With the benefit of hindsight, Tales of the Arnor should have been handled as a full expansion pack. It just has such a massive scope of changes in it.
For me, personally, it's the first GalCiv IV DLC I've got to work on since Tales of Centauron which I thoroughly enjoyed. But this one...this one is just so much bigger.
This will probably not be the last post I make on Tales of the Arnor so I will probably miss some things here.
Of the Nyx
So as some of you know, I've been writing the lore on Galactic Civilizations since the late 1980s. 4X strategy games don't make very good vessels for getting that lore out obviously.
Some of you probably noticed that the Yor changed the way they looked a lot between GalCiv II and GalCiv III. I mentioned in another post how the first Yor were created by the Iconians and then those Yor creatred more Yor which are the ones depicted in GalCiv III and GalCiv IV. The Nyx that are the subject of Tales of the Arnor look like the Yor from GalCiv II.
The Campaign
So the Nyx will be introduced in the new Mission called Tales of the Arnor. But you will also be able to play them in a normal sandbox game as well.
The Nyx get their own completely unique tech tree:
This turned out to be a bit of a crazy decision because a unique tech tree means they have their own unique ship components too:
It also means they have to have their own leader types:
...and their own leader powers.
The Nyx don't have ministers. They have Primes and they have a very different philosophy how their government should be handled and what traits matter.
It also means they get their own unique improvements including a new one called Aid Ship Production:
And that's just the start.
What you will learn is that the Iconians aren't necessarily blameless.