To follow on from our previous developer blogs aimed at onboarding new players into our flagship turn-based space 4X game, Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova, this week I thought we’d have a look at a simple system you can use to select a plan of technological development that will best fit your current game situation.
Technology, from a top down perspective, is pretty easy to understand in Space 4X: you generate some kind of research resource, in GalCiv ours is conveniently called Research, and once you’ve accumulated enough of it, you can use it to unlock new capabilities for you to play with.
Technologies, or Techs, are usually unlocked in some kind of sequence, and an advanced technology may require the unlocking of one or more prerequisite Techs before you can select it. It’s all pretty intuitive: you’ll need to discover a laser gun before you can build an advanced laser gun, and you’ll need to discover both lasers and space stations before you can access an orbital laser platform.
Tech trees are often subdivided into different research fields, for flavor and to keep everything more organized. Furthermore, technologies generally become progressively more expensive the further down the technology tree you explore.
In Galactic Civilizations IV, Research points are generated by the Citizens on your Core World working in tandem with Research Districts and Improvements, from research modules on your Economic Starbases, from various in-game events, as a reward for picking certain Ideological Traits and many more.
Techs can also be traded with other Civilizations, and are relatively valuable as a trade commodity as advancing through the research tree is an effective way to win the game.
Part of the strategy in a space 4X comes from plotting your trajectory through the technology tree to unlock the abilities, equipment and other fun stuff you’ll need at each given point of the game.
GalCiv is a sandbox oriented 4X game, featuring many setup options to customize the map and endless variations of in-game situations to face. This requires a fairly large and varied Tech tree, and GalCiv tries to avoid any one path being an optimal solution regardless of the in-game conditions, meaning new players can get a little overwhelmed with the choices on offer for the first few plays.
So what do you want to research first?
This is a huge topic with an infinite number of permutations: in situations like these we want to be thinking in terms of systems, rather than goals, because systems be refined as we develop as players. Here I’ll give you a very basic system that you can use to analyze your game state and figure out how you want to proceed down the tech tree.
Our goal is to win the game, and crucially, we must not lose the game before we can win it. There are many ways to lose, but picking the wrong Techs only to run afoul of a situation that those Techs have not prepared you for, is almost guaranteed to qualify.
For beginners, defeat usually means being militarily invaded or culturally dominated by your stronger neighbors. Alongside defending our civilization from these threats, we must also maximize our empire’s size and ability to generate game winning resources to keep ourselves strong enough to face challenges until we achieve victory ourselves. Running out of Credits or Food might not immediately end the game but it makes the game a lot more difficult to win until you’ve fixed that particular issue.
So, when the game starts and as the first couple of dozen turns develop, you want to be looking at your position on the map, relative to your neighbors and game-winning resources such as high class planets, strategic resources and Precursor artefacts.
This start as the Arceans gives us lots of room to expand but eventually we’re going to run into the Xeloxi who have a lot of colonies around them and are likely to grow fast and strong. There’s no immediate need to defend and in fact, focusing on the Weapons or Logistics line of Techs would stunt our growth.
So, first we grow, but we must intersperse growth and economic Techs with military technology too: one of the triggers for the AI to declare war is you not fielding a military large enough to counter theirs if they did decide to attack. You must not look weak!
In this case, we could focus on Techs that increase the movement speed of our ships, to get our Colony Ships and Constructors out to where they need to be before our rivals.
We also want to improve the economic output of our Core Worlds, whether that’s through increasing the amount of Citizens we can house (the green Planetology branch of Science) or by increasing our Manufacturing output (the orange Industrialisation branch of Engineering).
But before too long, it is imperative that we defend what we’ve built, and this is where the Weapons and Logistics lines come in.
There is more to defense than just warfare. We can build trade routes with our neighbors and make ourselves unattractive for invasion by making it financially damaging for them to declare war on us. The yellow economic branch of Governance can help here, by increasing the number and value of the Trade Licenses we can setup with other Civilizations in the game.
This is a very useful type of “defense” that simultaneously increases our growth by maximizing Credit generation, while keeping our relations with other players high enough that they’ll be less inclined to attack.
In the same screenshot you can also see the blue diplomatic branch of Governance, another defensive branch that effectively makes it harder for your enemies to declare war. Culture (above that) helps you defend from enemy Influence attacks, and increases your own threat vector with your own culture too!
On some maps, with very aggressive neighbors starting very close to you and very few empty worlds to colonize, it might be smarter to build your military a lot faster than this, instead only researching what you need to keep your defensive forces strong enough to dissuade invasion and perhaps start a war of your own, to take enemy worlds.
This is a potentially endless topic and so I have to end it here. My intentions are to get you thinking about reading the situation on the game map turn by turn, and then picking your research topics to both keep yourself in the game while maximizing your potential “to keep on keeping on”, until you get a chance to reach out for victory.
As you get better at the game, you’ll have outgrown the “defend or grow” thing. Then, you’ll learn the various Tech trees, and what they can offer you in terms of long term strategies and from there, you can develop your own playstyle. Some players love to rush for the military techs and overwhelm their enemies with advanced armadas of deadly warships, while others race for Culture, Influence and Precursor relic techs to try to win the game in a less-aggressive fashion.
As always, the choice is yours!