Galactic Civilizations IV News

To recap: When a player wants to create a custom civilization, they can choose to enter in a short description and then press “Generate”.

[h2]There are two parts of this.[/h2]

The first part uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT which generates the text and code for describing the civilization as well as quests in the game.

The second part uses AI to figure out what key words to look for and then see what already existing AI generated images exist for this. Since these images are trained solely off of Stardock’s own considerable library of art, it isn’t infinite. If the AI determines the match quality is poor, it will then queue it up for generation later while sending the best results it has back.

Stardock’s Tachyon backend for this only gets the text entered and works with that. So for example, let’s say the player enters in “A civilization made up of beautiful amazon women” (one of the most common entries apparently it just looks at the text and the final result would be something like this:




And then the images it matches with. It sends 9 at a time. 3 are the best it can find. 3 are a bit looser and 3 are totally random.




[h2]So what are the results we get?[/h2]
Broadly speaking, the types of inputs we get can fall into these categories:


[h2]Custom Citizens[/h2]
Now, what the AI doesn’t currently do is pick your citizens for you.



You would need a couple dozen images for citizens to work, otherwise, there’d be excessive repetition of the same face in game. So obviously it’s not currently possible to have dozens of citizens for each species as the generation time would go off the charts.

However, what we can do is start looking at the broader categories. While there are infinite possibilities when it comes to species, the number of general categories (human, robot, cat people, insect people, rocks, etc.) is quite finite and thus takes a massive issue and makes it much more manageable.

[h2]The top 10[/h2]
You might be wondering, what are the top 10 most popular alien choices people put in? Wonder no longer, here they are:

1. Humans
   
2. Women
   
3. Robots
   
4. Female
   
5. Cat
   
6. Girls
   
7. Elves
   
8. Cats
   
9. robot
   
10. human
    

Now, if we get rid of the duplicate meanings it goes more like this:


That’s how the top 10 are distributed. People like women and cats. Which makes it unsurprising that the 11th entry was catgirls.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1357210/Galactic_Civilizations_IV_Supernova

Additional Custom Civ Portrait Options
Users can now select "More Images" until they get the image they want (based on the description of your civ).

Previously, to get more potential race images to choose from, you had to regenerate the entire civilization. Because of how taxing that is on the AlientGPT system, we had to limit that to 5 tries per civ and 25 per day. But since most people just want to try out to see more images, we are separating the civ regeneration to the reroll of the images.

More Civs Unlocked
Players can now play as the classic GalCiv civs, the main GalCiv III civs and the the new GalCiv IV civs. The new Supernova civs are still locked for now as we are still working on them.

New Settings
We are starting to tweak the civ traits and will be working on these throughout early access to make all of them more interesting.

New Default Strategic Zoom Settings
If you found the iconizing agonizing (I’ll show myself out) then you’re in for a treat. We’ve rebalanced when and how different icons show up as you zoom out.

AI to Supernova
Beta 1 of Supernova was focused on AlienGPT and making sure it didn’t blow up on your computers. It mostly didn’t. Beta 1A brings the new AI over. Which isn’t to say the AI in Beta 1 didn’t work, it just hadn’t been updated yet to support all the changes to Supernova yet. You will find it much more engaging.

Updated Visuals
We’ve done our first pass on the visual style of the map itself. Gone is the blah grays. Also, you can set it so that you can see which tiles have been explored.

More Sophisticated Diplomacy
The computer players have a lot more nuance now in how they deal with each other. There are a lot more things that can happen in GalCiv IV: Supernova that affect relations. Sometimes you’ll have to pick who are your friends and who are not and live with that. It also means the other civilizations will be more likely to have diplomatic challenges with each other as well.

Major Balance Pass
Everything from how the galaxy gets generated to how much a pulse cannon costs has been looked at and adjusted. We’ve also brought back a lot of starbase upgrades that were previously only available to the Synthetic civs (By popular demand). This list will be too big to cover here but it’s a big set of changes. We’ve been reading every forum post and every Discord talk.

Bug Squashing
From typos to crashes, we’ve been squashing bugs to get this update ready for you guys. We’ve even brought in a veteran game industry editor to finally deal with the typos.


View the full changelog here

We're excited to announce that we'll be hosting a special Community Dialogue / AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with our CEO, Brad Wardell, to discuss and bounce ideas around while answering your questions about Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova!

This event will take place on our Discord server on Thursday, May 11th at 4PM EST. This is a good opportunity for you to share your thoughts, ask questions, and get insights directly from Brad about the development and future of GalCiv IV: Supernova.

To participate, simply join our Discord server (if you haven't already) and head over to the designated AMA channel on the day of the event. We look forward to seeing you there and engaging in some lively discussions about the game!

Where: https://discord.gg/6cWPPuKh

When: Thursday, May 11 at 4PM EST

RSVP: https://discord.gg/6cWPPuKh?event=1104047170061090918

We're excited to announce that we'll be hosting a special Community Dialogue / AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with our CEO, Brad Wardell, to discuss and bounce ideas around while answering your questions about Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova!

This event will take place on our Discord server on Thursday, May 11th at 2PM ET. This is a good opportunity for you to share your thoughts, ask questions, and get insights directly from Brad about the development and future of GalCiv IV: Supernova.

To participate, simply join our Discord server (if you haven't already) and head over to the designated AMA channel on the day of the event. We look forward to seeing you there and engaging in some lively discussions about the game!

Where: https://discord.gg/6cWPPuKh

When: Thursday, May 11 at 2PM ET

RSVP: https://discord.gg/6cWPPuKh?event=1104047170061090918

So how many turns should it take to get a thing? Turn based games live and die on pacing balance. We don’t have a speed button to zip over bad pacing choices. So we have to be very, very careful on the number of turns something takes to get.



Take research for example. How many turns? 1 turn seems too generous. 8 turns is pretty long. But do you make the tech cost more or find ways to reduce the amount of research or whatever you’re getting in.

Let’s take a look at this example and work our way through it. So Armed Shuttles shows up at taking 1 turn. That’s too fast I think. On the other hand, it has a 50% discount which means it would have taken 2 turns. That still seems pretty quick though.

So is the tech too cheap OR is the amount of research we’re starting out with too high?

Let’s look at how much research we’re getting:





First off, why do we get 2 free research? That seems overly generous. Let’s get rid of that. So I got into the globaldefs.xml file and find that and get rid of it.





Now we’re here:




Ok. But still, start of game, that’s a pretty big number too.


Holding down the SHIFT key lets me do tooltips within tooltips.





The technology input seems like a lot for this early.


More tooltips within tooltips:




Wow, Rebe is giving me a lot of tech. That’s one of my colonies.



So it starts with 4 and 3.27 is getting to me. That’s pretty generous.


Let’s go back to the globaldefs.xml





I increase the rate to 2% per tile away. This changes the number to:





Now with this changed, let’s go back to the research center:





Armed shuttles are now at 2 (they would normally take 4 turns). Now the question is, is the 50% reduction to research cost too generous? I feel like if we changed that it wouldn’t be tempting enough to pick one.


And so the iteration goes.