Let's take a look at Galactic Civilizations v4.0: Federations & Empires from the perspective of the Drengin Empire.
The galaxy calls them "cruel," yet they insist they merely believe in order. Yes, they keep the lesser species in labor camps, but have you considered the alternative? Idleness. They are, they claim, giving them purpose. And that's without getting into the "genocide" accusations. Reductive, in their view. They prefer the term demographic streamlining. A tidy galaxy is a happy galaxy. They don't hate other races; they simply love efficiency more than they love them. So before you judge, they'd remind you: they could have been rude about it. Instead, they conquered you politely. You're welcome.
At long last, players will finally get to put themselves in their shoes by playing as an actual Empire. Let's take a look.
We are going to play as the Drengin Empire in all their glory. Now that we include a Map Generator, we could play on a pre-made map, but we're going to play in a randomly generated one.
With 5 civilizations opposing them.
I will try to take care in calling out what is in the free v4.0 update versus what is unique to the new Federations & Empires expansion. The Map Editor is free in v4.0.
So, a few things right off the bat. First, the new fleet UI in the bottom left: you can toggle between showing the ship or a display of the ship classes. The special abilities unique to that ship are now displayed in a 3x3 grid. And in the top right there's a new panel option: Mini Map.
New to the shipyard, players can now set a shipyard to idle and have its resources flow back to the homeworld.
Colonial Charter
The government screen replaces the old Leaders / Policies screen, combining the two with a cleaner, better UI.
The Chicks UI has been updated so that a lot more information is provided at a glance.
There are now political parties. For the most part, various events will key off these to gain favor. The higher a particular group's approval, the more of a bonus you get. One nice touch: every civilization's political parties are different.
A couple of things you may have already noticed: you can now sort unassigned leaders by traits, and there's a whole new tab called Institutions. As you assign leaders to them, they will level up and provide more benefits to the player.
Planetary Improvements
The Drengin receive a couple of new planetary improvements to help jumpstart a homeworld or a new core world: the Warhost Muster and the Chainforge. The less we explain the latter, the better.
Another change is the on-screen smart notifications. These can be configured in options (or turned off), but they come in handy. You'll also probably notice the colony worlds now explain that they can't be upgraded.
Another new feature is that Starbases can now be configured to automatically add a module once you have the resources. For instance, this Starbase will get a factory added to it as soon as I get Durantium.
The Empire
The Culture tree can unlock governments if you have the Federations & Empires expansion. So let's unlock Empires.
Which leads us to:
So what does an Empire give you?
The Dominator, a powerful hero ship that can lay mines...
...and lower defenses for enemies nearby. The way mines work is that they attack anything that comes near. They can't move (they're mines), and they are pretty tough to take out. The downside is that they cost 2 Durantium and 10 fleet supply.
In version 4, fleet supply matters. There is a new cost called Overhead.
A tiny overhead cost is added based on how much of your fleet supply you are using. The idea: the tighter you're running on supplies, the harder it is to build new ships. Before, players never really hit their fleet supply (and you may still never hit it anyway) but now there's at least a secondary effect that means something. Especially if there's something that consumes 10 instead of just 3, like a Colony ship does. But for protecting an area, it's way cheaper than a starbase.
Next up, let's talk about decrees:
Now, just because you can become an empire early doesn't necessarily mean you should. Empires do well if... well, you have a lot of worlds. But the Drengin Empire doesn't care, so their one-world empire will pass a decree.
Decrees are similar to the Policies that the Colonial Charter government has, except... totally different. Your homeworld has Authority, and if you make another world a vassal you get Authority from that too. With that Authority you can enact decrees. Each decree commits some of your Authority, which limits how many you can have. The bigger your empire, the more decrees you can have. So, open-ended, right? No, because decrees are also a slight drain on your Authority.
And on top of that, many decrees lower the loyalty of your governor and vassals. (We'll talk about vassals in a second.)
Now we get the Royal Court.
There are 6 Court Offices, and they are all immediately available. These Court officials can be given orders (and we are improving the UI for this screen). So in effect, assuming each position has 3 different orders (and they can have more) that's 24 different jobs they can hold, but you can only choose up to 6 at once.
Now, once you have some core worlds, you will face some tough choices. Do you make them into a vassal?
Vassals are semi-autonomous. They... well, let me just show you.
Isn't she pretty? Let's make her into a Vassal.
Vassal worlds are managed by the AI to a degree. But in effect, they run like planets did in Galactic Civilizations II: you tell them what you want built and they build it. GalCiv III and IV made it so that you could literally choose where on the planet an improvement was placed.
Now, can you min-max every one of your planets better than the AI? Maybe. But Vassal worlds get a 2X multiplier to their output, and you can still tell them what to build if you want. In addition, they give you Authority.
And those decrees; look at them again. They mostly involve boosting your homeworld: take a few percent of the wealth or resources from those other worlds and bring it to your homeworld. Now you have to wonder, maybe you can optimize every core world better than the AI governor, even when the governor is given a 2X bonus. But what about the tradeoff, if you end up with your homeworld getting 10X more resources and you can focus all your min-max abilities on just that?
Of course, there's no free lunch. Decrees make you lose the favor of your vassals, and if you overextend and their loyalty gets too low, they can rebel, and then you get nothing. Luckily, there's something you can do: Enforcer-class ships.
The Subjugators
Another ship you get is the Enforcer Class:
Besides being pretty decent combat ships, they have another advantage: you park them in orbit and they remind the vassal who's boss. And a loyal vassal is a productive vassal; Enforcers restore Authority and loyalty. From a gameplay point of view, these ships are particularly nice because they make really good defender ships for your important planets.
The AI
One thing that will become pretty obvious as you play is that this is a whole new AI. Virtually every part of the game AI has been rewritten: what techs they research, how they research, how they choose improvements, how they choose what ships to build, and how they design ships.
Not that we had much choice. The AI had to be redone because these governments change the gameplay so much. For instance, the AI players have to know to send their mining ship to mine near the subspace streams, which required a host of other work across the board to make that possible. The AI's intelligence will be pretty noticeable.
The Drengin Experience
So hopefully you've gotten a taste of why the Drengin Empire are just misunderstood. Running an empire is not easy. You have to bust a few heads in order to keep order. And that is what it's all about. Order.
