Galactic Civilizations IV News

Improvements to a game’s user interface go a long way towards improving the experience you’ll get when you’re playing it. The v3.0 Hyperlane update made some significant changes to gameplay, which we’ve covered in the past few developer journals, but today we’ll take a quick look at the new UI features that it adds too.

One of the most essential changes we’ve made to the user interface comes in the form of a much improved Civilization Data Tab. There’s been some major reorganisation to make better use of this essential screen, and we’ve partitioned the whole lower half of the window for a new Civilization Wide Bonuses display interface.


It’s pretty useful to be able to see Civilization Wide Bonuses when you’re making decisions in-game, and having to hunt for it slowed things down. Previously, much of this information was a little difficult to get at: for example, if you wanted to know what your overall Beam Attack bonus was, you’d have to find and select a ship, then bring up several cascading tooltips, searching for the right bonus from a potentially long list.


Now all this information is available at a glance, all in one place. Bonuses are organised into what is being affected, and then where the bonus originates from. In the screenshot above, you can see that the Cosmic Contaminant's Gross Income bonus comes both from Techs (at 10% here) and also by Civilization Policy, which is adding another +5 Credits.

As the game develops there can be a lot in here, and there’s a handy scroll-bar at the bottom of this window so you can access extra columns as they’re needed.


Next up we’ve got a new Graphs tab. 4X games are data heavy and the sharper your tools for processing it, the better the experience will be. Part of the fun in any strategy game is in the planning, and planning is much more fun if you’ve got interesting and useful tools to help you out.

The Torians here are looking like they might want to go to war with us, the Cosmic Contaminant, and so it can be handy to figure out how we match up together. The new Graphs tab allows us to pick a Civilization and compare them to ours over a series of player-selectable metrics.

Here, I’ve picked some crucial information you might want to know if you need to size someone up for a war at a glance (or two), and I noticed something interesting: they’ve got a really low Food supply. This is something the CC could exploit during a limited war: by taking Core Worlds or Colonies that provide the Torians with Food, we could severely weaken them and force them to readjust their economy to make up for those losses.

This is another useful feature that will help you find and formulate strategies as you play.


If you want to compare your progress to multiple Civilizations, the Timeline is still there too, and this serves a different function in showing you each Civ’s overall progress over time.


We’ve already talked about Fleet Supply, but as a reminder, here’s where the new indicator on the main UI is.

Also on the top bar of the UI, we’ve encapsulated the lesser used Trade Resources into their own UI element on the right.


With this change, top bar shows all your most commonly used resources at a glance, with the Trade Resources tucked away for when you need them, and is a little less busy as a result.


Remember the Civilization Focus selector? Here’s where it’s located at the bottom of the Civilization Overview screen.

We’ve also made a significant change to the War Aims user interface, ensuring critical information on the progress of a war is always available as you play.


Here the Manti are engaged in two wars, with the Festron and the Korath Clan. We’re looking at the War of Conquest with the Festron, and you can see here that we’ve achieved several important War Aims: we’ve captured a Core World and two Colonies, although the Festron have so far given our mighty Fleets the slip and we’ve not destroyed a Starbase yet either.

As you complete these goals, the Progress bar will fill up, clearly seen near the bottom of War Aims UI element. Whoever fills the progress bar first will be the first to claim victory and the war ending Events will start. You can also see how many Months (or Turns) you’ve been at war, and how many Months remain before the “end the war already” Events start kicking off.


Finally, we’ve added a Mod Manager button to the main menu, which links you directly to the GalCiv IV website’s Workshop, where you can browse and add many community made mods for the game. GalCiv is a huge and expansive game and people love to mod stuff to better suit their tastes, and now it’s easier to find those mods.

Hope you enjoy the changes to the UI, let us know if you find these features useful in the comments below!

Cheers!

Today we’re going to take a closer look at two of the bigger features we’ve added to GalCiv in v3.0 “Hyperlane”, both of which complement the new map generation algorithm and really work to enhance the core gameplay of GalCiv IV.


As discussed in previous developer journals, Star Hyperlanes allow players to more easily transit from one part of the game map to another. Let’s briefly recap on what they are, how you use them, and why they’ve been added to the game.

v3.0 updated the map generator to create more realistic looking star maps, clustering stars and planets together in groups and giving more shape, and therefore more strategic gameplay, to your GalCiv games.

Before v3.0, stars were pretty evenly distributed across each sector and while some players like this even distribution, we thought that adding the option for clustered distribution would bring more of that dynamic, asymmetric gameplay that’s so fun in single player space 4X games particularly.


Players and the AI will race to explore these clusters, and may have to traverse space without any Stars whatsoever to reach new worlds and resources. Civs starting in larger clusters unopposed will grow larger faster, while those in smaller, more isolated clusters have a natural early defence against being rushed, but will have to find ways to reach neighbouring clusters if they want to expand their territory later on. Different Civilizations benefit more or less from being isolated or further from potential colonies than do others.


This is interesting for a couple of reasons: for those that don’t like playing with multiple sectors, it brings a little of that kind of gameplay into a single sector map, where some Civilizations will have access to more resources early, and others may be thrown into a close-in knife fight, battling for dominance over a small cluster with the winner taking all the best planets, and looking to expand to the next.


One consequence of the clustered star distribution patterns is that there will be areas of space with no stars whatsoever, and clusters may be quite far from one another. GalCiv 4 has already been through several points of development where Fleet travel time felt excessive, and so the Star Hyperlanes add a fun new way for Civs to traverse each sector more rapidly.


Star Hyperlanes link two Stars together, are detected as a consequence of unlocking some very early game research, and are really easy to use: just hop onto the lane at any point and you’ll receive a large boost to your Fleet’s Move speed, helping you traverse huge distances in a far shorter number of turns than it’d take if you didn’t have a Hyperlane to travel on.

This isn’t just a quick fix for a problem of slow movement speeds on large maps, and like the best kind of fixes, this one also adds more content for you to enjoy in the process: your mind should already be filled with wonder at the strategic considerations this will add to the game but I’ll give you just a few.


I touched on this in my previous developer journal but it may be that a Hyperlane’s terminating Stars could be a fast, two way link between yourself and a foreign power. If this is a potential ally, this could be a very useful way to rapidly transit your Fleets over to help them during a war. If it’s someone less friendly, like the Cosmic Contaminant, Drengin, Korath Clan, Yor or someone even worse, you’ll have to consider that Star Hyperlane are a potential vector for the insertion of enemy warships into your territory with very little warning.

In this way, Star Hyperlanes are a powerful tool, but one that cuts two ways; you’ll need to take care about who and what will be transiting down any Star Hyperlane, and I expect that they’ll factor into your strategic considerations greatly as you expand your territory in the early game, paying particular attention to the Civilization borders that form around each one.


Note that the map will generate Star Hyperlanes between clusters when there is some space to traverse between them, and while you can technically set the Star Hyperlanes to be active while deactivating the clustered star distribution effect completely, you’re unlikely to see many Star Hyperlanes as a result, as the Uniform Star distribution pattern doesn’t leave much room for them.


Both Hyperlane Frequency and Sector Layout (for Star distribution) are new options and can be adjusted to taste at game setup. If you want GalCiv IV to play as it did before v3.0, you can set Hyperlane Frequency to None, and Sector Layout to Uniform. If you want more clusters and more Hyperlanes than default, then that’s an option too!

The next huge feature change in v3.0 after the map generator improvements and Star Hyperlanes is the addition of the Fleet Supply Cap.


Where Logistics puts a limit on the amount of Ships you can add to a Fleet, the Fleet Supply Cap sets an overall upper limit on the amount of Ships you can field at any one time. As before, each Ship Class will be worth more or less points towards this total and once you’ve hit that limit, you’ll need to Decommission a Ship, or have them forcibly decommissioned by a hostile Civilization, to build any more.


GalCiv is a big and expansive sandbox game, and the idea all along has been to allow each player to play the game the way they want to. One of the consequences of allowing Civilizations to build unlimited ships is that wars tend to favour those with the higher Manufacturing and Research outputs, and while this is an expected (and to some extent desirable) situation in any space 4X, we don’t want wars to be won entirely at the strategic level, where a large Civilization that played very well during the eXplore, eXpand and eXploit phases of the game can trivially win the eXterminate phase too purely by outbuilding their opponents, flooding their territory with so many Fleets that they can’t possibly hope to deal with them all.

A knock on consequence of allowing a near limitless number of Ships to be built at any one time is that it the more Ships in play after a certain point, the less important each one becomes. Ever since the update accompanying the Warlords DLC release, we’ve worked hard to improve the auto-battler system GalCiv uses by increasing the amount of input the player has to alter the outcome of battles.


From the components you pick on each Ship, through to a Ship’s Class and Doctrine, and then the careful Fleet composition to ensure the Ships you’re bringing to a fight are suitable for exploiting the weaknesses in an enemy Fleet, we want you to have fun engaging with all that detail. With somewhat fewer Ships, you’ll need to be a little more discerning when it comes to Fleet combat, as you’ll feel every casualty even more.

With less Fleets overall, you’ll need to consider whether you can really afford to start that fourth simultaneous war or whether that’ll leave your military spread too thin to prevent enemies slipping through your defences. This change should make Military Starbases more cost effective, and overall make Civilizations that rely heavily on warfare over industrial development a bit more competitive. Looking at you, Korath Clan!

Another reason for putting an overall limit on the amount of Ships in the galaxy at any one time is one of performance. Some players were reporting late game slowdown and this should help work to alleviate that for those with computers that were affected by it.

You’ll probably be happy to note that the Fleet Supply Cap is quite generous, and it scales with map size, so you’re never feeling like you’ve got this huge space to fight over and only a relative handful of ships to do so (a problem I personally had with Simtex’s Master of Orion II in the early game particularly, an otherwise outstanding space 4X game). We’ve added some Planetary Improvements and Techs that increase Fleet Supply even more, and if you’re needing more Fleets for whatever reason, you’ll have the option to pursue those as research goals.


We’re hoping that with the new map generator and Star Hyperlanes, and the introduction of a more meaningful Fleet combat system that focuses more on quality over quantity, Galactic Civilizations IV will become even more exciting and fun for you to play. Let us know what you think of these changes as always!

One of the most obvious changes to GalCiv IV v3.0 will be how maps are generated. The initial philosophy in GalCiv IV was that a given sector would have a uniform star layout with the strategic points being handled by sector layout.

As time has gone on, it’s become apparent that most (>90%) players play with a single sector. This has made us revisit how maps are generated for v3.0. Now, a single sector can have its stars “clustered” within it. This would be a real problem, though, because lots of empty space is boring to move across. This is solved by having subspace streams that now exist within a sector called “Hyperlanes” which connect different clumps of stars to each other, giving a strategic hardpoint.

Hyperlanes are generated at the start of the game and are unlocked with Subspace streams (which makes that tech interesting, even on a map with only a single sector). We also are planning to let players who have the Megastructures DLC build their own hyperlanes.

Let’s take a look at how a MEDIUM sized map with OCCASIONAL stars at start currently appears:


In previous versions, the stars within a given sector would be somewhat evenly distributed with very limited empty space to prevent “dead” space. Now, with hyperlanes, we can have dead space.

Once subspace streams are unlocked they are revealed:


These hyperlanes are the result of the Precursors and predate the subspace streams. Long ago, the Arnor constructed these “hyperlanes” between the suitable stars to speed up travel. They allow ships that are already traveling within hyperspace to greatly increase their rate of speed (500% faster).


The AI and your other ships will automatically take these streams into account when plotting a course and make use of them. While they are point to point, ships can enter and exit a hyperlane at any time and still benefit from the speed boost while on a hex that includes an element of the hyperlane.

We think with this change players will find maps to a be lot more interesting. Let us know!

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Galactic Civilizations IV is closing in on a large and important milestone in its development history with the imminent release of version 3.0, the Hyperlane Update, with a lot of work done in previous versions to prepare the way for the incoming additions and changes to the game too. Now it’s time to take you through some of the main features of v3.0. This is an overview rather than a deep-dive, and we’ll be releasing more developer journals on these features soon.

Let’s start with a couple of very big and important gameplay changes.


One of the first things you’ll notice as you explore the sectors in GalCiv IV now are that some of the stars will spawn with a Stargate linking between them. You can see them in the screenshot above, connecting stars to one another.


Frogboy explained the reasoning for this addition back in developer journal #96. As a quick recap, for those players who like playing with very large sectors, even with the increased movement speed made to ships over the past few years it can take several turns to make those longer distance journeys, especially in the early game. Megastructures does add a handy instantaneous travel mechanic in the form of Stellar Gateways, but not everybody has that DLC and we needed to find another way for players to more quickly traverse parts of the map.

Once you’ve unlocked the capability to do so through research, the Star Hyperlanes will grant a 200% movement bonus to ships traveling along them, and bringing some of the functionality of node-based travel systems from other space 4X like Master of Orion and Stellaris into GalCiv, while still retaining the classic hex-based movement system overall.

I think the best way to address issues like these is to adjust or add game mechanics in a way that increases the depth of gameplay while simultaneously fixing the problem. This is an interesting solution to excessive fleet transit times because not only does it provide a way for players to more rapidly move ships between portions of the map, but those Star Hyperlanes will become a focal point for your strategic and tactical considerations too, opening up many interactions with other players as a result.


A Hyperlane starting in Drengin-controlled space could potentially dump a huge fleet of dreadful slavers right on your doorstep within a few short turns of travel, and that is going to create potential conflict or dialogue with rival players. Stargates are going to become a critical consideration as you expand out into the map and become a driving force in diplomacy and war planning.


The second huge new feature, and perhaps the biggest change made to GalCiv IV yet, is the introduction of a Supply mechanic.

While Logistics limits the number and size of the Ships you can field in your individual Fleets, Supply limits the overall number of Ships you can own in your Civilization period. The Supply limits scale up with map size of course, and you’ll still be able to field significant numbers of ships all in all.

A Ship’s Logistics value is added to the Supply when it is constructed, and once you hit your Supply Cap you can’t build any more Ships. The aim is to reduce the reliance on players winning wars purely on the strategic level by just building far more ships than your opponent can hope to match, with the added effect of helping late game performance too.


Another reason for this change is to encourage players to really engage with the detailed combat mechanics that were added alongside the release of the Warlords DLC. GalCiv IV has a deep and detailed combat system, allowing the player great agency to influence the outcome of the autobattler-style combat. Individual Ship design, Fleet composition, Ship Classes and Doctrine (which includes Operational Abilities and Targeting Priorities) all make for rich and rewarding gameplay. Technology also plays a big part, and while it’s difficult for low tech ships to compete with very advanced opponents, by carefully constructing your Fleets and setting their Doctrine to take advantage of weaknesses in your opponents' Fleets, you can often even up the odds by outplaying your rivals with superior tactics.


The Supply Cap should ensure that wars aren’t quite so focused on just outpacing your opponents on an industrial level, and this should make some of the more war-focused Core Civilizations, like the Korath, a bit more competitive too.


The Civilization Policy screen now has a new UI element and a new gameplay feature attached called Civilization Focus.


This allows each player to push their Civilization in one specific direction a bit more than the others, granting a 25% bonus to Growth, Colony Gross Income, Research, Military Manufacturing or Planetary Manufacturing. This provides a quick-fix tweak that can easily be set to provide extra industrial flexibility whenever you need it.

This can help you achieve your goals a little quicker without the need for excessive, turn-by-turn fiddling with tax-rates, Civ Policies, Faction Leader placement etc. without falling foul of the old “micromanagement” problem of space 4X games where some players felt compelled to make small and continuous economic changes each turn to squeeze out minimal and mostly inconsequential performance gains. Now, if you’re a little short on Credits for the turn, or need some warships right away, you can just change the Civilization Focus instead of making numerous other adjustments, only to have to set them back the next turn.


War Aims are next, with a new UI element to help players understand more clearly what’s going on when they’re fighting a war with someone.


You’ll see above that the usually peaceful Altarians have declared a War of Annihilation on the Xeloxi, presumably fed up of their endless criminality and determined to wipe them out once and for all. Now it’s much clearer to see which War Aims have been achieved, with a bar showing how close each Civilization is to achieving them. It also shows how long you’ve been at war together, and how many months remain before the “time to finish your war” Events chains start kicking off.

I picked the War of Annihilation here because there’s another change made in v3.0 that affects this particular War type: the AI is now a little less gung-ho about declaring a War of Annihilation, as they were being declared a little too frequently. The War Aims system was brought in to help address the old “forever war” problem in 4X games and this adjustment should support that a bit better. Also, the War of Annihilation now has a maximum length of 120 turns, which should be more than enough for a dedicated genocidal maniac to bring their evil plans to fruition.

To further support the goals of improving GalCiv IV’s user-interface and ensuring the game is properly readable for players, we’ve added some crucial information to the Civilization tab in the Data Bank and restructured that screen in the process.


Behold the Civilization Wide Bonuses screen!

Faction-wide, for Colonies, and for your Fleets and Ships, broken down into categories of which game system is adding that bonus: all of this information is here for you to see in one screen. This saves you the need to manually search for your Missile Attack bonus by hunting down a Fleet and checking it’s tooltip, as just one example.

And that’s not all for the Data Bank! Sometimes you’ll need to pick and compare your Civilization’s various strengths and weaknesses against those of your rivals, and for that we’ve added this new Graphs screen.


And don’t worry, the classic Timeline graphs monitoring Civ progress through various scores is still there too. The Graphs screen gives you a much better interface for analysing how you’re competing with a specific civilization on a more customisable set of metrics.

Finally for today, we’ve re-introduced the Modding button back onto the main menu screen of the game, so you can quickly access Stardock’s mod-manager website for GalCiv IV mods.



Let us know what you think about these main features coming into Galactic Civilizations IV. We’ll have more information on this huge update in the coming weeks, so stay frosty!