Galactic Civilizations IV News

Modding has been around as long as video games have existed. The earliest games were really only played by other programmers or nerdy academic types with access to university mainframe computers, who were happy to jump in and improve the software made by their colleagues.

Nobody called it modding back in the late 70's as far as I can tell, but we can see that same hacker spirit infusing the video gaming community right up to this day.

Hell, some genres are almost entirely comprised of games derived from mods: all of the so called Major Roguelikes, including NetHack, ADOM, Angband, Crawl etc. are all derivatives of the various modded versions of the original Rogue, and each of those games has spawned dozens more. Roguelikes are their own little subculture within the computer science community, but 4X games are no stranger to the modding scene either.



Dedicated fans and bedroom engineers have lovingly fixed, improved and mutated their favourite titles pretty much ever since the genre began. Civ II was one of the first 4X that made modding easy, and Civ IV is still going strong almost entirely on the strength of the excellent modding tools that Soren Johnson fought with Firaxis so hard to get out to the public. Other games really needed mods to fix their most serious issues (looking at you Master of Magic, you little flawed diamond!)

We love mods at Stardock, and recognise that we can’t possibly create games that are perfect for every single gamer that buys them, with all their myriad tastes and needs. That’s why we’ve built Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova to be easy to mod.

And now, we’ve added a handy modding tool into our launcher that links up to the GalCiv4 website, allowing easy access to community created mods. Simply click on “Mods” on the launcher to bring up the new interface.



Clicking on the “Get mods” button will take you to the GalCiv4 website where modders can upload their creations, and you can download them too.



We can see Frogboy’s mod here on the right, click on it and you’ll be prompted to save it somewhere on your computer. Once you’ve done that, come back to the mod manager and click “Install new mod”, and select the file you just downloaded.



You’ll be prompted to enable your mod, or click “Enable game mod support” at the bottom of the window, and your mod will be activated. Launch the game as usual and hey presto! Frogboy’s insanely large map mod is activated and ready to steal a couple of months of your life.



If you’re inclined to modding, get your mods uploaded to the site! Galactic Civlizations is a game limited only by the imaginations of the players and modders that support it, so get involved!

And let us know what you think of the modding tool in the comments below. Cheers!

[h3]Limited Time Discount on the Expansion Pass[/h3]
Get in now and gain immediate access to the Soundtrack today, and the remaining 5 as they release.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/1159/Galactic_Civilizations_IV__Expansion_Pass/?snr=1_5_9__403


[h2]The v2.1 Genesis Update[/h2]
Introduces a wealth of new features and enhancements, including: 

• Steam Workshop integration for Steam users 
  
• A new Mod Manager for easier mod navigation 
  
• An improved tutorial for newcomers 
  
• 22 minutes of additional music to enrich gameplay
  
• Enhanced military starbase zone enforcement 
  
• Expanded support for various non-English languages 
  
• A variety of new events, AI improvements, and much more 
  
• Full changelog here

We’re thrilled with the feedback from our players. Many of the updates in v2.1 have been inspired by their invaluable suggestions across forums, Discord, Reddit, and more.

In addition to the Supernova update, Stardock has introduced its first Expansion Pass for Galactic Civilizations IV. This pass offers players a significant discount on upcoming DLCs and expansions, drawing inspiration from the popular Founders Program of the previous game. The Expansion Pass is a fantastic offer, covering the first years' worth of expansions and DLC, modeled after our successful Founders Program.


[h2]The Expansion Pass[/h2]
Players immediately gain access to the 60+ song Soundtrack of Galactic Civilizations IV. The pass will also automatically unlock upcoming content, including:

• Tales from Centauron this December
  
• Warlords in the Winter
  
• The Species Pack in the Spring
  
• Megastructures in the Summer
  
• Tales of the Arnor in the Fall
  

The Expansion Pass not only supports the development of exciting new features and content, but it also enables us to expand our team with more engineers and artists. This growth will help us incorporate the fantastic ideas our community shares for future free game update.





[h2]v2.1 Genesis Screenshots[/h2]

We'd like to introduce everyone to update v2.1, also called the Genesis update for its focus on creativity with the introduction of steam workshop integration. The update also includes mod updates, improvements to the tutorial, lots of new events, more music, and major improvements to the War AI. Please read below for more details.

Art

• New Icon Art for planetary improvements.
  

AlienGPT

• Image generation now works correctly after selecting an image, changing the prompt, and then generating a new batch of images.
  

Audio

• The game gets 22 minutes of new music spread through the course of the game.
  
• Midgame music changed from 100 turns to 60 turns (5 years) so that the next batch of music could be heard sooner.
  
• New events get voiceovers (English).
  

Core

• We added an option to turn off the startup resolution check. To enable, open your prefs.ini and set "DisplayResolutionCheckEnabled" to 0. We want your feedback if this addresses your startup crash issue.
  
• Fixed a stuck turn caused by the game saving while a ship was moving.
  
• Fixed a memory leak in the Ship Designer.
  

Battle Viewer

• Auto volley works faster.
  
• Reduced the pretty long delay at times between the ship being destroyed and the ship disappearing.
  
• The general animation of battles on the map is faster.
  
• Disabling text of 0 values in the battle log.
  
• Adding Overkill display, so if a ship is shot at that is already dead, it doesn't show up as incorrectly defended damage.
  
• Added a new Accuracy column next to the weapon range.
  
• Added should be three new percentage columns next to each damage mitigation strategy, with the statuses of those defenses.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the battle predictions sometimes to be wildly different than the actual results.
  

Gameplay

AI

• Major AI update: Military commander AI and Political leader AI now talk to each other to ensure their military is ready to go to war before declaring war (no more declaring war while they're still assembling fleets).
  
• AI is more nuanced about attacking enemies with smaller fleets if they are certain to win and they are close.
  
• AI is better at determining whether a given civ is within range of the other for diplomatic calculations.
  
• AI doesn't consider being at war with a civ that hates being a real team-up.
  
• AI begging you to declare war on someone else is much less frequent.
  
• Aggressive civs don't use siege ships but, instead, go right to Transports.
  
• AI can classify planets as wealth-generating focused planets.
  
• AI is better at building approval districts when necessary.
  
• An AI that is supposed to be murdering everyone will not ask for peace.
  
• AI is much better at avoiding war with civs they can't easily reach unless they've been paid off or have no other alternative.
  
• Snathi will no longer defend their planets from invasion. Neither will the Xendar. It's all attack attack attack.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused AI to send individual ships to attack invaders near Core World.
  
• Siege fleets are much braver about attacking worlds that have defenders.
  
• Space monsters and pirates are more intelligent in who and how they attack.
  
• AI bonuses for high levels are reduced due to AI getting smarter. Changes include:
  
  • Bright:
    
    • AI no longer gets money upfront.
      
    • AI no longer gets a manufacturing and research bonus.
      
  • Genius:
    
    • AI logistics bonus reduced from 3 to 2.
      
    • AI is no longer given extra money at the start of the game.
      
    • AI population cap bonus reduced from 3 to 2.
      
  • Incredible:
    
    • AI Sensor range bonus decreased from 24 to 16.
      
    • AI starting money bonus reduced from 50,000 credits to 5,000.
      
    • AI is much less willing to give money each turn to the player for stuff.
      
    • AI is much less willing to go to war with their friends for stuff.
      


Artifacts
• New Artifact: Genius bomb. Slowly increases the intelligence of a target core world to 20 over time.
  
• New Artifact: Magnify Influence. Increases influence generation by 3X on a target planet for 24 turns.
  


Citizens


• Worker specialists no longer provide Influence Growth for their colonies due to being busy...you know, working.
  
• Influence per turn from Workers reduced from 20% per social skill to 5% per social skill.
  
• Entertainer Influence generation reduced from 50% of their social stat to 10% of their social stat.
  
• Celebrity influence generation reduced from being 100% of their social stat to 50%.
  
• Culture (Influence) related techs are somewhat more expensive to research.
  
• Reduced the Influence of scientists.
  
• Criminals LIKE crime.
  


Executive Orders

• Coerced colonization approval hit reduced from 15% to 10%.
  
• Increased fertility executive order no longer available to synthetic civs.
  


Events


• Spawned events Civs (Thalan, Snathi, etc.) are now the result of someone making a choice in an event (doesn't have to be the player), and it will spawn near the civ that made the choice and rolled those dice.
  
• Lots of new leader events have been added.
  
• Updated Tutorial with new steps and objectives, better flow, and newer player-friendly pop-ups.
  
• Improved VO's provided by BattleMode.
  
• New events are now hooked up for voice acting.
  
• The "Terrible Weapon" event's negative effect duration was reduced to 24 months, but its permanent beam attack benefit also decreased to 4.
  
• Event-based diplomatic effects were edited to be more succinct.
  


Galaxy


• The "Rare Stars" galaxy start option makes stars rarer for hermit players.
  
• The gigantic sector size increased from 100,000 tiles to 130,000 tiles. For reference, a medium-sized map on its own is 10,000 tiles.
  
• Map sizes won't be reduced if you choose map sizes that are beyond the recommended for your system if you have more than 10GB of RAM.
  


Improvements


• Fixed a bug that allowed non-homeworld improvements to be built on your homeworld by removing your capital city.
  
• Hyperion Shrinker is now a civ achievement, so everyone can potentially build it, but the cost increased from 200 to 600.
  
• Starport Maintenance reduced from 2 to 1.
  
• New improvement: Orbital Farm. Unlocked with Xeno Agriculture (early food upgrade).
  
• Industrial Center buffed. Manufacturing increased from 3% to 10%.
  
• "Beacon of Babylon's" Harmony Crystal cost was reduced from 5 to 3, and faction-wide influence buff was reduced from 10% to 5%.
  
• Cultural Beacon Influence per turn benefit was reduced from 20% to 10%, and
• Manufacturing Cost was reduced from 1400 to 600.
  
• "Manufacture Life" always produces a Yor instead of whatever citizen type the player has chosen (i.e., won't create cats anymore).
  
• "Orbital Farm" Durantium cost increased from 1 to 5.
  
• Precursor Elevator decay mod changed from multiplier to flat.
  
• Duranitum cost for Space Elevator orbital increased from 1 to 2.
  
• Space Elevator orbital now has a Maintenance cost of 1.
  


Misc


• Added many new Leader Traits.
  
• Fixed (reduced) an exploit where players could easily get players to go to war with each other with some trinkets and tech.
  
• Mountainous Worlds can now have up to 2 fertility (instead of always 0).
  
• Xeloxi tolerance to pollution increased.
  
• The "Asteroid Mining Module" cost was reduced from 40 to 10.
  
• Asteroid Mining Factory benefit increased from +0.1 manufacturing to +0.2
  
• "Military Starbases" will automatically attack enemies that come into their zone of control.
  
• Balance pass on the planet's default cultural relevance.
  
• Pirates are allowed to build ships into the late game.
  
• The "Natural Enemy" penalty increased from -3 to -8 (i.e., Drengin and Torians will never be friends).
  
• Diplomatic bonuses and penalties were edited to be more succinct.
  


Ships


• "Gravity's Heart" Commander ship nerfed, and it loses a Plasma Weapon.
  
• T'lass's Flagship nerfed. Loses 2 Plasma weapons.
  
• Tiny and Small Hulls were made slightly visually bigger on the map to be easier to see.
  
• AI is better at researching larger hulls.
  
• Tiny Ship hull cost increased from 12 to 20.
  
• Tiny Ship Base Moves increased from 3 to 4.
  
• Small Ship (Frigates) Base Cost increased from 30 to 75.
  
• Small Ship Base Moves increased from 3 to 4.
  
• Small Ship Base HP increased from 5 to 8.
  
• Small Ship Base Mass increased from 10 to 15.
  
• Small Ship Base logistics increased from 3 to 4.
  
• Medium Ship (Cruiser) base HP increased from 32 to 50.
  
• Medium Ship Base Moves increased from 3 to 4.
  
• Large Ship (Battleships) Base HP increased from 128 to 150.
  
• Large Ship Base Moves increased from 3 to 4.
  
• The Huge Ship (Dreadnoughts) base HP increased from 200 to 300.
  
• Huge ship Base moves increased from 3 to 4.
  
• Carrier Module fighter capacity increased from 4 to 16.
  
• Carrier Module cost increased from 150 to 550.
  
• Carrier Module Mass increased from 15 to 20 Mass + 20% of the Total Mass to 50% of the Total Mass.
  
• Ships with the "Escape Battle" ability (such as the Xeloxi Command ship "Ladgerda") are no longer almost indestructible.
  
• AI ship designs emphasize defensive modules more than before.
  
• Anti-matter bomb damage was reduced from 12 to 8 HP.
  
• Starbase on weapon volleys changed so that they can fire every turn. Whoahahaha!
  
• Anti-Matter bomb requires a ton of space.
  


Tech


• Extreme miniaturization cost reduced.
  

Missions

• Restored missing trigger set references for missions.
  
• Disabled the Korath mission, as it was not ready.
  
• Restored deleted scenario conversations for the missions.
  
• Restored missing trigger sets for other missions.
  

Tutorial

• Updated Tutorial Screens to Blur English Text.
  
• Updated Tutorial VO.
  
• AI players are literally blocked from attacking the pirate shipyard on the Tutorial mission. We tried to be nice.
  
• Disabled the redundant tutorial pop-up windows for research, shipyards, etc. We already have pop-up windows for those, and having a duplicate that then spawns another similar window breaks flow.
  
• The tutorial map can have nebula and precursor relics.
  
• Nebulas are now rare.
  
• Tutorial techs are made quite a bit more expensive in general to prevent players from quickly going through them.
  
• Additional techs were added to the tutorial, including Planetology (for food).
  
• Minor text edits for flow/clarity per playtesting feedback.
  
• The player no longer has a step for researching Colonization. Instead, they'll get directed straight to 'Build a Colony Ship' if they haven't already.
  
• Fixed an issue where the "Colonize a Class 10+ Planet Objective "objective wouldn't complete when appropriate.
  
• The 'On Selected' trigger doesn't work if the entity became selected through the end-turn tab.
  
• Fixed a problem where the select entity (e.g., a probe) selection event wasn't getting triggered if the game selected the entity as part of the End Turn process.
  
• Patched other cases that caused the selection events to get missed.
  
• The "Executive Order" trigger is no longer triggered by using an Artifact.
  

MP

• AI with high intelligence no longer causes desync.
  

Text/Localization

• Generic names made less human-y.
  
• Updated text for refits to explain that the movement bonus is only for friendly territory.
  
• The AI is humbler in its speech when it's losing a war.
  
• Text updated to explain that the ORGANIC population won't grow without food. Food doesn't help robots.
  
• Added Multiple New Lore Lines for the GNN Events
  
• More human-gendered names.
  
• Fixed empty string issues and text sizes.
  
• Replaced references of Survey ships with Flag Ships (They are Flagships)
  
• General move to changing "The Alliance" to "The Terran Alliance."
  
• MEGA translation update. It should be of much higher quality. Fingers crossed.
  
• Fixed flavor text for techs in many languages.
  
• Big Spanish update with community help in improving it. Shout outs to Charlemagne and Shekerd.
  
• Polish font sizes increased on QHD UI.
  
• Russian font size increased to be more readable.
  
• Spanish font sizes were adjusted to be easier on the eyes.
  
• Slight tweaks to Chinese so that inline icon better matches the text size.
  
• Updated Chinese fonts to remove weights and increased 4K point sizes from user feedback
  

UI

• You can no longer place multiple one-per-ship components on a ship design when in Advanced Edit mode.
  
• Fixed an issue where the game would not warn about invalid UI sizes if the resolution had not been set manually in the prefs or options screen.
  
• Fix several problems where the UI scale wasn't set correctly both in the UI and on startup.
  
• Update Diplomat slots to support up to 4 lines for longer race names.
  
• The Civ name lists in the End-game summary screen no longer overflowed at the bottom of the screen if there were too many.
  
• Narrowed the width of the Civ summary tooltip.
  
• Fix the turn distance calculations for the tooltip when pressing CTRL on the galactic map.
  
• Tiles outside of your fleet range no longer incorrectly state that the "Subspace Streaming" tech is required.
  
• Escape Battle Module now has cooldown information in the tooltip.
  
• Removed blank spaces appearing on the bottom of citizen tooltips.
  
• Steam Workshop: The Workshop Button in the Title Screen pops up Steam Overlay (only in Steam, not epic).
  
• Updated Artifact card to a wider format to better fix text.
  
• Ship path numbers now correctly show when a selected ship moves off.
  
• Updated the Databank Civ overview screen to use more consistent terminology.
  
• Updated the tooltip for the Main Menu icon should read just "Workshop."
  
• Added icons to the Cultural Focus dropdown so that all the Ideologies have an icon displayed in front of them.
  
• Civilization Abilities "Raiders" now has the correct Income tooltip.
  
• On the databank screen, added an explanation that citizens may come from any race.
  

Workshop / Mods

• Enable Steam Workshop on Steam build. Epic users will continue to use the older workshop.
  
  • We plan to add a button to automatically transfer your content to the Steam Workshop soon.
    
• We have added an external mod manager that can be opened from the game’s Launcher. This tool allows you to install, enable, and disable mods.
  

Last week we talked about some changes made to the way the game AI played when at war, which has gone some way towards addressing the lack of pressure and difficulty some players were experiencing in the mid to late game. We’ve not stopped there, and Frogboy has recently dropped some hints at what will be coming in the upcoming v2.1.

For now though, we’re going to examine some of the smaller changes that came in with v2.01 that you might have missed, but we feel add something significant to the way the game plays.



While these smaller changes aren’t quite as sexy as big content updates or drastic gameplay changes, they all work together to gradually improve the quality of the game by making it feel more immersive or believable, including a general glow-up of game mechanics to tighten up strategic and tactical play respectively.

First up is map generation. One of the most important factors in determining the kind of game you’re going to get, and its difficulty, is the positioning of where you and your rivals will spawn on the galaxy map, and we’d had a lot of feedback about this since the release of the game onto Steam.

On top of an improved distribution of stars, which has given each sector a more organic feeling (and strategically interesting) layout, we’ve now tweaked the Maximum and Recommended number of players to adjust to the number of sectors, as well as overall map size.





This should mean that multi-sector games are better balanced out at the recommended settings, and the player is always free to add more or less to suit their particular playstyle. Remember, if you want more time to expand, set less players than the recommended number, and if you want more pressure from the AI earlier on, add more.



Pollution is generated by your industry and reduces population growth as it increases in intensity. That’s there to give the player reason to pause and consider what is more important: rapid industrial development or more Citizens for Jobs and colonization.



Polluting Districts and Improvements now increase their output of Pollution as they scale in level, to represent the added load on your eco-system as your industry begins to sprawl. Furthermore, the more Pollution on a planet, the more upset your Citizens will get with some species being more or less bothered by it. Others are completely unaffected by Pollution, while radioactive races just love wallowing around in toxic sludge!

Next up is a series of changes intended to reduce the effectiveness of the stacking of Starbase areas of effect: we’ve increased the number of tiles required between each base from three to four, while adding a maintenance cost to some of the more advanced modules too.



This particularly affects Military Starbases, which were seriously overperforming in terms of their cost effectiveness, and are now more appropriately priced to prevent the player from spamming them everywhere. They’ll also auto-fire their missile-based ranged attack at passing ships too.

Lastly here, we’ve reduced the effectiveness of some of the movement modifiers on the various modules to fix the stacking effect granting ships unintended invincibility and teleportation abilities.




The Supernova update added the ability for ships to be refitted to later models, a long requested feature. However, players were somewhat baffled at why this technology came so late in the tech-tree (previously it was accessed at the same time as Cruisers) and was so expensive.

The initial thinking there was that refitting a ship is pretty difficult compared to building it from scratch, and the technology and pricing should reflect that. Unfortunately this wasn’t communicated and felt jarring to the community, and so we’ve reduced the cost of refits and provided access to them earlier too.

We’re always keen for feedback and your help is proving invaluable in assisting to improve the game, so let us know what you think of these changes in the comments sections below!

One of the most common questions I see asked in the 4X gaming communities online is “What are the 4X games with the best game AI?”, and inevitably someone will mention one of the Galactic Civilizations games in amongst some of the other greats of the genre. Usually, it’s GalCiv2, but the original PC game and Galactic Civilizations III pop up occasionally too.

With such a respectable heritage, Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova had big boots to fill. We think the AI is pretty good now and up there with the past games in the series, but there’s always room for improvement, and one common complaint that we received shortly before launch was that the AI was behaving in an unsatisfying way when it was at war with the player.

Firstly, even if an AI-controlled civilization had built a large and powerful empire, bigger and stronger than the player it was at war with, it would occasionally just sit there, building up fleets but not reacting to the player’s moves until they’d gotten really close. The allowed the player free reign to set up coordinated attacks on enemy Core Worlds and Colonies, which the AI struggled to react to and it often looked to just be sitting there, waiting for you to kill it.



The AI in Galactic Civilizations plays fairly: that means it plays by the same rules as the player, including its vision range and ability to detect threats, and one of the consequences of this is a regular check for threats, which can be computationally expensive if not done efficiently. Optimizing's the AI thinking process a little too much led to it not spotting out far enough.

This issue has now been addressed, with the AI looking a lot further out to detect incoming threats, which makes the AI a much more dangerous opponent when engaged in a war. It will also better protect its homeworld in wartime.

Furthermore, it is now a lot better at figuring out if the player is a threat, meaning that it is more likely to declare war in the face of hostile behavior.

Finally, it will now build balanced fleets, with less of the fighters and bombers it tended to field in heavy numbers, and more of the larger ships, ensuring that it’ll do better in keeping up with the player’s fleets.

Before this patch, all of the above occasionally created situations like this one from a recent game of mine, where the AI just didn’t react to my invasion fleets well enough and I easily rolled over half the galaxy by turn 153, with not a single war declaration from the AI all game.



Things have improved! In this new game, the Drengin declare an early war to take advantage of the fact I built a lot of infrastructure with no defending fleets.



And here’s a huge invasion by the Mimot Brotherhood, who are fed up of the Yor’s constant expansion and corruption of their fuzzy youngsters with a constant barrage of ear-splitting techno music.



On a non-combat related topic, the AI should now pick better colonization targets for its colony ships, preferring the better class worlds over poorer neighbors if possible.