Galactic Civilizations IV News

It’s time for a quick teaser of our latest update v2.9, named “The Starview Update” is coming soon for Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova. Alongside a substantial list of the usual bugfixes and balance changes we’ve applied to address issues players have found and reported to us, we’ve continued to add content and improve the overall user experience of playing the game. I won’t cover everything here because the v2.9 update is pretty substantial, so I’m picking out some choice titbits to whet your appetites for its upcoming coming release.

First up, we’ve got another redesigned roster of ships for our very own psychopathic Sentient Droids, the Yor!


The Yor Singularity are a favorite of many GalCiv players including, so I’ve been reliably informed, Frogboy himself, the lead designer behind the GalCiv series. Fans of this malevolent cybernetic monstrosity are in for a treat because their ship models have undergone a rather extensive visual upgrade!


Whenever we update ship models, the designs that are being replaced are still available as an alternative set for players to use alongside these replacements. As usual, the “Classic Yor” set is available for those of you who still love those older ships. This will also increase the range of Synthetic and Cybernetic themed models to include in your custom civilizations too.


What’s more, Starbase and Shipyard UIs have been beautified and tidied!


We’ve removed the graph guidelines lines from behind the Starbase, showing the galaxy behind in all its glory, and it really stands out a lot better now. The Starbase UI has had a redesign to make it cleaner and easier to parse too. These Starbases have never looked so good!


The Shipyard screen has also been upgraded, again showing off your beautiful ship designs against the Starfield backdrop instead of those old grid lines. You’ll even see the occasional ship fly past too!


In line with this update’s theme of raising the overall quality of the game’s general user experience, there’s been a serious pass made over the in-game text and tooltips to replace outdated information and better clarify their meanings. GalCiv is a complex game series even for 4X, and Supernova is no exception to this rule, with many different interlocking game mechanics and systems to consider.

As the game develops, your civilization grows and the amount of fleets you have to manage increases, the use of GalCiv 4’s automation tools and Rally Points can be a serious time and effort saver.

Rally Points aren’t just for automating the process of flying newly built ships out to a distant location: veteran players have come up with many novel and ingenious uses for them. Before this update, accessing the UI for Rally Points required an actively selected Shipyard or ship (and often meant you had to search for one on the map to do so), but now they can be rapidly accessed through their own dedicated hotkey, defaulted to “P”.


Once your Rally Points are set up, you can use the automation tools to direct fleets to and from them. These controls were previously located in the Civilization Policies screen, but we felt it would be more consistent if these automation tools had their dedicated place on the main screen’s toolbar, as you can see below.


The Civilization Policy screen is a lot neater as a result, as you can see. And what’s this at the top left of the screen?


That’s right, the old tax brackets of Low, Medium, High etc has gone, replaced with a slider that allows a much finer gradation of taxation. This is a pretty significant change as it gives you more control over your economic, industrial and research output.


The team have also removed deprecated and unused techs from the tech tree, so they’ll not turn up in your game anymore. Along with the larger changes made to better organize the tech tree over recent patches, we’re hoping that this smooths the process of picking your path through the research tree to get what you need from your civilization as the game develops.

We recognize that it’s essential for players to have quick access to the information they need to make the right decisions, turn by turn, and so this effort should go some way towards ensuring there’s less confusion and more fun in your campaigns.

As I stated previously, as you’d expect there’s a big batch of gameplay updates, including bugfixes, balance changes and general game polish bundled along with this patch. I’m going to pick just one of these, as it’s definitely one I see complaints about all the time on our various socials: the Festron no longer consume Citizens they shouldn’t be able to eat, like beings made out of rock or metal. Practically speaking, this means they can’t eat any Citizen that doesn’t itself consume Food. This kind of fix may seem like small fry, but immersion is really important in a strategy game, and little inconsistencies like that can really take you out of your game. Now your little Festron guys can chow down on those tasty Taurians, Xeloxi, Catgirls and all the rest without magically consuming Yor and Onyx along with them.


Finally, the v2.9 update brings another well requested feature to fix a potentially frustrating situation regarding downloadable content for GalCiv 4: if you own any of the DLC for Supernova, you’ll no longer need to be online to access that content. Not much more to say about this, but thank you for bearing with us as we got this one sorted.

There’s a lot more to this update but that should be enough for now. We hope you enjoy v2.9 and the improvements to Galactic Civilizations IV’s overall user experience.

Cheers!

Hello everyone!

For this week's dev journal, I wanted to further discuss the utility of Gal Civ IV’s Ship Designer.

This time around, I will be focusing on the mechanical benefits of using the Ship Designer and some scenarios where using it may come in handy.

In case you missed it, feel free to check out Dev Journal #71 where I explore some of what’s possible for players looking to create really cool-looking ships. See my design, the ExoDrake, below for a preview of the topic.



Without further ado, let's talk about the Ship Designer.

There are a few reasons why you might want to create custom Ship Designs. These reasons can generally be boiled down to a singular concept: Specialization.

By and large, the ships available to the player by default are designed to be well-rounded and useful in almost every situation. They are a one-size-fits-all solution that can get the job done.

For ships better suited for unique and novel situations, players can turn to the Ship Designer.

By creating new, custom Ship Designs, you can create tools uniquely suited for the challenges at hand. These new designs can allow you to accomplish your objectives with greater efficiency than the standard shipsets would usually allow.



There are two ways to access the Ship Designer: from the Main Menu and from inside a Shipyard.



When accessed from the Main Menu, the Ship Designer will display all available components regardless of prerequisite Techs whereas accessing the Ship Designer mid-game from inside a Shipyard will limit your selection.



This limitation helps ensure that the ships you design don’t contain components outside of what you are currently capable of producing.

This can also help with pacing in subsequent games as your Ship Designs get saved and added to the pool of ships available to the Civilization you created them as.

Designs utilizing components unlocked via early-game techs will be made available during the early-game and designs made with late-game components will appear in the late-game.

The alternative of accessing the Ship Designer via the Main Menu is useful in its own right. A savvy player may concoct their own powerful designs and plan for them to become available ahead of time.

To begin a new design, players have the option of starting from scratch or using an existing Ship Design as a template.

To start from scratch, select the “New Ship Class” button. To work from an existing ship, select your ship of choice and then hit the button with a plus-mark beneath the “New Ship Class” button.



Starting from scratch will reveal more options for Ship Type and using an existing Ship Design will limit these options to the size and type of ship selected (such as combat versus non-combat.)

Players can also choose their ship's Operational Ability and Target Priorities from this screen - assuming they are designing a combat vessel.

These two variables are powerful tools for creating specialized ships.



Once in the designer, players will need to choose a Hull before attaching any components.

Hull Size determines each ship’s Capacity for components - the bigger the ship, the greater the Capacity.

You will be limited to the ship sizes unlocked by certain technologies if accessing the Designer from a Shipyard and/or if you started with an existing ship as a template.

The bigger the Hull, the more late-game the prerequisite technology. Keep in mind that bigger Ship Designs will not be made available during the earlier parts of the game.

Hull Capacities are as follows:

• Tiny = 8
  
• Small = 18
  
• Medium = 32
  
• Large = 60
  
• Huge = 100
  
• Cargo = 20 (for non-combat ships)
  

Hitting the button in the top right will allow you to exit Cosmetic Mode and begin adding new components.



You then see all available components on the left, sorted into five categories:

• Weapons (Beam Weapons, Missile Weapons, Kinetic Weapons, and Exotic Weaponry)
  
• Defenses (Shields, Evasion, Armor, and special defense components)
  
• Drives (Moves)
  
• Support (Hit Point, Sensor Range, Accuracy, and fleet buffing components)
  
• Special (Specialty modules including Flagship, Supply, and Probe Modules)
  

You can see the stats and effects of each component by hovering over them.

One important stat of note is Mass. Attaching components adds Mass to the Equipment Manifest at the bottom of the Ship Designer. The Equipment Manifest is capped by your ship's Capacity, and you will not be allowed to add any component that would exceed Capacity.

Capacity can be increased with certain techs and by larger Hull Sizes as previously discussed.



Components can be attached by selecting one from the panel on the left and placing it onto the ship by clicking an anchor point.



Changes in Mass are previewed in the Equipment Manifest while each component is selected and updated once attached.



The look of each attached component can be adjusted via the control panel in the bottom right-hand corner with translation, rotation, and scaling options alongside more advanced tools like mirroring, hiding, or animation.

For the players looking to preserve the cosmetic aspects of their designs, one trick you can use is to hold ‘Shift’ and ‘Ctrl’ while attaching a new component. What this does is it snaps the component to the root of the Ship Design without an anchor point. Then, with the component selected, you can toggle the ‘Hide Part' option in the bottom right control panel - keeping it invisible and out of the way.



It is also important to keep an eye on the Manufacturing Cost as you add components as some will require specific resources like Elerium, Antimatter, Promethion, or Durantium to be produced. Each additional component will also add to the Construction Costs which determine how long it will take a Shipyard to produce your designs.

Adding too many components can limit your ability to produce these ships.



One way you can utilize the Ship Designer is to create “upgraded” versions of existing ships like, for example:

• Probes and Flagships with Increased Sensor Range
  
• Freighter (Trade ships) or Supply ships with increased Moves
  
• Repair Ships with increased Soldiering for quicker Invasions
  

However, of all the possible ways to use the Ship Designer, you will probably spend the most time (and have the most fun!) designing for combat.

Combat in Gal Civ IV has a rock-paper-scissors-type match-up system with three weapon types and three defense types.



Understanding these categories and their matchups will enable you to design ships tailor-made to dismantle your galactic opponents.

Consider:


Take a look at the Yor Fleet below. By examining their combat stats, we can see they have high Evasion and increased Beam Attack damage.



To counter this fleet, I want to design ships with high Shield (and Hit Points) and powerful Beam Weapons.

While starting a new Ship Design, I’ll choose an Operational Ability to “Defender” to further reduce the strength of their Evasion. I’ll also select “Bombers” as the Targeting Priority to quickly remove the two ships with Missile Weapons from their fleet.



From here, I’ll grab a Fleet Shield for increased Shield, Lasers for Beam Damage and accuracy, Chaff to counter their Missiles, and an Ion Cannon to neutralize their Evasion.



With my design complete, I can save my newly complete “Yor Doomed” Ship Design and begin production on a fleet.



With a fleet of six “Yor Doomed” ships, the Yor fleet that threatened my border didn’t stand a chance.



One last note on accumulating Ship Designs:

As your game progresses, your various Ship Designs will slowly become obsolete as your opponents adapt and technology progresses. When this happens, you have the option to mark them as such and have them removed from your Shipyard’s available projects for the remainder of your game.



The Ship Designer allows you to adapt and respond to the challenges that arise throughout a game. This is a cumulative effect that reaches beyond the end of one game and into the next. Each ship you design gets saved to the ever-increasing roster of available ships, allowing you to respond quickly to every obstacle.

You may even face new challenges should you go toe-to-toe with a Civilization you have previously played as and designed ships for. I’ll be on the lookout for the “Yor Doomed” fleet the next time I play as the Yor.

There are endless possibilities and clever component combinations to discover. I’ve only touched on a few here in this Dev Journal.

And so, I’d like to ask:

• What component combinations have you discovered?
  
• Do you have a favorite Ship Design?
  

Thank you for reading and have fun conquering the galaxy!

4X games are fun because you take the role of a great leader of a great nation, civilization or tribe and then lord it over them as you see fit. You call the shots, and nobody else. Sure, some games have more or less simulation aspects to them that interfere in various ways with your top-down decision making process, but usually, as the head honcho, what you say goes.

Of course, this isn’t particularly realistic when it comes to certain aspects of an empire’s management: President BATTLEMODE might well have grandiose ideas about rush-building that shiny new battleship he needs to lead his navy to victory in an upcoming war in the Pacific, but no matter how much he shakes his fists and jumps up and down, yells at people over the phone and threatens all kinds of terrible things, the myriad elements that go into his country’s industrial production chain just can’t quite get it together this month, and the President has to make do with an ancient 1890s ironclad leading his WW2 forces instead. Very embarrassing.


In GalCiv IV the capacity for a government or leader to pull strings to make extraordinary things happen represented as a special resource called Control.

Control represents how closely knit your leader’s control network over their own civilization is. Naturally, the closer a ruler leans towards totalitarianism, the easier it is to have their cronies watching over every aspect of society, enough to pull things together in times of need and get something important done at short notice.


Control is generated in several ways: most civilizations will generate at least one Control point per turn from the start of the game through the Capital City on their homeworld, although this is not a strict rule and some Core Civs do not, instead having to aim for some of the other generation methods to get their first Control points rolling in. This is deliberate, and represents their initial inability to pull their civilization together enough to rush build that Colony Ship they so desperately need.

The Civilization Trait Militant can grant a starting bonus of 50 extra Control per Trait point, which can be a very powerful way to get your fledgling empire up and running.


Certain Improvements, Events and Ideological traits can all generate you more Control too, whether increasing the amount you get per turn like the Coordination Beacon improvement here…


Or granting a one-time boost of Control points, like this 100 point boost gained by unlocking Iron Fist in the Totalitarianism ideology tree.


All this begs the question: what do I need Control for? What do I spend all those points on?

Primarily, Control is the main resource used when activating Executive Orders, which are a neat way of organising some of the really special, exciting abilities representing extraordinary feats of bureaucratic aptitude, incredible logistical efficiency, or just a tyrant’s terrifying ability to crack skulls together. These Executive Orders give your civilization has access to a series of unlockable bonuses that can give you a special boost just when you need it: providing you have the Control (and sometimes a few Credits) to pay for it.


Draft Colonists costs a fairly sizeable chunk of Control points but has a fairly rapid cooldown timer of just 12 turns, and this means civilizations that expend the effort to gain more control points in the early game can colonise new worlds very quickly: remember, you’ll also be building your own colony ships in your shipyards too.



Galactic Festival is cheap, at only 10 Control, but has a long cooldown. There’s a reason for this: it can generate a lot of extra credits every turn through it’s large +25% Tourism bonus. This obviously works better if you’ve got a large territory, as Tourism income is based on how many hexes you control, but this Executive Order can fill the coffers pretty rapidly if you play it at the right time.

Each civilization will have it’s own set of Executive Orders and many of them will be unlocked with research or through the Ideological Traits tree, and there’s a lot of them to find and use!

Control is also used for rush-building improvements and shipyard projects too, so President BATTLEMODE can finally get that battleship he needed.


There are a few other places where Control will be used, such as in certain Event choices, but I’ll not spoil those.

Have fun exerting control over your civilization!

Hello everyone! This week, I wanted to talk to you all about the GalCiv IV’s Ship Designer.

As a feature, the Ship Designer allows players to do two important things:

1. Create custom ships specially tailored to their needs
   
2. 
   
3. Create really, really cool designs
   

In this Dev Journal, I am going to focus on the latter.

As you might guess from my username, I am a big fan of all things dragons - therefore, it should come as no surprise that the Drath are my favorite civilization.

And so, I would like to walk you through how I went about creating my new Drath ship, the ExoDragon.


The first step in creating a new ship design is opening the Ship Designer.

The Ship Designer can be found in the Main Menu left of the Workshop, Language, and Options buttons.

You can also access the Ship Designer mid-game from any Shipyard though options like Components and Operation Abilities will be limited by your current Technology.


Before fully launching the Ship Designer, you will be prompted to select Ship Style, Ship Colors, Sub Surface Textures, and Material Modifiers.

“Ship Style” refers to the “set” of Ship Designs used by each civilization - in this case, the Drath Ship Style is used by the Drath. Completed designs get added to the selected “set” and made available to any civilization using that Style.

Ship Colors, Sub Surface Textures, and Material Modifiers are not saved with any completed design but instead applied to all ships according to the current Civilization. Players can change these settings later while creating/editing a custom Civilization or setting up a new game.

An easy way to find what Sub Surface Textures and Material Modifiers a Civilization uses by default is to make a copy of that Civilization, edit it, and navigate to the “Fleets” tab of that Civilization. For your convenience, however, I’ve assembled them all into one easy table!




By setting these options in the Ship Designer, we can get a better understanding of how each design will look in-game.

For this endeavor, I was designing a ship for the Drath, so I chose the Drath Style and changed the rest to match the default Drath settings:

• Drath Ship Color
  
• Scales and Orange Peel Subsurface Materials
  
• Metallic (Bright Lights) and Low Reflectivity (Bright Lights) Material Modifiers
  

With this out of the way, I launched the Designer.


After launching the Designer, I opted to get the ball rolling by creating a New Ship Class instead of choosing to Edit an existing design. This was because, for my purposes, I wanted a blank canvas.


Next, I chose to leave the Ship Type as “Unclassified.”

By making this choice, I avoided locking my design into a specific role. For reference, selecting “Flag” would have attached a Flag Module, “Colony” a Colony Module, and so on. An Unclassified ship with none of these Components can later be copied and edited to be any ship under the sun.

With the ship type selected, I was free to “Start New Design” and enter the Designer proper!


Now it was time to get started… almost.

Before I set off on creating a Dragon, I needed to set the stage.

The first step of my preparations was choosing a Hull. For a new Design made from scratch, it’s important to select a Hull as a Hull determines your ship’s Capacity for components and when it can be unlocked.

Hull Capacities are as follows:

• Tiny = 8
  
• Small = 18
  
• Medium = 32
  
• Large = 60
  
• Huge = 100
  
• Cargo = 20 (for non-combat ships)
  

I opted for a Large Hull for this design.

Next, I added a Hexagon the size of a standard tile for reference. To do so, I navigated to the Cosmetic Pieces and sorted by Style. The Hexagon piece appears near the top.

Once selected, I held CTRL + Shift and clicked anywhere within the viewport - snapping the Hexagon to the center/origin/root of the scene.

Lastly, I ensured that I had Advanced Edit Mode and Design Gizmos enabled (personal preference). I found these options at the bottom of the screen next to the animation toggle buttons.


With that out of the way, it was time to start creating!

I wanted my dragon to feel more “organic” than the usual Gal Civ spaceship, so I decided to start my search for parts with the Festron. Their carapace-y pieces looked appropriately draconic with the Scales Sub Surface Texture which was exactly what I wanted.

I started the design by chaining a handful of these pieces together slightly scaled down and tapering out to create the body.

Along the way, I adjusted each piece using the control panel on the bottom right-hand side. Often, using the scroll wheel while hovering over an individual slider offers precision that can be hard to achieve by hand.

Once I had my base, I switched focus to creating natural-looking movements.


Starting at the “neck” I used the animation tool to create an Oscillating Rotation on the X and Y axis of each section.

The Ship Designer’s animation tools allow you to edit and animate rotation, offset/motion, and scale. For animation, each of these attributes is animated in a loop where you the designer can control the speed and adjustment.

By default, animating Rotation spins each piece around a specified axis but by ticking oscillation, I achieved the motion I was after.

By oscillating ~30 degrees in either direction on the X and Y axis, I made the dragon “look” left then right, up, and then down. By halving the speed of the left-right motion, I gave it the appearance of “looking around” in an organic fashion.

With these motions repeated for each section of the body, my dragon was moving!

One more useful tip: to reset all animation, hit the pause button and then add any piece. Doing so will return the animation to neutral.


My next step was developing the head. For the head, I drew from a handful of different styles - most notably the Festron, Iconian, DLC, and Altarian styles.

Important to note is that I did not use the Mirroring toggle on the control panel for any of these parts. Normally, designers would want to “Mirror” parts like wings across their designs to halve the time they spend attaching them.

This technique would not work for my dragon as Mirroring in the Ship Designer happens across central axes and is not based on the piece the mirrored object is attached to.

A mirrored horn would end up floating away from the head when it looks to one side or another which I wanted to avoid.

Instead, I utilized the Flip toggles on the control panel to match each duplicate part accurately.


As I continued, I added Iconian-style wings and “eyes” using the Basic Light 005 piece. I gave each wing slight “stretching” and “dipping” movements, exaggerated by the preexisting movement of the body.


Nearly done, I added and animated two arms with grasping claws and removed the reference Hexagon.

Lastly, I did one more pass I chose certain pieces of my dragon where I wanted to Invert the material - switching the Primary and Secondary colors and styles.

With that complete, my dragon was finished!


I took a quick moment to capture some screenshots.

With the black background toggled (found next to the animation buttons at the bottom of the screen), I used the “Print Screen” button on my keyboard to take screenshots with transparent backgrounds. I was then able to retrieve these photos from my GalCiv4>ScreenShots folder.


With that, I saved the design with the temporary name of DragonShip_01.

Once saved, you can find your designs in your list of available designs for that Style. With any of these selected, you can hit the edit button and return to make adjustments, add components, and so on!


As an example, you may want to download the ExoDragon for yourself and equip it with some powerful Beam Weapons like the Disruptor Pulse Array or Doom Ray.

By going in and editing the design, you can do just that! You can even hide these components (or any piece you choose) if you want the effect but don’t care for the appearance.

From here, customize to your heart's content! Though be aware of each part's Mass and manufacturing time.

One more thing to be aware of is that your custom ship designs are available to the AI as well as yourself so don’t be surprised if you spot your ships prowling the galaxy!


To wrap everything up, I’d like to thank you for reading and encourage you to share your own designs on the Gal Civ IV Steam Workshop!

All you need to do is click “Upload Design,” give it a name and description, and send it on its way.

I’ve had a blast designing the ExoDragon but most of all, I’m excited to see what you create!

Check out the ExoDrake for yourself here!

In Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova the beliefs, customs and social dynamics of your civilization are determined by your Culture, consisting of an amalgamation of eight different in-game Ideologies. These aren’t just there for flavor, they can bestow powerful benefits and abilities for your fledgling empire.

Let’s take a look at how Culture and Ideology works together!



Each Ideology is comprised of a tree of linked bonuses, known as Ideological Traits, which can be unlocked by spending Culture Points.


Culture Points are generated each turn with extra points awarded for making ideologically motivated decisions in Events, through various Improvements on Core Worlds, and through many other game systems here and there. Each Ideological Trait purchased with your Culture Points will become progressively more expensive as the game progresses from start to finish.

Furthermore, each Civilization will have a Cultural Awareness score for each Ideology in the Cultural Progression system: this represents a percentage of the Culture Points that will be deducted from the total number of points required to unlock a trait, and is known as the Ideology Discount for that Ideology.


In short, the larger your Ideology Discount, the faster you’ll progress through that particular Ideology. Cultural Awareness (and thus Ideology Discount) points are accumulated in various ways, primarily through your Civilization’s preferred Ideology pick at the start of the game, and then as rewards for making choices that support that Ideology when Events appear throughout the game.

Here’s a list of the available Ideologies and simple summary of what each one represents.



While Ideological Traits have been picked to be consistent with the underlying philosophies that underpin that Ideology, there’s a variety of effects within each one, and those picks aren’t always quite as simplistic as “this is the warfare ideology” and “this ideology deals with economy”.


Sure, you’ll find that focusing on some Ideologies will heavily buff a specific aspect of your game: for example, Pacifism contains many Diplomacy bonuses, but these will usually be accompanied by other, more varied effects that suit the philosophy of pacifism. The one exception is Progressivism, which is almost exclusively hyper-focused on increasing your ability to research.

The Ideological Trait Altruism in the Pacifism tree here grants a very significant +2 Diplomacy bonus, but it also grants you a 10% proportion of all Planetary Inputs from each homeworld of a friendly Civilization to your own homeworld. This is a powerful Ideological Trait if you are intending on maintaining friendly relations with many other factions, and depending on the way your game is going, it could be a life-saver.


Let’s say you started the game in a position where you were beaten to the best colonies by your closer rivals and you’ve been somewhat economically outpaced as a result. You can’t get the military you need to beat them by force, and you haven’t quite got the cultural output you’d need to push their borders back with influence either. At times like this, trading and rushing for Diplomacy boosting Techs and Ideological Traits, like the Pacifism line, can be very effective.

The diplomatic boost you’ll get from stacking those Diplomacy modifiers will keep your larger neighbors from attacking you early, granting you valuable time and space to build your own economy, set up trade routes (remembering that trading with other civilizations also grants you a diplomacy bonus!) construct more defensive stations and fleets, and so on.

Furthermore, your smaller, taller economy will benefit from those extra Planetary Inputs you’re skimming from all the friendlier civilizations in the game. And there’ll be more friends on the map, because you’re now an expert diplomat!

All of the early traits in each Ideology are useful, and you’ll often be torn as to what to pic. This is deliberate, we want you to make tough (but hopefully fun) choices!


If I can, Cultural Awareness permitting or not, I often like to beeline for Moral Relativism in the Nihilism tree: the ability to gain Cultural Awareness in every ideology when you make an event choice is very, very powerful. This allows you to eventually pick choices from whatever Ideology you want, and get a reasonable Ideological Discount on each: very nice if you want to pick and choose the best traits from each tree!


The Culture and Ideology system is designed to work in tandem with the Tech tree too: you may be investing all you have into your military, to face down an incoming threat, and that choice will likely be hampering your research efforts. However, by jumping into the Progressivism line of traits, you can pick up the slack and put those Culture Points you’ve got piling up to some good use!

At the end of each tree, there is a powerful “capstone” trait. I won’t spoil them, but they are very desirable and grabbing one during the course of your game will often enable you to begin to snowball in power in some way. Of course, your enemies have access to these too…

Whether you focus your efforts on just one or two ideologies to make the most of your Cultural Awareness, or you just pick the traits that give you the most useful bonuses for you at that point of the game as you accumulate the Culture Points to grab them, is up to you!