Galactic Civilizations IV News

v2.5 and the Warlords Expansion is now available, and we're excited to share the ins and outs. Check out my guided tour below:

Our prior dev journal gave a preview of what to expect from the Warlords Expansion. This week’s dev journal is a guided tour what is new for both the v2.5 ‘Ares’ update and Warlords, including an improved tech tree, QOL improvements to in-game lighting, an upgraded battle viewer, and much, much, more…

[h2]Updated Visuals[/h2]
We have adjusted lighting and added point light effects to things to get them to “pop”. The prettiness is more of a side effect of the desire to make the galaxy more readable.




[h2]Expanded Technology Tree[/h2]
We have greatly expanded the tech tree for both Warlords users who get new technologies like Cloaking Devices and Biological Targeting as well as 2.5 users looking for new ship components instead of merely a stat bump.




[h2]Improved Battle Viewer[/h2]
You can now click on any ship and see how it’s performing in the battle. The log now clearly shows how different weapons and defenses work.




[h2]Resource Clumping[/h2]
We have improved the map generation so that resources will tend to “clump” a bit together. This should result in some areas of space being particularly more valuable than others (relative to previous versions).

In this example, 3 Durantium nodes are found within a single alien system.




[h2]Specialized Defense Systems[/h2]
GalCiv IV gets rid of the rock-paper-scissors way of weapons vs. defenses.

Instead, in GalCiv IV when an enemy attack reaches your ship, it first checks to see if its accuracy is better than your evasion in order to tell if it hits at all. Then, if it hits, the shields will see if they absorb the damage. And then any remaining damage goes to the armor which mitigates a % of it.

However, with v2.5 we have made it so specific ship components can do special things. Some weapons can ignore shields for instance. Some defenses can thwart missiles. And so on. This allows players to counter enemy strategies that have focused too much on a particular area of weaponry or defense.



We plan to do a lot more with this in the future. We also suspect modders will do a lot more in the future.


[h2]Invasion Tactics[/h2]
New to the Warlords expansion are various invasion tactics. Invasion Tactics allow you more control over the nature of Planetary Invasions. They allow the player to make interesting choices at the start of an invasion that affects casualties, planetary destruction, and the duration of the Invasion.



Each tactic has its own pros and cons.



[h2]Doctrines[/h2]
The Doctrines feature completely revolutionizes how players design, build, and utilize their ships in Galactic Civilizations IV. Combat Doctrines are composed of Operational Abilities and Targeting Priorities, which can be combined with Ship Type to create the perfect combat solution for even the most specific of warfare situations.




[h2]New Ship Components[/h2]
We’ve added a host of new ship components into the game for both Warlords users and 2.5 users, many of which have unique capabilities to change the field of battle in your favor.




[h2]War Aims[/h2]
New with the Warlords expansion, the War Aims feature allows for limitations on conflict depending on the War Aim selected, but beware the diplomatic consequences of over aggression and war weariness.




[h2]Capturing Starbases[/h2]
Warlords players can now capture enemy starbases, provided that they have powerful enough fleets to do so.




[h2]Updated Trade Breakdown Screen[/h2]
The trade breakdown screen now allows players to clearly understand at a glance which planets are trading with your civilization and which of your planets is being traded with.




[h2]Updated Fleet Wide Command UI[/h2]
The Fleet Wide Command UI has seen an upgrade as well.

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!