Galactic Civilizations IV News

Attention all Galactic Civilizations IV fans! We are thrilled to announce an exclusive livestream event that you won't want to miss. Dive deep into the Warlords expansion and the v2.5 "Ares" update.

[h2]When?[/h2]
April 18, 2024 at 1PM ET

[h2]Where?[/h2]
Right here on our Steam page.

[h2]What to Expect?[/h2]
Prepare to be amazed by the depth of new features and enhancements that come with the Warlords expansion and the free "Ares" update. From War Aims, Combat Doctrines, and Invasion Tactics to new Ship Components and Technologies, there's so much to discover. Plus, get a sneak peek at the ability to capture enemy Starbases and the reworked Battle Viewer.

See you there!

[h2]Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova’s v2.5 update drops on April 18th and will be accompanied by the release of our third dlc “Warlords”, an expansion focused on expanding the game's warfare systems.[/h2]


v2.5 brings in a lot of changes to space combat and invasions, and the way warfare is carried out in general, and Warlords opens up a lot more content in each one of these systems, adding many exciting new ship components to wreck your enemies with!

Today we’re going to take a very quick peek at some of the features and tools you’ll get access to when you purchase the Warlords Expansion. This isn’t an exhaustive list as Warlords has a lot of content, but a very general overview to give you an idea of what’s on offer.

First up is the War Aims system, which aims to give a war a little more definition and allowing the player to set its goal and further help decrease the instance of unwanted “forever wars”, a phenomenon that we’ve begun to address in previous updates.

Let’s see how this works. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this picture has words too, check it out!


As we can see here, Warlords adds the ability to declare four different types of war, each lasting a different length of time before consequences start to kick in, and featuring an increasing penalty to diplomacy the more drastic your goal is.

It’s important to note here that this system does not lock the player in or out of wars: you can end them at any time you choose. However, as wars drag on beyond their intended time-span, events will kick off to gradually discourage the player from keeping at the war forever.

This system, in tandem with the changes brought in with v2.3, really helps shape wars a little more, and for those of you less inclined to fighting all the time, keeps them from being the all consuming horror that turns your chilled out, empire building experience into a constant never ending conflict for the rest of the game. If you’re like me, you’ll probably just declare a War of Annihilation on everybody at once, and enjoy the bloodshed, but the choice is yours!

Next is the new Invasion Tactics system, allowing you to pick an invasion type which will affect casualties and collateral damage to assets and the planet itself. Warlords unlocks the eight unique planetary invasion tactics: Orbital Bombardment, Surface Invasions, Propaganda, Biological Attacks, EMP Attacks, Shatter Attacks, Annihilate Targets and Liberate.

Let’s look at one of these now.


Orbital Bombardment reduces the duration of the siege by reducing Planetary Defenses, but at the cost of damaging its Planetary Input, as your devastating spaceborne artillery obliterates both defender and infrastructure alike. This might be a good option if you’re under a strict time limit to conquer the planet before your fleet needs to be somewhere else in the war, or you’re hoping to seize and raze it before a larger enemy fleet turns up to defeat your sieging force.

Next up are the changes to ship classification and targeting priorities in combat.

Firstly, we have Ship Types. These are organized via Hull Size and have a unique Category ability and, with Warlords, a player assignable Operational Ability too. The Category ability (for example, our regular ol' Frigate now gets +25% Accuracy) and Operational Ability go together to differentiate ships of different hull sizes, and along with a new feature to change Targeting Priorities, brings in some much needed player agency into the construction of both individual ships, and fleets.

Players now create ships as Ship Classes, which are a Ship Type (Fighter, Frigate, Cruiser etc.) plus the Operational Ability and Targeting Priority. Then you add your components in the designer and name it as usual.

This allows you to custom build your forces to take advantage of weaknesses in enemy fleets or go wild by building ships and fleets, in tandem with the new ship components, that focus heavily on speed, accuracy, defensive abilities and much more.

We’ll cover these new features in greater detail later in this series but for now, let’s take a quick look at what Warlords adds here. Firstly, grabbing the expansion will add three additional Ship Types over the base game, the Corvette, the Destroyer and the huge Command Ship.

Let’s compare the Cruiser from the base game with the new Destroyer, ships that share a medium sized hull, to see how they differ.

Here’s the old Cruiser we all know and love:


Note Cruisers now have +10% Weapon Range as its Cruiser Category ability, and here it has the Operational Ability Barrage set to it too, for a -25% Weapon Cooldown. Now add your weapon of choice from the many component options and you’ve got a deadly ship that keeps out of the range of other ships longer while firing off rapid barrages of missiles, beams or whatever else you’ve equipped on it. Also notice that by default, the Cruiser is set to kill strike-craft, then Frigates and Corvettes before anything else.

Now let’s look at a the Warlords exclusive Medium Hull addition: the Destroyer.


The Destroyer’s Category ability gives them -10% Weapon Cooldown, so remember that is the ability that’s tied to it’s Ship Type and is immutable, and here has been given the Operational Ability Ghost for a +25% Evasion bonus, and is designed to kill ships with small hulls, then fighters and bombers, before any other larger ships. This deadly shark glides into range of smaller Frigates and Corvettes, evading attacks and rapidly dispatching them, before turning on strike-craft in turn.

Of course, with Warlords you can edit the Class, so if you prefer your Destroyers to go hunt Battleships from long range instead, go for it!


Warlords adds four extra targeting priorities to customize your fleet orders with even finer granularity, and thirteen extra Operational Abilities to supercharge the various Types in your fleet.

Hopefully here you get a taste of how these different Ship Types can be used in combination with other Ships Types of different hull sizes, in tandem with the Targeting Priorities and ship components, to build fleets of warships that complement one another with their various abilities and bonuses, to take on even more varied enemy fleets constructed in the same way.

Speaking of ship components, Warlords adds a lot of new options for players to customize their warships with. Let’s take a quick look at just a couple.


Here’s an Ion Cannon, and as the description says it disables a targeted ship’s Evasion. This could be very useful if your rival is fielding ships that are very difficult to hit: stack some To-Hit bonuses yourself first though!


And for all you grog-swilling pirates out there, here’s a way for you to board and capture enemy vessels for your very own, instead of destroying them outright, adding them to your mighty fleet of ragtag buccaneers!


Not content with adding actual Vampire Citizens to the game, now you’ve got a Vampire Module to suck the blood from your enemy’s ships, dealing them damage while simultaneously repairing yourself.


Finally, owners of Warlords will now be able to capture Starbases instead of just destroying them as usual.

This is one of those singular changes that looks small on paper, but when you think about it and play, you’ll see has a huge impact on gameplay, opening up new strategies for stealing Strategic Resources, capturing Ascension Crystals and vital Military Bases guarding critical areas of the game map.

This was a quick overview of the main features that Warlords adds and enhances along with the v2.5 update coming to Galactic Civilization’s IV: Supernova next week.

Stay tuned for more updates! Cheers!

Each civilization in Galactic Civilization’s IV: Supernova is constructed from a set of building blocks, either predefined and later edited by a player, as with our Core Civilizations, or selected by the player when making a custom civ. Biology, Citizen species, Cultural Focus, their starting Planet Type, Commander Ships and more are all selected to craft a specific playstyle for the civilization.

The two cornerstone mechanical building blocks of this system, which most strongly inform the way a civilization will play, are the Civilization Traits and Civilization Abilities. Today we’re going to take a look at Civilization Abilities, with a little help from Traits too, to show how a Civilization’s main playstyle is crafted.

Each game in the GalCiv series was carefully designed to ensure playable civilizations can be played in many different ways. Civilization Abilities and Traits grant you access to unique game features and allow the player to minmax your empire’s development while adhering to their lore and thematic nature, but unlike certain other space 4X games they don’t tend to lock you into a set playstyle each time if you don’t want it.

Let’s take a look at a Core Civilization with interesting Abilities and see if we can figure out an intended playstyle for them.



The Intueri Aggregate are an example of a civilization with a unique Ability that ensures they play quite differently to other civilizations, without hard-locking them into one playstyle or another as you so often see in other 4X games.



Note our expanded tooltips now accurately show everything an Ability is doing in your game, including access to various Techs, Executive Orders and anything it blocks too. Here we see that the Ability Watcher grants the Intueri a special Executive Order called Cosmic Eye which they can use to steal Techs from other Civilizations without their knowledge. It also increases their general Sensor Range for wider visions, and grants them a flavourful bonus to Deception too.

This would be a bit too powerful on its own so I’ll show you how we use Traits to both to balance out strong Abilities like that, and to add some flavor and focus to a civilization’s playstyle.

Watcher works in tandem with the Civilization Trait Foolish (-2) and the naturally low Intelligence of their Citizens to ensure that Intueri live up to their reputation as a race of uncreative copycats who struggle with original thought and learn through observation. The -30% Research penalty for Foolish (-2) means that the Intueri really need to utilize Watcher on a regular basis to overcome their naturally slow technological progression. Of course, you could hyper-focus on Research Districts and Improvements to try to counter-balance this low overall research rate, but that will come at the expense of industrial, economic or military development.



If this still all sounds a bit dire for the Intueri, we now come to their second supporting Ability, Ancient. The ability to gain Research from Precursor Artifacts and Anomalies gives the Intueri further opportunity to bolster their technological development. On maps with lots of Precursor elements in play, the Intueri can become quite the research powerhouse without the need to build excessive Districts and Improvements on their Core Worlds. Ancient also grants the Intueri access to some very powerful Precursor Techs and Improvements, one of which doubles the Intelligence of your Citizens on a world.

Still worried about the Intueri compared to the other mighty galactic civilizations in your game? Just hang on a moment, we’re not done yet! We now throw the other Civilization Traits into the pot.

Explorers (+2) and Fast (+2) means means rapid and far reaching expansion in the early game, while Productive (+1) grants an accelerated industrial development. The Intueri will likely beat their rivals to the best worlds, strategic resources and the Precursor relics.

A typical Intueri game will be characterised by rapid and far-flung expansion as their fast and highly perceptive scouts find the best Core Worlds long before the other Civilizations, with their long range Colony Ships and Constructors able to travel further out too. They get three Probes at the start of the game too, a big advantage over those who only receive one, as exploration is incredibly important in GalCiv.



They’ll have the drop on those rivals with their high Sensor Power and Cosmic Eye, and while they’ll initially be playing with rather low technology, they will be stealing Techs from their neighbours without any diplomatic penalty. With some luck, you’ll learn a very high cost or rare Tech that took your enemy many months to research, making use of it yourself and with the option to trade it out to other civilizations for a hefty price (probably another vital Tech you’ve not quite reached yourself).

The Intueri have the option to take and hold a rather sprawling empire with long distances between Core Worlds. This isn’t usually the best idea for most Civilizations as they’re difficult to defend, but the Intueri’s ships move very quickly and they can build them quicker than most too. This speed and extended safe operational range grants them a dramatic strategic and tactical advantage, as they get the choice of the best worlds and resources, and their ships seem to appear out of nowhere to defend even seemingly remote and undefended locations.



One final strategic consideration to note: fighting against any civilization with Cosmic Eye is a dangerous affair as you can never quite be sure what they’re going to be fielding. It’s entirely possible they managed to steal a very powerful, rare Tech from a neighbors while presenting a rather low tech force on the surface. It’s entirely possible to send in a fleet to wipe out what looks to be a ragtag bunch of outdated ships only to find a they’re equipped with something nasty and specific to another Civilization Ability, or perhaps an unexpected Dreadnaught bristling with deadly, high tech weapons where you were expecting older, weaker Cruisers.

As you can see, the Intueri Aggregate really do have the ability to play how they look: they see everything, long before their rivals do, with the potential to surprise their opponent with a rapid and large deployment of warships fielding unexpected technology. Yes, they’re slow to research initially, but their other Abilities and Traits more than make up for this deficiency and a creative player will find endless fun utilizing these tools to leverage victory in their games of Galactic Civilizations.

Hopefully this example illustrates how Abilities form the backbone of a Civilization’s playstyle, supported by the various other mechanics, to give each Civ a unique variety of playstyles for you to experiment with.

Cheers!

In our recent update version 2.4 Populi we initiated some big changes to the way Citizens are generated and handled in the AlienGPT system, which we detailed in last week’s developer journal.

This time around we’re going to look at another important feature added in Populi, the ability to move your population around your vast and sprawling civilization using an all new Citizen Transport system, and some ideas that you can use as a base for your own strategies surrounding Citizens.

Before Populi, there was no dedicated way to move Citizens between your Core Worlds, with players repurposing Colony Ships and military Transports to do the job. This was a laborious process and became onerous when a lot of Citizens needed moving from one place to another, discouraging players from experimenting with population hothousing strategies as one might with other space 4X games.

Here’s how to use this new system.



Moving a Citizen is simple: click the button here on the Core World interface. It is located to the right of the Growth indicator.


On the Transport Citizen screen that opens, select the Citizen and the target Core World destination, then hit Transport after checking the estimated Travel Time and Surlin the Scamp here is off to bolster the numbers of a frontier world.



As a VIM (Very Important Mimot) he’ll be personally transported to Pylefira I in a fast shuttle, which appears on the map as a unique automated unit as shown here. Each turn this transport will expend its movement allowance in travelling towards its destination. It can be targeted by hostiles, so try not to send your VIMs of into enemy territory!

With the ability to efficiently move your Citizens around your empire, we can now more easily implement a classic space 4X strategy where a planet is selected for the hothousing of Citizen growth, and using that planet to rapidly increase the population of newly colonised Core Worlds.


In the above example we can see that this Mimot world with nine Citizens will be adding +27 to their Growth rate (Mimot grow very quickly with each Citizen giving +3 Growth), on top of a whole host of other modifiers they get: they’re using Population Boom for a +200% Growth bonus, the Nurture Den, the Natural League Faction and the Recruitment Station Orbital Improvement are also assisting here too.

Here’s another example from the Drath Freehold.


The Drath grow slowly compared to the Mimot, and get a small penalty to their Growth, with seven Citizens only generating 5.6 Growth altogether, before the other modifiers, but they do have access to the Coerced Colonization Policy for a +100% bonus, and Artocarpus Fruit increases this further. There’s a Colonial Clinic giving a large +40% boost too, although that is quite expensive to build in terms of Manufacturing and requires a little Durantium too.

By stacking as many Growth modifiers on your planet as possible with various Improvements like the Colonial Clinic and adding civilization-wide bonuses from Civilization Abilities, Traits and Polices, any modifiers from Events, and leveraging the natural Growth of your increasing Citizen pool, you can dedicate a planet to Citizen growth.

Here’s one possible way to develop your civilization, by dedicating specific planets to specific jobs.

Set one planet for Manufacturing early, and use it to pump out Supply Ships. Then pick a large Core World with plenty of space to build on, and dedicate it to Citizen Growth, building the Colonial Clinic and other Growth boosting Improvements.


Keep it free of Pollution (a negative modifier on Growth) by only building limited Manufacturing assets and then send Supply Ships from your industrial world to get those early Growth production assets up instead of relying on your own factories. Pick Civilization Policies that favour Growth, and away you go!

Once your Population begins to max out and your people start complaining about overcrowding, you can use the Citizen Transports to send excess Citizens to your newer worlds (including that heavily Polluted Manufacturing world that’s building your Supply Ships and likely has little population growth of its own). Develop this baby-making planet with Cultural, Approval and Wealth generating Districts and Improvements too, to make use of those Citizens who’re otherwise sat their breeding.


Core Worlds with natural Approval boosting tiles to help offset the Approval penalty for overcrowding, like this Permanent Rainbow, can make great planets for this strategy.

Note that in some space 4X games this is often the optimal way to play; in GalCiv it’s not so important on the lower difficulties but it will help on some maps in some situations, and can be an incredibly satisfying way to play for those of you who love the industrial/economic development side of 4X games.

We hope this new feature helps you to enjoy the game more, with less fuss required in moving your Citizens around your empire, and inspires you to try different playstyles like the one I’ve suggested here too! There are many potential applications for Citizens (think about some of the Improvements, Techs and Events that increase Citizen Stats…) so go wild with your imagination!

Last week, Frogboy introduced Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova v2.4 update named Populi and gave a very brief overview of its features. Today, I thought I’d expand a little on how it works and showcase a few more examples.

In summary, AlienGPT will now generate the name and description for your Citizens to match the custom civilization details it produces for you. It’ll then select an appropriate Citizen portrait to give a face to your people, with the number of Citizen types expanded to feature species popular within the community. Well, more than one face, as each Citizen type has many new faces added to ensure your various Citizens can be told apart more easily.

Let’s get a quick disclaimer out of the way first: as with the original AlienGPT leader portrait selection system, the Citizen portraits are not generated by AI to a prompt, and are instead picked from our existing pool of pictures pre-made by our in-house artists, using our own extensive library of art created for our games at Stardock over the past thirty years.

First off, Citizens have been moved from the Abilities tab over to the Biology tab where they belong, and we’ve moved the Civ Colors and Planet over to Abilities to make room for them. You can manually select them yourself if you prefer, and you’ll see the list has been expanded to cover many of the most frequent requests we see from the community.

[h2]Here’s a list of the new types:[/h2]

• Feline Fatales: the obligatory cat-girls everybody loves to play with.
  
• Cyborgs: now we’ve got a dedicated humanoid/mechanoid hybrid Citizen.
  
• Space Demons: they come with horns and everything, suitable for all interdimensional escapees.
  
• Space Dwarves: don’t worry, we won’t retcon these guys out of existence at a later date.
  
• Space Elves: no, they didn’t fade away and diminish. They built space ships instead!
  
• Star Frogs: very wise survival experts, remember to keep them well moist.
  
• Humanoids: a generic Citizen to fit your needs when the others don’t.
  
• Lizards: we had a fair number of lizard lookalikes in the Core species but now there’s a generic one for you.
  
• Sentient Plants: now the Baratak aren’t the only intelligent vegetables in the universe.
  
• Vampiric: another popular pick for those of you who want seductive bloodsuckers in your game.
  

All of the above can be manually selected after a standard AlienGPT generation, if you’re not happy with its pick. As usual, you can skip the prompt completely and just select all the info, including the Citizen name and description, yourself as a manual entry.

Frogboy posted some examples up last week but here are a few more for you to check out.



Here’s the Inferno Flora Collective with their unique Citizen type Infernia.



And here are some Infernian Citizens on their homeworld Lavara Prime. Note the Citizen’s name fits the theme of the Civilization.


And here’s one I generated on a livestream the other day. I really like this one, and feel it really shows off the power of AlienGPT. These are the Yor-Tech Exiles, humans who escaped persecution at the hands of the Terrain Alliance after illegally interfacing with Yor Cybernetic technology, forever tainting themselves in the eyes of their former brothers and sisters.


Their Citizens have a nice spread of portraits too.



And here’s how Commander Bradley greets these deviant escapees from his own territory and a reminder that AlienGPT not only generates the Civilization for you, but also many of the communications you’ll receive from the various Core Civilizations too.

If I may be permitted to put aside my Stardock staff-member cap and speak purely as a gamer for a moment, I find this technology incredibly exciting. As Frogboy stated last week, AlienGPT isn’t perfect yet and it can make mistakes, but this really does go a heck of a long way towards immersing the player into their game. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that immersion is the most critical component in keeping you playing long, complex strategy games like GalCiv once the campaign goes over several hundred turns and you’re moving many dozens of units around.

We’ve pulled out all the stops to present a set of interesting Core Civilizations for you to play as, but there’s no substitute for your own imagination, and AlienGPT can help bridge the gap between those of you who love to go all in on hand-crafting your own custom civs, and those who’d love to do that but don’t feel they can for whatever reason. This system can do nearly all of the job for you, some of it, or none at all.

As always, the choice is yours!