Galactic Civilizations IV

I like this game, it reminds me some of Master of Orion, mostly MOO 2. Of course its much more modern and has stuff beyond MOO 2. I have played a few full games, I'm currently playing a large map and have 6 or 7 other civilizations left that I'm competing with, a couple civs got conquered. The graphics are good, the stars and planets on the map are vivid with colors and there are nebulas, black holes, etc where some of the resources can be harvested. The game has had a few updates since I bought it. It mostly runs well and smoothly. But occasionally some glitches happen. The sound effects cut out sometimes I noticed once you have a game going with a lot of ships / colonies, etc. I think the game could be improved some too. One of my biggest complaints right now is that once you have a large empire going, I have probably 15-20 core worlds and many colonies / starbases, the management can became tedious. For instance, there is no way I know to put the shipyards on "Idle", so a shipyard has to be building something or it will keep bringing you back to the idle shipyards. I wish there was a way to "shutdown" or put shipyards into an "idle" status and then bring them back online when you need them to build ships. If you have 15-20 shipyards, this becames a real task every turn if you don't need to build much currently. The other issue I see sometimes once I have a large empire is that as you get the focus moved from one idle fleet to another to give it orders, sometimes after moving a fleet or ship the turn will just end, not giving you a chance to do anything else. Normally you get an "end turn" icon when nothing is left to focus on. Then you can end the turn if you want to or active another ship, check out a core planet, etc. But sometimes the end turn just "happens" after telling a ship to move and this is annoying if you wanted to do something else before the end of the turn. I still recommend the game, its fun and I enjoy playing it.

Unreasonable price for season pass 2 Stardock is doing worse than Paradox ---------------------------------------- Edit after developer feedback: Sorry but your explanation does not add up So you make 2 years of content for 4 expansions.... So why not make 1 year of content for 2 expansions ? Price would be lower and players would not have to sign a blank cheque...

Seemed similar to Endless Space 2 or Stellaris. But so far the Tutorial missions seem bugged, quests repetitive or bugged (planet with 54 pollution was getting "new plague emerged" event every month for 10 months in a row),... Will update later if I decide to give it another try. Update: Definitely don't recommend. Playing as Cosmic contaminat. Getting "Super bacteria" event 4 months in-game. Event that tell me my elderly are in danger from bacteria. Elderly in a race of irradiated abominations that spawned 4 months ago. Did the authors even try to make the game immersive?

This game is definitely an improvement over GalCiv3 1: The fact that you can now besiege planets for a set number of turns before it falls as opposed to needing to land ground invasions. Ground invasions themselvse are not made up of disposable "legions" you lose after each invasion 2: The leader system makes internal politics a lot more interesting. Each leader has a backstory, stats that determine how good they will be at different jobs, and a loyalty stat. 3: More events show up, including ones related to leader backstories 4: GalCiv4's cultural focus system is better than Galiv3's ideology system. Instead of 3 simplistic ideologies with specialized perk branches and needing to rack up those ideology-specific points to buy these perks, you now have a system with 8 distinct ideologies each offering more of a variety to their perks, which can be purchased with generic culture points, which can be used for any ideology. You are still rewarded for making decisions that favor a certain ideology, as Cultural Awareness gives you discounts on its respective ideology's perks, but you are not forced to specialize like in GalCiv3. 5. This is the first game I have seen incorporate GenAI. The AlienGPT is a cool feature to help with the creation of custom factions, often tweeking stats to suit the playstyle you're going for, and it's nice to know that it is trained solely off the studio's own art library All of these features are available in the base game with NO DLC REQUIRED That said, there are a still a few mechanics that I miss from GalCiv3, such as the Mercenary Market and Government system

Overall it's still one of the best turn-based strategy games I've played. But & as with all of the Sid Meyers Civilisation games this one has a similar AI that becomes predictable over a few restarts of the game. This means that adversaries on the map automatically surge towards & enclose your player as soon as contact is made. This game also randomly inserts hostile enemies at you despite the settings you input. Thirdly; there is A GLITCH involving the economic policy settings page that sometimes prevents you from adding or changing policies until the next time you open another policy box on this page.

You play for a couple dozen hours and you start wondering: where is the game? Yes, my sphere of influence is growing. Yes, my fleets are getting stronger. Yes, my planets are developed and industrial/scientific powerhouses. But where does it all lead and how does it add up? There's a finite amount of fun in watching a circle grow larger, or your fleets (of miniscule size compared to competitors BTW) engaging in terrible 2d auto-combat, or clicking build for the fortieth time on the newest colony. There are the trappings of a decent 4X scifi game, but only that and nothing more. There is no depth to the mechanics, no beauty to the "art," and certainly no polish to the systems (what even is the shipyard ship designer?). I would not recommend. Stardock makes other decent games. GalCiv4 isn't one of them.

As stated so much. Too full of bugs. The game is an experiment, trying to use generative AI too early for too much. Biggest irk is spending time on ships designing them and writing text for them to disappear in droves once new tech is researched. Discovered unique tech just completely gone. Honestly for all the options they had with AI integration. I feel the choice of images is just the worst one. Could have used it for ship names or citizen/leader names, based off either custom names or existing names. Make the other civs unable to see what you have and stop the demand 10% of it offering a exploration treaty in return, but rather have algorithms to have a better approach so trade isn't ♥♥♥♥. Especially by factions that are unfriendly that spam trade deals even if they are far weaker in every regard. That system had zero changes from 3 and I think also 2 but that's longer ago. The tech tree is far more limited then ever before, and if you play on a large+ map with few habitable planets you have to spam starbases because there is like only 1 or so tech to increase ship range. They could have added comfort options to the game that were annoyances in 3. Like auto upgrade equipment if new tech comes out where possible. Improved exploring, instead of straight lining to the map edge, in spirals outwards from home-world so finding nearby planets is less of a hassle on big maps. One thing I always hoped would change was how certain tech was handled, because you know, The year, 2301, the race that has existed for thousands or hundreds of years on that planet finally goes into space, but forgot what espionage was, oh and what is trade? I get the older games did it. But can't we have smarter approaches to that? Perhaps relate techs to big breakthrough level techs as gates instead of mechanics for everything. This game just feels stagnant and as I said an experiment that we pay them for to be testers on. At the bare minimum I am just asking for a unified art style not a mix due to GenAI, even if I do love the potential of GenAI. So many hours on three, dozens on 4, Yes I bought the game around the steam release (F epic) So yes I borrowed the game+DLC to play mostly. Because I AM NOT paying a cent more to be a test subject. Anyone that recommends the game has no self respect as a gamer imo. On a 7800X3D with 4070ti (not super) and 32GB ram on a nvme and the game has fps issues on 4K? In this age? Today on the day of my daughters weddin'? Nah man. I waited for over half a year since my last play and no bug seems fixed yet DLC drops. Okay there is some good, I like the orbital construction addition, the non generated stuff looks really good, and I do like there custom civ creator more then the previous version being able to choose portraits for citizens allowing multi-cultural special in a way.