Galactic Civilizations IV News

As many of you know, the GalCiv III Elite Founders had the ability to name their own star in game. We wanted to extend a similar offer to our beloved fans of GalCiv IV: Supernova Edition through this contest, where up to 100 lucky winners will have their star name added in-game. Immortalizing them forever in Supernova!

Anyone with a Stardock account (new or existing) is eligible to submit a star name. All submissions will be approved by myself and the team at Stardock, and approved contenders will be publicly displayed on the website.

Finally, Stardock staff will vote internally on their favorites as winners to be placed into the game forever.

We look forward to seeing your submissions, what will your immortalize in the stars above? A fun joke, a loved one, a wish, or maybe even yourself?

Good luck commanders.

Submit your name now

Submissions end date: 1PM EST, July 19th
Winners will be announced: Wednesday, July 26th


[h2]Rules/Guidelines: [/h2]

• Must have a Stardock account to submit a name.
  
• Only ONE entry per user. You may change your entry once it has been submitted, but it will need to be re-approved.
  
• Any inappropriate, trademarked, or copyrighted content will result in the entire entry being rejected.
  
• Star names are limited to 30 characters (letters/numbers/spaces), no punctuation or special characters. Star names will be converted to title case in-game (only first letter capitalized).
  
• If more than one instance of the same star name is submitted, the first submitted will remain approved and the second will be rejected.
  

[h2]German Language Beta, New Anomalies, Updated Culture Traits, and Enhanced Battle Viewer Await Players in Early Access v1.6[/h2]

Assume the role of a space commander and delve into a vast and immersive universe. Witness epic space battles with an enhanced battle viewer and conquer the cosmos with the added advantage of German language support. Explore the potential of anomalies to enhance your empire's capabilities and customize your path by adopting culture traits. Prepare for an exhilarating journey as you chart new frontiers, engage in strategic warfare, and shape your interstellar empire in unprecedented ways. 

View the Full Changelog

[h2]Top Features in Early Access v1.6[/h2]

[h3]German Language (Beta) Support[/h3]
Stardock Entertainment brings a beta version of German language support to Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova v1.6, inviting a wider audience to join the intergalactic adventure. Players from German-speaking regions can begin to enjoy the captivating storytelling and immersive gameplay in their native language.




[h3]New Anomalies[/h3]
In response to the feedback from our community, version 1.6 introduces exciting additions that greatly enhance your empire's capabilities. One highly requested feature is the ability to add survey abilities to your ships. Now, your vessels can explore uncharted territories and gather valuable information. Expand your fleet's mobility, extend ship range, reduce crime, or grant enhanced evasion capabilities. These new anomalies offer strategic opportunities, empowering players to shape their interstellar empires according to their preferences.




[h3]Improved Civilization Designer[/h3]
We've refined the civ designer based on your feedback for a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. Enjoy the updated layout as you create the civilization of your choice.




[h3]Revamped Culture Traits[/h3]
Some culture traits have been reassigned to new cultures that align more appropriately. This adjustment aims to enhance the overall gameplay experience. But that's not all! Stay tuned for upcoming changes that will continue to refine and expand the cultural dynamics in Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova.


[h3]Enhanced Battle Viewer[/h3]
The enhanced battle viewer provides a deeper appreciation of the scale and intricacies of each engagement, ensuring every encounter is an exhilarating and visually captivating experience.


[h3]The Vault Additions[/h3]
New ship modules that can be added to ships at any time.




View the full changelog


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

Greetings!

We're excited to announce the release of GalCiv IV: Supernova v1.55, a significant step forward. This update brings a collection of new features, key balance changes, and improvements that will transform your intergalactic adventures. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Gameplay Overhaul: Expect a major rework of the technology tree, including an entirely new approach to Exotic World colonization, Interstellar cabinet, and Space Weapons. We've fully rebalanced the AI's tech prioritization, and you can look forward to seeing them focusing more on weapons and hull research. 
   
2. New Anomaly Events: We've introduced several new anomaly events to keep things fresh. If you've been tired of the "stealth field", you're in for a treat!
   
3. Improved Ship Mechanics: Ships can now attack multiple times per turn as well as invade multiple times per turn if that's applicable.
   
4. Custom Factions: We've improved AlienGPT and added a host of improved abilities for civilizations including new citizen types.
   
5. Economy and Diplomacy Tuning: Trade routes have been revamped to be more valuable, with their value multiplier increased from 15% to 33%. Various factions, including the Banking Clan and Capitalist Society, have undergone balance tweaks to offer a more fair and engaging gameplay experience.
   
6. You can move your Civ Capital. Enough said. We've also done a full balance pass on planetary improvements.
7. Many many small and large improvements: We've been spying on you as much as we can. Or at least, we've been reading your feedback and have jammed as much as we can into this.
   

NOTE: This update will break the previous version's (1.51).  If you have a game in progress you want to finish, you can use the 1.51 branch. Read here to learn more.

We hope these updates will significantly improve your game experience in the GalCiv IV universe. As always, your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don't hesitate to share your thoughts on these new features and improvements.





[h2]Full change log:[/h2]

• Update siege ship strategic icons and stat icons.
• Resized faction logos resized to reduce scaling artifacts.
• Visual display of ship hull sizes modified to make it easier to view them in battle.
• You should see fewer "failed generate error" messages.
• Fixed the Voyagers ability to actually for realsies give a +2 moves, +2 sensors.
• "Hive Mind" ability HP buff in territory decreased from 25 to 5.
• Several new anomaly events (tired of the "stealth field" yet?).
• "Grand festival" length decreased from 25 turns to 12.
• Major rework of technology tree.
  • Full rebalance of the AI prioritization of techs to get it to better research weapons and better hulls.
  • Exotic World colonization replaces the myriad of specialty planet types techs.
  • Interstellar cabinet replaces the myriad of "Ministry of X" techs.
  • Space Weapons. Early game tech to give some additional weapons before specialization.
  • Point Defense tech tree removed (point defenses and other specific weapon counters will become part of a specialized defense branch later along with new evasion techs).
  • Beam weapon theory renamed Directed Energy Weapons.
  • Space Lasers (sigh) renamed Photonic Alignment.
  • Devastator Missile System renamed to Phoenix Missile System to match the weapon it gives.
  • Shrunk the size of the cruiser tech description.
  • Removed drones as a resource / element of the game until we can do something more interesting with them.
• Self Determinism now grants 3 leaders.
• Ministers unlocked mostly between Interstellar cabinet, political capital and colonial bureaucracy.
• Various exotic world planet types (like radioactive worlds) are unlocked by a single tech: Exotic World Colonization.
• Several new ship components for early game use.
• Ideology naming updated to fit new culture system.
• Festron no longer take a penalty for not being on an aquatic world because they don't actually like water. They're not water bugs. They're bug bugs and prefer jungle which they now get a huge morale boost of if they're on those worlds.
• Invite leader cooldown reduced from 50 to 10, control cost increased from 10 to 20.
• Trade route value multiplier increased from 15% to 33% to make trade routes more valuable.
• The number of Trade licenses greatly reduced.
• Tech Inflation multiplier reduced from 11% to 10%.
• Number of rounds in a battle increased from 40 to 100 so that battles have a better chance to play out.
• YOU CAN MOVE THE CAPITAL. Players can destroy their capital and then place it on any tile they want.
• Colony capitals can now be destroyed and relocated as well.
• Civ capital maintenance removed.
• Durantium Processor level bonus increased from 1% to manufacturing to 3%.
• A new upgraded research project added.
• Garrison now increases Planetary Defense instead of Resistance.
• More improvements moved to earlier in the tech tree.
• Low quality planets now rarely have any food output to make food more valuable.
• Coerced colonization approval penalty increased from 5% to 15%.
• Hull Reinforcing changed form providing 25 HP to every ship to 20% (percent) buff to a ship.
• Major Prestige Victory balance pass. Should feel a lot better.
• Siege Ships are now Frigate class.
• Carriers are now Dreadnought sized.
• Siege ship template changed from medium to small.
• Tactical speed of ships altered to be better balanced.
• Cruiser hull Manufacturing cost increased from 40 to 100.
• Battleship hull manufacturing cost increased from 100 to 300.
• Dreadnought hull manufacturing cost increased from 250 to 1000.
• Dreadnought hull usable space increased from 32 to 36.
• Updated starbase modules to fit with the updated tech tree.
• Various command ship requirements updated for new tech tree.
• Banking Clan faction diplomacy penalty increased from 0.5% to 1%
• Capitalist Society faction gross income buff changed from a flat 1 per intelligence of leader to a 1% buff to income per intelligence of leader while increased the approval penalty from 0.1% to 0.5% per social.
• Emporium faction Bazaar discount changed from 0.005 flat to 0.5% per intelligence of leader added wile Crime is now increased by 0.01% per diligence of that leader.
• Trade routes no longer create the trade ship mission. Kills perf. 
• Minister of Finance provided a 1% buff per colony income per intelligence.
• Minister of Defense now provides a Planetary Defense buff instead of resistance.
• Cleaned up which ideology gets a buff from event choices.
• Cleaned up ideology buffs based on event choices.
• AI ships will no longer bother with marginal colonies unless it can take them in less than 2 turns.
• Improvements to AI tax rate handling some issues with the way the AI was choosing techs to research.
• Planets will rebel much faster than before.
• Fix to the galactic market changed to simply see if they have the universal translator. No fancy stuff.
• Economic Power no longer takes the treasury into account.
• Much bigger approval penalty from high crime.
• HP buff to ships based on # of colonies is now the square root of the # of colonies rather than linear.
• Raw fleet weapon rating greatly reduced for determining the siege rating of a fleet.
• Update to support cheesing of building capital improvements on all your planets.
• Renamed Explorers ability to Voyagers.
• Lots of new lines of text for the AI to speak to the player rather than "we want peace".
• Trader renamed Independent Trade ship.
• Prison World explains what it does now
• General UI text update to fit better on screens (especially for people in Germania) and clearer descriptions of stats.
• Forum link now goes directly the GalCiv IV sub-forum.
• 3 new citizen types: Avian, Canine, Feline.
• [Placed limit on AI Freighter construction
• Improved Map Generation
• Tiny maps are now slightly bigger.
• Fixed common, abundant black holes over spawning.
• Updated Orders menu to display the relevant stat each profession uses.
• Damage numbers no longer float off before they do damage on hit.
• Adjusted the tactical speed of ships.
• Terror stars always show up in the battle replay
• Custom faction Traits tab to fit single column
• Make sure that when you edit the name and short name fields, the faction data is updated
  correctly.
• Strip additional invalid characters from the "name" and "short name" fields.
• Custom factions no longer default to Totalitarianism.
• Fixed a problem where the Steam authentication cache silently fails.
• Abundant map setting resources balanced.
• Massive change to the cultural trait system.
• Consolidated cultural traits used to create factions.
• AI manages its defenders better.
• AI players won't start covering worlds until much later.
• Fixed missing anomalies.
• Fleets automatically form at rally points.
• Made it so that sentinels only attack ships.
• Make fleets can attack more than once per turn.
• Updated AI to use a new ship class system.
• When you pick a given ideology, ALL of them increase the cost by N, not just the one in that tree.
• Yor home system always starts with a Durantium resource.
• If the player has a strong military, some civs will give you some respect.
• New Mercenary added.
• Set up data for commander ships for Korath and Seeing.
• Fixed broken triggers on anomalies.
• Added missing Tech prereqs.
• Added misused Tech prereqs on events.
• Slight buff to the conquest ability.
• Compassion Trait now gives the correct approval bonus.
• Fairness trait only gives 1 colony ship now.
• Synthetic life civs can no longer get the "Dwindling Numbers" event.
• The "Culture Clash" event is now using the correct strings.
• The Starport improvement restored.
• Removed cultural awareness buffs from improvements.
• Precursor Accelerator event:
  • Changed "Individualism" choice to improve planetary defense.
  • Removed "Totalitarianism" choice (was OP).
• Fixed ideology effects from the "Legacy" and "Prototype" events.
• Crimelords get a new executive order: Impress Constructors. Make the workers an offer they can't refuse.
• New improvement: Heritage Center. Early game tourism improvement.
• Terror Stars no longer show up in the cargo hulls when you play as the Terrans.
• Fairness culture trait now correctly spawns a colony ship.
• Trade routes create a mission ship.
• The Festron are NOT aquatic.
• Festron homeworld is no longer aquatic.
• Bazaar is now unlocked by the "Universal Translator."
• Fixed a problem where if you unlocked the bazaar and then started a new game, the bazaar was unlocked at the start. Bizarre!
• Steam achievements are now enabled.
• Make asteroids go to the nearest core world, not the nearest colony.
• Added more Anomaly images.
• Big changes to the culture tree:
  • Iron Fist control reward increased from 50 to 100
  • Fairness now spawns 3 colony ships.
  • Deep Investigation spawns a bunch of anomalies.
  • Kindness now spawns 3 constructors with it
  • Individualism(new) - Lowers decay, the player is awarded a flagship.
  • Added a bunch of new placeholder traits that aren't functioning yet.
  • Getting a trait increases only the discount for the next tech by 1%.
• Shorten some of the quest events that were too long.
• Changed references of "Empire" to "Civilization"
• Cultural affinity choice now gives a 25% upfront discount.
• Updated resistance bonus description.
• Inconsistent improvement warnings have been removed (for now).
• Military consistently renamed to Shipyard Production.
• Tweaked culture window
• Planetary Crime tooltip breakdown is less confusing.
• Removed redundant stat breakdowns in the Planetary defense tooltip.
• The planet tooltip for colonies shows who they send their resources to at the bottom of the
  tooltip.
• The Y and N keys should no longer hide the shipyard window.
• We are updating our combat U.I to display battle rating, conquest, and HP stats. Screens updated so far include:
  • Ship design "stats" box
  • Starbase and Shipyards
  • Battle start and results screen
• Changed distances to be consistently measured in KM
• Disable Tech brokering by default.
• Improve the Rally Point UX flow. Now you click on the map to set the point, rather than going
  through a series of menus.
• Mission Rewards are now in whole numbers, not fractions (e.g., you won't get 1.45 Elerium as a
  reward anymore).
• Resource Popup should show how much you already have.
• The splash screen is longer stretched on ultrawide screens.
• The tech tooltips need to show what stats they change.
• Update Planet Tool tip icons to be consistent with the yield tokens.
• Made a pass on all techs and ensure they are color coded most sensibly and aesthetically.
• Show Ship Range on the ship tooltip and ship details.
• Upgrade Window - Text is no longer cut off for the lowest line of text.
• Fleet names no longer include their faction's name and instead just uses their call sign (e.g., TAS if playing as Terrans).
• Anomaly alerts now display the event name, description, and choice.
• Updated Starbase Missile Salvo text.
• Fix String issue with "Pirate" Frigate and Cruiser. The name was given to the Onyx and the Baratak.
• Disabling the Tutorial really really disables the Tutorial robot.
• The options screen only warns of restart needed due to graphics changes only if you've actually changed the graphics.
• Move the controls so that they're docked to the top bar.
• Shrink the writing in the log such that you can fit 2 more rows.
• Increase the size so that it goes to the very bottom.
• Fix missing ideology traits in custom civs created in builds prior to v1.55.
• Prevent core world capital from being able to be built on the capital world.
• The Shipyard manufacturing value is now referencing the correct number.
• Updated battle viewer combat stat displays to just battle rating and HP.
• Update Galaxy Settings slider icons for Minors, and Entities.
• Updated the Bazaar popup card to support one more line.
• Make more room for long custom faction names on the turn button.

Good luck!

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