4X games are fun because you take the role of a great leader of a great nation, civilization or tribe and then lord it over them as you see fit. You call the shots, and nobody else. Sure, some games have more or less simulation aspects to them that interfere in various ways with your top-down decision making process, but usually, as the head honcho, what you say goes.
Of course, this isn’t particularly realistic when it comes to certain aspects of an empire’s management: President BATTLEMODE might well have grandiose ideas about rush-building that shiny new battleship he needs to lead his navy to victory in an upcoming war in the Pacific, but no matter how much he shakes his fists and jumps up and down, yells at people over the phone and threatens all kinds of terrible things, the myriad elements that go into his country’s industrial production chain just can’t quite get it together this month, and the President has to make do with an ancient 1890s ironclad leading his WW2 forces instead. Very embarrassing.
In GalCiv IV the capacity for a government or leader to pull strings to make extraordinary things happen represented as a special resource called Control.
Control represents how closely knit your leader’s control network over their own civilization is. Naturally, the closer a ruler leans towards totalitarianism, the easier it is to have their cronies watching over every aspect of society, enough to pull things together in times of need and get something important done at short notice.
Control is generated in several ways: most civilizations will generate at least one Control point per turn from the start of the game through the Capital City on their homeworld, although this is not a strict rule and some Core Civs do not, instead having to aim for some of the other generation methods to get their first Control points rolling in. This is deliberate, and represents their initial inability to pull their civilization together enough to rush build that Colony Ship they so desperately need.
The Civilization Trait Militant can grant a starting bonus of 50 extra Control per Trait point, which can be a very powerful way to get your fledgling empire up and running.
Certain Improvements, Events and Ideological traits can all generate you more Control too, whether increasing the amount you get per turn like the Coordination Beacon improvement here…
Or granting a one-time boost of Control points, like this 100 point boost gained by unlocking Iron Fist in the Totalitarianism ideology tree.
All this begs the question: what do I need Control for? What do I spend all those points on?
Primarily, Control is the main resource used when activating Executive Orders, which are a neat way of organising some of the really special, exciting abilities representing extraordinary feats of bureaucratic aptitude, incredible logistical efficiency, or just a tyrant’s terrifying ability to crack skulls together. These Executive Orders give your civilization has access to a series of unlockable bonuses that can give you a special boost just when you need it: providing you have the Control (and sometimes a few Credits) to pay for it.
Draft Colonists costs a fairly sizeable chunk of Control points but has a fairly rapid cooldown timer of just 12 turns, and this means civilizations that expend the effort to gain more control points in the early game can colonise new worlds very quickly: remember, you’ll also be building your own colony ships in your shipyards too.
Galactic Festival is cheap, at only 10 Control, but has a long cooldown. There’s a reason for this: it can generate a lot of extra credits every turn through it’s large +25% Tourism bonus. This obviously works better if you’ve got a large territory, as Tourism income is based on how many hexes you control, but this Executive Order can fill the coffers pretty rapidly if you play it at the right time.
Each civilization will have it’s own set of Executive Orders and many of them will be unlocked with research or through the Ideological Traits tree, and there’s a lot of them to find and use!
Control is also used for rush-building improvements and shipyard projects too, so President BATTLEMODE can finally get that battleship he needed.
There are a few other places where Control will be used, such as in certain Event choices, but I’ll not spoil those.
Have fun exerting control over your civilization!