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 26 chart moves that followed a price cut of more than 20% went a median of 7 places towards #1, and the 2,400 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
[hr][/hr][i]Simple, but functional old school 4x game which was overshadowed and improved upon by its competitors. GC II was an amazing, innovative and well written game. Its sequel however stagnated and introduced massive amounts of questionable quality paid content. Series seemingly only had progressed in terms of graphics throughout the decades which is just too little as most 4x games have amazing aesthetic. The final nail to the coffin is the fact that this game simply does not work. Its fundamental mechanics are broken which makes it an obsolete product. [/i][hr][/hr] [b][i]Place of discussion and full review:[/i][/b] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Calicifer/discussions/0/4859966604394247450/]Calicifer's Reviews[/url] [h1]A Dinosaur[/h1] This is what I felt while playing this game. It might be a lesson to me, that I should play my childhood favourites when they come out and not when their development is long over. Everything this game does seem so similar to GC II game. This might be fine for an old or remastered game, but is far from fine for a new game. It feels that everything what this game does, someone else have done it better. Game is stuck in the past with next to little actual development of its mechanics. Play Stellaris for better immersion. Play Endless Space for more casual and straightforward 4x experience. Play Distant Worlds or Aurora for complex simulation. This game is in a weird place where every competitor have done everything it tries to do, but better. [h1]Is it worth starting the galactic crusade?[/h1] This question solely depends on how experienced you are in 4x games. Do you have nostalgia for GC II? Experienced players have nothing to see here, however it is still a charming little experience. Morality events have their own charm, research tree is sometimes funny or tries to be creative. Developers once put effort into this game and it is now in remade form, all the things which made previous game great is still here and they might be worth experiencing for returning players or ones who do not have extensive library to compare games to. [h1]It takes talent to fail so much[/h1] Despite this game being developed for decades now, it is still a broken mess. From its combat system, economy, surrender mechanics or diplomacy. It is hard to find an aspect of this game which would just work. You sure can play this game, but do not expect it actually working. Soon you will notice just how poorly thought out and refined all of its internal mechanics are at which point, all the gameplay becomes about meaningless min/maxing and computer exploitation. [list] [b][i]AI[/i][/b] [*]Artificial intelligence in this game is really terrible to borderline broken. It simply fails to be a credible threat. It has no function which would tell it to create a massive deathball and try to invade you. All it does are interceptor building which really are good at anything besides protecting your planets from ground invasions. It cannot keep up with a player, after an early game where AI seemingly cheats, it falls behind rapidly due to its ineffective build strategies on its own planets. The difference is so immense that after a while, you start a war against them only to discover that they had failed to properly max out their planets and construct any worthwhile fleet against you. This game was in development for so long and developers still had failed to make a simple boolean-based AI which would actually work. [b][i]Diplomacy[/i][/b] [*]Diplomacy option received quite a bit of adjustment over the years, however AI still remains very bad at it. It will never trade planets or their own far out stations for anything reasonable. You might give your whole empire away for one of their colony planets. They consistently ask you to invade others for insultingly meagre rewards. They randomly ask for tribute with no relationship to the threat (or lack of) they pose to you. They sometimes give everything away in their own deal. They sometimes randomly decides to hate you when their ally declares war on you. They sometimes randomly declare war against you when you camp on of your fleets next to their borders even if they are ridiculously outmatched. They do not show any initiative to ally with you and only get pissed at you for trying to research high end tech. In this game diplomacy is very rudimentary and is little more than a button to min/max your own gain. [b][i]Surrender[/i][/b] [*]After all this time, this game still has major bugs. After enemy empire surrenders, it can decide to give all of its planets to their own ally. They can surrender even when you sign peace treaty with them and leave them with quite a few planets. They will just decide to end themselves and will give all of their planets to their allies. This however causes all of their controlled planets to disappear. In my play through, whole south of the galaxy was unpopulated, because enemy AI decided to surrender and all of its planet vanished, leaving only their token influence on the map. It is a major bug which developers never had bothered to fix which I think is quite telling of their commitment to these series as a whole. [b][i]Combat[/i][/b] [*]Combat system is equally broken as rest of a game. Ship building is all about stacking specifics weapons. It does not have any counter system. Shields, armor and point defences are effective to a certain level before late game tech adds modules which essentially nullifies all defensive capabilities of enemy ships. With something insane as 100% armor piercing, it becomes pointless to add any armor to your ships. In fact, the only effective protection is maneuverability in sub-light speed drives. You can add easily stackable 20% evasion bonuses from a single such drive upon any ship. Interceptors which casually dodge shots is one thing. However, you can even make super-maneuverable capital ships which will dodge most of the shots coming their way. In this game, there are no counters, just abusing broken stacking mechanics which make combat one hit - one kill affair. There are also issues of ship roles. Even if you make light aircraft carrier on cruiser hull, it will still rush to the combat regardless of its combat role. Support ships with no defences will still close in instead of trying to stay behind. In this game, setting ship role does not matter. Entire system seems to be completely broken and there is no organic inter-play between various ship types. Capital ships just outright annihilate everyone and there is no point of trying to counter their spam with light interceptor-bomber ships which could hit them without being hit themselves by their massive cannons. It is such basic inter-play, but it is missing in this game. [b][i]Economy[/i][/b] [*]Economy in this game is solely reliant on stacking bonuses. Eventually every civilization becomes incredibly good at something. They receive such immense bonuses that it makes you wonder why even try doing anything. It is a game about specific builds and strategies as your entire galaxy spanning empire can be less productive than few worlds in the corner. It is such 4x gamey mechanic. [/list] [h1]Send it to Lagrange point...[/h1] ...and kill its momentum. Send it in places where nobody will ever see it again. Where gravitational forces cancel each other out and its lack of momentum will ensure that it will be stuck in cold, dark and irrelevant place forevermore. This game is as average as it gets. I cannot even recommend on a basis of refinement and maturity, because there is none. It is just an old game with new graphics and features which were never properly implemented. This game does not enrich your soul, it does not provide you with new experiences, it does not challenge you. It is good as a time sink, but it doesn't do anything better than other games.
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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
The game is buggy as hell despite being what's supposed to be a turn based game. Just in the last few hours I've had one CTD, twice where the game effectively freezes where you're waiting for the AI to make their turn but it never happens, and a dialogue option that repeats and can't be exited from. I can't continue the campaign due to this bug: https://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/350542050095526329/ They claimed a fix was coming, but it's been 8 years since then. The game itself is not that bad, given that I got it for cheap, but it's no excuse to not fix your damn bugs.
no ultimate edition after 7 years, this game seemed like a graphical upgrade over galciv 2 and a dlc moneygrab. I will never consider another Stardock game in the future.
Caveat - this is only a thumbs up because I have indeed got a lot of hours of enjoyment out of this game. However, I am overall pretty disappoint. Stardock has been given multiple years to try and tackle bugs, crashes, hangs, etc, but every time I come back to this game, I can't past a certain turn count. It's almost as if the game is designed to fail before it resolves. Very disappointing.
Great game that I would have rated 8/10, but unfortunately there is a really annoying and widely reported bug that causes the game to freeze (or sometimes crash) between turns. Sometimes it will happen at EVERY turn - truly a game breaker that has sill not been fixed - 5.5/10.
Uses Epic Online Services (Spyware).
After playing through part of the campaign and couple random maps I'm not impressed. When you first start it seems like there will be a lot you can do in game. But you soon discover that there's no point in building anything larger then a small size ship because a swarm of small ships will ALWAYS take out the computer's fleet. And you quickly realize beam weapons are more useful then any other weapon, because first mission in campaign has computer send a swarm of 5 tiny beam (laser) ships to destroy your 2 frigate class ships. Ok so ship building is bland, maybe there's hope for game in world building. Nope. Each planet only has so many tiles to place buildings on, half of which you'll need factories on because otherwise your ships and buildings take 30 turns to upgrade/build. So now 4 of your 8 tiles are factories (3 plus starport which should always be built first to help you get resources into space quicker), then you'll need 2 tiles to be banks, and 2 tiles to be research facilities. There you go... that's the entire game basically. There's some world that are bigger so you can drop an influence spreading building and maybe a food or approval building. Eventually you research terraforming so you can craft 2-3 new tiles on a planet, but you're still going to be dropping factory/bank/research on those to keep up with computer. in my 72 hours of playing I never once bothered with the buildings you get from your morality points, because the buildings normally take 25-30 turns to complete. You're better off spending those turns building factories/banks. You're saying to yourself "well maybe I'll play it differently and build a full fleet of ships of varying size to make it more fun". Sure you can do that.... if you want to spend 900 hours playing same map. The medium ships take around 20-25 turns to build 1, the large ships take like 40-50 turns. But here's the issue, the ships don't scale well. Every 4-6 turns you can spit out a small laser ship, in the time it takes to build one medium size ship you can build 4-5 small ships that will always beat the one medium ship. In the time it takes to build a large ship you can toss out a fleet of 10 medium ships that will wreck the large ship. When you only have 3-4 shipyards you don't want to be losing large ships you worked on all day. Because after computer nukes your 3 large ships they'll take out your shipyard with 2 medium ships they spent 4 turns making and now you can't build new ships at all. Game over.
This game is a mess. You get a base game that isn't even as good or complete as GalCiv 2. Then to make it a functional game with as much content as the base game of GC2, you have to buy $100 worth of DLCs. The worst part is they tried to redo the tech tree because some people don't like having choices in a strategy game. GC 3 plus $100 in DLCs is just an updated GC2 with less choices and options. I don't play 4x strategy games for simplicity and all this one manages to do is take you to the cleaners for the same amount of content in GC2 and dumb the game down for people who really don't like strategy/ civ management games anyway. I wish Stardock would get off this series. Or at least stop trying to rob people with 300 DLCS for a complete game. I hope they don't mess SoSE 2 like they did GC3. That is their real gem of a game.
Unfortunately I can't recommend games from Stardock anymore. This game here was fun and I liked it, but I do incorporate decisions of developers in my recommendations and in my future purchases. [b]1. Stardock went the EGS exclusive route with GalVic IV.[/b] I understand everyone needs money to do a living. I also understand that you try to optimize your profit. BUT it is absolutely clear, that this is a anti-consumer decision. Those consumers you want to sell your products to. Sometimes you can't get everything you like. Here you loose customers. [b]2. Stardock censors the Steam forum on this topic.[/b] I understand moderation, but not censorship. I really liked Stardock for being one of the pioneers to go DRM free with the first GalCiv and being bold enough to make the games they have done in the past. I enjoyed them a lot. But No. No, if you ally with someone arrogant like Sweeny and his stance to perceive customers as a given resource eager to lay their money to his feet while he drops a dump on us ... so be it. If you are so eager to take money from Tencent which is taking influence on cultural goods to get the Chinese agenda going ... so be it. But you do this without me and hopefully without others. I thank you for the games of the past and the great time I had with them but our ways part.
Great game, it is well designed and balanced. It is the best of the 4x space strategy games. If you can buy it on Steam with DLC's for 25% off you are crazy to not buy it. I've played GC2 for many years and have played GC3 since it was released. [u]Strengths: [/u] - Custom races, this is very well done. - Various play styles impacted by choices you make in game. Love citizen, artifact and Ideology systems. - Ship design, amazing levels of detail here - you can spend hours just designing ships for fun. Artists rejoice! - Unique game options allow for different kinds of games with different victory conditions. - Mods exist to add races, ships, and variations to the game. Hopefully more are coming (Startrek vs Starwars please?) [u]Weaknesses:[/u] - Doesn't scale to massive games as well as it should and they will slow down your computer (lag). - Shipyards should be able to repeat missions for credits / research or resources indefinitely - Buying resources from the market requires a mouse click for each unit (allow us to enter how many) - My last game I bought 320 Antimatter for $1. each but had to click the mouse 320 times. - If I want to sell 300 Thullium I don't want to click the mouse 300 times. - Diplomacy: Doesn't balance trades with credits automatically to come to an acceptable agreement - Shipyards should have the ability to assign missions to find any resource (add Duranthium, Xanthium & Techapod, etc.) - I would prefer one mission to find resources and you just select which resource you are looking for. - Races declare war but don't explain why... it would be nice to know which action I took lead to war. - Were my ships in your space / Is my military too weak / Is the NPC just a malevolent and violent jerk? - High learning curve without enough manuals / tutorials. They exist but more could be done. - Would love a tutorial on how to automate features of the game to speed up the game and reduce my choices. Many of my issues with the game are particular to my preferred play style and could be considered nit picking. Still I give it a 96% rating, this is my kind of game. Thank you Stardoc.
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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