Build a civilization that will stand the test of time in the largest space-based strategy game ever! Choose from dozens of unique races and make a name for yourself across the galaxy through diplomacy, espionage, technological advances, and more.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
Prices
Each in the currency that store quoted — not converted: the gap between two rows is the publisher's pricing, not an exchange rate.
Every market we collect.
Discounts
Every price cut of more than 20% we have observed, in each market that quoted one, with this game's chart position on either side of it. These are episodes, not a model: a sale is one event, and one event cannot tell you what the next one will do.
Reviews, worldwide (the counter carries no country): 0.43/day in the week to Sep 8 → 0.86/day in the week after.
For scale, across Steam · Top Sellers · Brazil over the last 30 days: the 25 chart moves that followed a price cut of more than 20% went a median of 10 places towards #1, and the 2,413 moves with no price cut behind them went 2 away. One store, one chart, one country — it is the only place we have enough observations to say even that.
Prices outside the United States have been collected since 6 August 2026 and chart positions since 19 July 2026, so a cut older than that has no market to compare and a market that joined later has no history yet. Nothing here is converted between currencies.
About
Add-ons
Each DLC is estimated with the same model as a game, then summed — a modeled figure, not reported DLC sales.
Sums Steam only; Xbox, Epic publish no volume signal, so the true total is higher by an unknown amount.
Updates
Build ids and update times come straight from Steam's PICS — the same source SteamDB reads. Patch history grows as we record new builds.
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 813 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
EDIT (4/10/22): I've bought the beta of Galactic Civilizations 4 on Epic's store. It's essentially Galactic Civilizations 3 with a few new wrinkles and a new victory condition (a lot of the same resources were copied and pasted into 4). The biggest wrinkle is planetary systems are grouped together in one area, and different areas are linked by hyper lanes. Currently hyper gates do not exist (not sure if this is planned to be reintroduced). The new victory condition (prestige) allows for games to end significantly quicker, preventing a grind fest. While GC4 also looks nicer, if you already have GC3 it won't bring much you haven't already seen. ORIGINAL (1/5/22): This review is a comparison of three space-based strategy games: Endless Space 2 (ES2), Galactic Civilizations 3 (GC3), and Stellaris (Stell). I enjoy all three, but each has some strengths and weaknesses. First some game play info: ES2 & GC3 are turn based while Stell is real time (but with the ability to pause and make decisions it can play like a turn based). Navigation in GC3 is grid based, while navigation in GS2 and Stell is from star to star via warp lanes (GS2’s tech tree does eventually unlock open navigation, but you can’t intercept ships in open space, only at star systems). Economy management in GS2 is at the solar system level, while GC3 and Stell are at the planet level. As of January 2022 both GC3 and Stell continue to see patching / updates, while GS2 has not been patched since the last DLC release in May 2021, which was released behind schedule and is of terrible quality. Now to rate each on a few key aspects (in no particular order)… Most stable base game: ES2 Most stable with DLCs: Stell (ES2’s last DLC simply does not work, but the rest are fine; also, GC3 is very stable, I’ve just had one or two hiccups) Best graphics: ES2 Largest map: GC3 (it’s not even close, you can go crazy with this one with 35+ opponents and hundreds of colonizable planets; but you do need 32GB RAM and an 8 core CPU to pull off the largest map) Best story line: ES2 Best ship customizer: GC3 (Tech tree in GC3 unlocks ship weight limits to do whatever you want with, while Stell and ES2 ships have modules to select different tech from, with Stell probably having a more diverse tech tree between the two) (also of note, in GC3 you can also customize the ship’s appearance, and players have come up with some cool designs, but appearance has no impact on the ship’s performance) Best combat mechanic: ES2 (once combat starts there’s really not much you can do in any of the games, however in ES2 you can at least set formations which offer bonuses and can take advantage of your weapons loadout based on the range that’s most optimal; ES2’s combat graphics are pretty cool at least) Best hero / citizen mechanic: ES2 Best tutorial: ES2 Best races: ES2 (each race not only have different attributes, but some can introduce some really fun mechanics unique to that race, completely changing how you approach game play) Best end-game mechanics: Stell (on this note, if you want something that’s easy and simple to win, Stell is not your friend, go with ES2) (GC3 does not have an end-game mechanic, which sometimes turns it into a grind fest) (ES2’s endgame mechanic is not bad if you’ve kept up to that point) Most challenging: Stell Best ability to customize economy: GC3 (you get a set number of land plots per planet based on it’s quality to do with as you please, which can influence your population, production, research, etc; in ES2 planet size and quality influence your population cap and a small number of build choices; in Stell planet size and quality influence the amount of infrastructure you can build, and thus can influence population too) Best computer-assisted economy management: Draw (each game allows you to put management of colony economy on auto-pilot so you’re not spending time micromanaging stuff and to be honest I hate all of them as I tend to be a little OCD about stuff; but as I haven’t come up with a better way, I’ll live with it) I don’t have a clear cut favorite, as I tend to rotate between the three, but due to the amount of freedom in ship design, economy management, as well as open galaxy navigation, I tend to play GC3 a little more as ES2 almost feels restrictive in comparison.
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Price dynamics, follower growth, revenue and sales trajectories with interactive tooltips
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Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English*, French, German, Russian*languages with full audio support
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Matched by title — a reused name can pair the wrong games. * is a critic aggregate. Prices and positions are each store's United States storefront; Epic charts worldwide. Audience and Score too, except Steam's, which is worldwide.
Hours played at review time, across 816 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
I have enjoyed this game alot. I am retired but enjoy sci fi and astronomy.
Stardock have taken the Paradox route of creating games with 400 overpriced dlc.
Way too much DLC, I have the base game but the quantity of things apparently not available to me makes me not want to play.
The December 2022 update has effectively pranged the game beyond repair. I started a large game with 12 other races but at one point half the races effectively threw in the towel regardless of size or power, they just gave up. Weird, this didn't happen before....! I get the feeling Stardock has done and "Apple" move and has retrospectively killed this older game to push players to Galactic Civ 4 (which is still an Epic Games Exclusive). Nice try.
Don't buy this on Steam. Stardock appears to be moving the franchise over to Epic instead. For those of us unwanted customers here on Steam I would recommend purchasing Stellaris instead. Much better game anyway.
The latest update has made the game unplayable. Terrible, game-breaking bugs have been introduced and the AI has been reduced to almost nothing. It's a shame, because this game WAS fun, but now I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. The worst bug so far is when entire planets are deleted from the game. This happens often when a civilization surrenders. They "give" all of their possessions to another player (human or AI). But half the time their planets and starbases are just deleted from the game. Furthermore, there are instances where some major races won't even research the most basic technologies. These are just the game-breaking changes. The QOL seems to have been sabotaged and it seems like you're playing on a server even in single player. My ships will literally trace two paths after given a move order. This is my opinion but also a warning to anyone who sees this on a sale: I'm not saying it's a trend or even intentional...but Stardock seems to have a history of making game-breaking "improvements" that coincidentally come around when the next iteration of the game is released. Playing this game today is nothing like it was two years ago. It's an experience that has turned me off from buying anything Stardock publishes. And it's happened before. I just can't support a company that degrades its own products to force you to upgrade. That's what they've done here. If a future updates improves the game and fixes the new bugs, I'll change my review and my opinion. But until then, I'll stay away.
AI simply does not invade other AIs planets when they are at war. Three different civilizations were at war with the Icononians, controlling most of their space, and did not invade their planets. The AI knows roughly how to attack a human player, but they are incapable of fighting each other. Worst AI I have seen in a mainstream strategy game.
>Start civilization >like 20 turns in >Alien species that lives halfway into my ship range steals the only colony currently available in my sphere >They've already taken like a third of the resources in my ship range >I have another faction encroaching on my other flank >I have no other for colonies in the nearby systems that are not 40+ turns away on the tech tree to become habitable >I have no chance of building an invasion fleet to kill them for the next 5-6 hours of gameplay >delete save Good game but its all decided in the first 100 turns. If you roll a bad early start, you might as well just delete the save and try again. You CANNOT recover, and even if you somehow do, its gonna take 500+ turns of grinding Oh and the "recommended civilizations"/galaxy size ratio is extremely off. You should have half the recommended civilization for your galaxy size at most. Otherwise everyone is so close we would have discovered them with the Voyager probe.
I put a lot of hours and fun into this game. If you like 4x strategy space themed game, this is a fairly good game. It can suffer from memory hungry issues when using the larger maps and the session gets into a large number of turns. I recommend it if you like this type of game. Now for the thumbs down. EOS was added after my purchase of the founder edition years ago. I agree to Steam taking data, not epic online services. It was not needed imo and it I guess Stardock going epic exclusive for GC 4 prompted them to add it. From the developer aspect, the price of upsetting people that do not like epic is a small tradeoff. If that does not matter than get the game or the new one. I enjoyed the game but I cannot support the choices.
Active players
Estimated daily and monthly active players (DAU/MAU) modeled from peak concurrency.
Players by region
Where this game's players are, estimated from review languages.
Players also reviewed
The games this title's players most often review too — audience affinity.
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