After several years of post-release development and multiple expansions, Galactic Civilizations IV has a hell of a lot of content. 4X is a relatively complex genre and GalCiv leans pretty hard into the “sandbox” side of things, providing the player with many tools and options to play with when planning their conquest of the galaxy.
This is great for the player, but with such expansive scope and depth, paired with periodic patching to iron out bugs and address various issues that crop up, the overall balance of the game will come under strain. By balance here, I’m not just talking about the relative power levels of the various Civilizations, and the many abilities they bring to bear against one another. This overall balance must also consider how well major (and minor) gameplay elements and individual mechanics interlock and interact with one another too, to ensure that the overall fun factor of the game isn’t bent out of shape.
There’s a lot to consider here: the overall pacing of the game needs to feel good, with a clear and distinct start, middle and end, and the AI needs to be able to play the game in a satisfying way too. All of these things can kind of drift as more features get added, and we always make an effort to tighten things as we go. Sometimes though, you need to stop and make a concerted effort to examine the way the game plays right now and then focus in on those areas that need looking at.
With that in mind, you’ll be happy to note that we’ve got a new patch incoming that helps tighten up GalCiv4’s gameplay from top to bottom. While balance patching isn’t quite as sexy as a big content drop, the game should be a lot tighter and more fun to play as a result of this.
All that said, there are some really cool changes in here too! Here are some of the more noteworthy changes made to the game.
First up, we should talk about the improvements made to map generation.
Firstly, we know that not everybody enjoys playing with multiple sectors, but still want the epic scale of a huge map, to build and destroy civilizations on. For you guys, we’ve increased the size of the very largest single sector map.
As you can see, this is a truly enormous map set to the Gigantic setting. I’ve removed the fog of war so you can get an idea of just how many stars and planets you’ll have in play with Occasional Star Frequency. You can imagine what it’ll be like if you increase Star Frequency!
If that’s a bit much, and if you like very big games with lots of distance between stars, but want less Core World management, you could try it with Star Frequency set to Rare.
This picture is quite misleading, looking like a smaller sector perhaps. Make no mistake, this is still a truly massive map. That said, with less stars populating it, there’ll be a lot more distance to travel between worlds, and you’ll have less colony management to worry about.
Here’s what your starting situation looks like. The outer light-blue circle around Geode there is your starting Ship Range, and you’ll need think carefully about how to get all that way over to your neighbouring stars and get another Core World going!
This highlights just how versatile GalCiv is as a sandbox game: if you play with the map settings, you’ll get some really cool and interesting game variants, often increasing the challenge in interesting ways too!
Back to the update, the game will now generate more stars overall, on all Star Frequency settings, and if you want more habitable planets, we’ve increased both their number on the Abundant setting and the maximum number of planets that can be colonised at once. This should please players who like to settle and manage very densely populated Civilizations.
Blackholes are also somewhat more common now, which in turn should increase Antimatter and the possibility for more Stellar Gateways, for those of you who own the Megastructures DLC. Also, if you do own this expansion, we’ve increased the amount of Gigamass gained from Gas Giants, which will increase the amount of Gigamass in the galaxy overall.
Civilization Proximity when a map is generated is now more satisfying and coherent to the settings you choose. Players should mostly be placed in their own sector when “Very Far” is chosen, if there are enough sectors spawned on the map, and Civilizations occupying the same sector will be now appropriately separated.
This should address a long held concern about player placement on the map overall, ensuring map generation and Civilization Proximity settings are more intuitive to use, to get a result closer to what you’re expecting to see.
Exploring those maps is important too, and we’ve improved the auto-explore AI system to work faster, smarter and focus on exploring stars, to find the best worlds and orbiting strategic resources, eliminating the fog-of-war in the process. Speaking of which, performance improvements to the fog-of-war system have been made to dramatically reduce the late game turn processing times, and increase the general performance of the FOW system overall.
Moving to the UI, changes have been made to reduce clutter and improve the overall user experience of navigating the Planet Screen, Ship Designer Screen and Shipyard Screens.
One much requested feature to note here: the Planet Screen now has a handy filter to sort Improvements by their output category.
Technology costs scale up a little faster than before, which means players get to enjoy each tech level a bit longer, remembering you can adjust this speed in the game’s settings if you like it even faster, or slower.
The AI now prioritises Culture techs more than before: Culture and Influence have changed quite a bit since the release of Supernova, and being a very powerful mechanic, getting it balanced right is really important. The AI should now be better at keeping up with the player when they’re going for an Culture-based victory, choking their opponents out with rapid Influence expansion!
There have been many tweaks and changes to the game’s economy, particularly in terms of resource generation at the Core World level. There are too many to mention individually but here are the main changes.
Firstly, Citizens and their various Specializations (or Jobs) now have more impact on Planetary Output values for Manufacturing, Research, Income, Food and Influence, which will have the knock on effect of giving a decent economic boost to Civilization’s (and players) that prefer Citizen-based industry over mass industrialisation using Districts and Improvements.
Furthermore, there have been some tweaks made to Crime to make it feel more impactful. We’ve altered the effects of some of the tools you have to deal with it, making some cheaper and more effective, while reducing the efficacy of some of the more overpowered crime reduction abilities.
The end result is that Crime is a more serious issue to deal with, keeping it a relevant threat for longer, but ensuring the player still has options to reduce it if they want to take those extra steps.
Furthermore, taxation is now more infuriating for your Citizens: previously it was a bit too easy to max out your tax-rate and have everybody go about their lives pretending that losing 75% of their income to the taxman was just fine and dandy. You can still do that, but it’ll require a bit more coercion, bread and circuses, or outright mind control to achieve.
There have been some significant changes made to the game’s resource economy: Strategic and Luxury Resource costs in the Bazaar are now much more market-driven, meaning that the prices will change more dramatically depending on supply and demand than before.
Furthermore, Luxury Resources (that’s the really exotic stuff like Helios Ore, Techapod Hives and so on) are much rarer now, and more valuable as a result.
Moving onto the ship designer, Ship Hulls, from Medium upwards, are now generally larger and can take more components, meaning more choice in how you build the larger warships and non-combat vessels in the game.
In combat, weapon ranges have been increased overall, with missile weapon systems getting an extra shot in each time they fire, and extra damage added to boost their power a bit more.
There’s some exciting news for Diplomacy: players can now trade Colonies and Starbases with one another in the Trade screen. This will open up some interesting strategic options, where you may want to trade away a planet you’re likely to lose to an Influence push and get something in return for it. Another option might be to capture a Core World in a raid and gifting it to another Civilization in return for an alliance, or perhaps to put that Civ’s new holding between you and your foe and potentially drag them into the war too…
Finally, we’ve improved the formatting and translation for non-English languages, improving the game for our international GalCiv fans too.
I think that’s enough for now! I hope you can see that these balance changes are actually pretty exciting and will change the game for the better in a big way.
Let us know what you think in the comments below, and I’ll catch you next time!
Cheers!