in:

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This update includes many balance changes to make diplomacy more meaningful and interesting, to allow players (and the AI) to more easily exit wars they don't want to be in and reduces the occurrence of "Everwars", and generally improves the "grand strategy" level of GalCiv's gameplay by making the AI make more believable choices when it comes to declarations of war.

Also included are many bugfixes, an update to the original Epic Edition, support for the older "Widescreen HD" resolution for Steamdeck and older computers, and more!

The full changelog for v2.3 "War & Peace" is here.

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova version 2.3, titled “War and Peace”, is now available, and brings a host of balance changes and bugfixes right across the game. Primarily, this update aims to reduce the occurrence of what 4X gamers call the “everwar” problem, where a civilization becomes locked into a war with a rival and have no realistic way to disengage or call for peace other than to fight it out and destroy the belligerent faction completely.


Some more bloodthirsty players don’t mind this but a whole lot of others really do: outside of some rather dramatic and extreme sci-fi and fantasy settings, never-ending wars are rare. In reality, wars tend to flare up and die down after victory goals are met, resources become depleted and civilians become sick of having their loved ones returned to them in body-bags. Everwars in 4X are generally undesirable as they reduce the non-combat aspects of a 4X to a supporting role to the grind of an endless conflict, and that isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, nor is having to conquer absolutely everybody to effectively win the game.


In previous versions, although the AI had become a lot better at picking wars it can win, it also tended to fight on right until the moment it either surrendered completely or its last colony was taken, depending on the game settings.

One approach to fixing this is with the “grand strategy” game technique of forcing the player to stop a war once some kind of war-score counter value is reached. This isn’t always fun for the player when they’re yanked out of a fun conflict that they’re not finished with yet, moments before they’re about to engage in an epic, war-ending battle.

“War & Peace” aims to address this problem in several stages.

Perhaps the biggest and most immediately noticeable change will be a series of war and surrender Events that trigger the longer a war goes on, and vary depending on who started the war and who is winning or losing it, to add some extra flavor and ensure the player has an option to end the war they might not want to be in.


While the player is not forced to end the war at this point, there are incentives to do so that might sweeten the deal. When the AI does offer an olive-branch, there’ll be a variety of different peace-offerings on the table for you to choose from.

Secondly, the AI will be more likely to accept a ceasefire now, and the longer the war has gone on the more likely they are to accept a peace deal. This should reduce the ever-war problem, and while we want players to have to fight for their lives when wars do occur, we feel that these moments shouldn’t potentially go on for hundreds upon hundreds of turns, especially for players who enjoy the more peaceful aspects of building a great galactic civilization.


Furthermore, the AI is more loyal to civilizations that it has had good relations with for a long time, favoring those it is has well established trade routes with, and will be somewhat less inclined to be bribed into a war with those favored civilizations by other sneaky war-mongers. This means that they’ll not just take their current diplomatic status with their partner into account when they make that decision to go to war, they’ll look back at your past dealings too. Make friends and trade with them, and they’ll be more likely to stick by you when you’re in need of assistance once the Drengin, Korath Clan, Yor or some other dreadfully mannered neighbors come knocking!

To prevent sneak attacks, when a civilization declares war, all of their ships are removed from the enemy’s borders outside of their zone of control.


Various diplomatic modifiers have been tweaked, such as diplomacy-focused civilizations no longer coveting the worlds of others, and a more slowly growing and reduced “We Want to Conquer the Galaxy” from civs wanting to militarily expand too.

These diplomatic changes to how wars are started and ended should open the grand strategy side of Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova up even more, with civilizations being more or less inclined to engage in long wars to achieve their goals and loyalty to old friends factoring into their strategic planning. Gamers with less of a martial-inclination will be able to enjoy their empire building with less threat from long and grueling wars that they cannot get out of, and defensive and diplomatic civilizations will be able to achieve their victory goals without the inevitable need to become an unwilling galactic conqueror.

As always, thanks for reading, and let us know what you think of the changes in “War & Peace”.

Cheers!