Galactic Civilizations IV

In reviewing the game, I saw multiple comments that the base game of Gal Civ 4 offered only minor updates to Gal Civ 3. It took me five hours to confirm this and that unfortunately put me beyond the two hour time limit to request a refund. I bought the game at a large discount during the Winter Sale, but still feel like I overpaid.

The PowerPoint presentation of 4X space games Pros, Cons, and review. Pros: - huge waste of time, you can play 100s of hours on drafty brain mode without getting ahead. Cons: - sloppy UI and AI design on the level of an undergrad student doing a JAVAscript model of viral proliferation - no intelligence, purely a war of attrition simulation - results in delusional, simplistic AI behaviors that expect you to respond on the same trash-level performance - deliberate waste of time. game stacking obstacles for no other purpose than giving you "clean-up" chores. - conculsion: this game treats you as an equal. A brainless parasitic entity without standards or a concept of dignity or self-awareness, and it gets upset if you don't comply with its expectations. Review: If GalCiv 1, 2, 3, and 4 have proven anything, it is that the corporate Zeitgeist seems to be that you can do anything to pull money out of people's wallets with the least effort and they will take it up the a*** A carbon copy of the previous game, including a blur of new issues and a lesser impression than the predecessors. It plays like a PowerPoint presentation of other notable game titles, where ship icons shuffle about the map like cheap overlays, because the dev team did not manage to bridge the gap between prolific project size and streamlined solutions. Factually this bogs down a game with flare, bloom, antialiasing and all the graphic bombardment that you will not experience because it is simply impractical to manage a 15000 item map with the zoom factor of a microscope. That aside, the game shows how sloppy developers have become with their work, basically outsourcing quality control onto the consumer to acquire the hardware needed to smoothly run a faulty, shameless product. This slopiness shows everywhere. The game noticeably bogs down as time goes by, it also begins to stall with every task it is given, like generating fresh maps, loading the game, etc. The game uses an AI voiceover to read all the tooltips and event blurbs. HOWEVER the AI is not part of the game. Instead they used the AI to read all the blurbs and put the voice clips in the game at some beta stage. At some point they made smaller and bigger changes to the text blurbs, thus the AI voice narrates a different text. They could not even be arsed to force an intern to use an AI tool that robbed an artist of an income, so that the consumer would have a proper, up-to-date game. Thats how little effort and worth they put on you, it would cost them nothing and still they did not do it. And then the game itself, its technical ideas and their implementation. First comes the AI proliferation which seems to be viral. The AI expansion is not driven by resource restriction, but follows the same spread pattern as "everything I touch is mine" which creates an incredible slog of "hoovering the galaxy" to remove them. A conquest victory is akin to drilling a hole in your skull with a spoon. Likewise "building tall" is impossible, because you can not compete with a system that proliferates exponentially by using quality sources. Simply put 5 times a 10 can not trump 479 times a 1, and while the AI does not have to spend *any* effort at all (since your PC is doing the work) you have to decide if you want to spend the time managing the expansion at trash level, or in fact if you will be satisfied being a mostly uninvolved passenger on autoplay as you watch the simulation "under your control", and in that case, why do you play at all? No matter how bad your life is, you can do better than that with a bag of chips. Other design choices, like DLC come with a baffling display of incompetence that barges in with the bravado of a drunk bloke. Stargates? YES! however, you can not build a network that connects all dots. A WHOLE DLC package introduces megastructures that add ZERO quality of life. The gates only work on black hole positions which are randomly placed on the map, they can only connect to one counterpart at another black hole and do not automatically connect to ALL gates. So not only is this item dependent in its usefulness on the random placement of the resource, it also requires you to re-wire the gates by hand, every time you wish to..."dial in" another destination, and that destination depends again on where it was placed. Remember you spent $15 on that privilege. The other items you can build are...an empty ring world that is somehow worse than any other trash planet you can upgrade by hand, and star upgrades which give 5% to this, 40% to that, at a point in the game where it is completely irrelevant to have that bonus. The dealbreaker though was that the game decides to overrule your agency. Concrete example was an enemy empire declaring war. The result was them losing about 200 ships, 7 planets and 30% of their territorial influence, while destroying 3 ships, taking no ground. Not only did the AI subsequently offer "peace treaties" which were like "things are going poorly, give us 50% of your GDP for 100 turns, but it eventually decided that *my* advisors brokered a peace deal overruling me, because the war was going poorly. The game literally decided to give itself a bonus for losing and says it was a kindness to you. Make of that what you will, but if you want to compete in a game that proves it is better at stacking ♥♥♥♥ than you are, at your dime for buying the game, and powering it using your electric bill, and calling you a loser despite beating it bloody...this is on you.

Lots of reused assets from the last 2 GalCiv games, the newest assets are AI generated. Basic features like the "Create species" button locked behind outrageous DLC

Disclosure up front: This is my first Gal Civ game. A lot of the negative reviews I've seen seem to be centered on the experience returning/veteran players are having with this game. The consensus seems to generally follow that GC4 is not enough of an advancement on GC3 to justify paying for it if you already have previous entries in the series. I'd like to acknowledge the existence of this consensus opinion and concede that it is not mutually exclusive with anything I've written here. So, with that caveat, I will no longer bury the lede: I have immensely enjoyed my time with this game. As an avowed fan of the turn based 4X genre, Gal Civ presents a deep, satisfying mesh of interlocking systems that will largely be familiar to genre vets: you start small, you claim planets (our sci fi re skin of cities) the planets get you more stuff so you can more easily build fleets to get more resources etc Some of the more unique mechanics to this particular 4x iteration took me a game to wrap my head around. Anecdotal Example: building mining starbases early and often is crucial for securing an income of strategic resources. I built absolutely none of these until fairly late in the game, instead leveraging my civilization's advanced science to trade of technologies I'd researched to other civilizations in exchange for the resources, and since I was on an easy difficulty for my first game (with a lot of civilizations on the map) this actually worked out. I've included the full anecdote because I think it also exemplifies some of the fun ways systems can overlap in this game! My main critique is the battle layer. I feel like the 4X genre has progressed past the simple days of old where you just make the two armies smash against each other until one is gone. So many other entries in this genre have found ways to make the battle layer more interesting. For Example: Proxy studios games like Zephon or 40k Gladius have heavy combat focus and do not separate units fighting into another layer and keep one unit per tile, so that the movement layer is also simultaneously a tactical positioning layer. This can get very VERY convoluted in the late game when there are tons of units out, but it is generally engaging. But a LOOOOOOOOOT of games have a separate tactical layer for battles, like Endless Legends, Humankind, and at least one other game in my library at this very moment have similar but distinct ways of transitioning the player into a tactical positioning layer when a battle starts to add more depth to combat strategy than just "make fleet have big number smash into other fleet" And with a game with so much depth to its mechanics nearly everywhere else I find myself disappointed by the simplicity of the combat system, especially given how much emphasis is put on the ability to design your own ships. What's the point of designing my ships if it just means that when I choose to watch the generated battle video, the attack animations look slightly different? Overall though, definitely recommend for players new to the series. Vets should seek out reviews by returning players to view the aformentioned negative-leaning consensus from that group

Awesome 4x grand strategy game! This is the latest in my favorite space strategy game series, and it is the most streamlined and fun experience to date! I loved Gal Civ 1 and 2, but found Gal Civ 3 complicated things too much and the fun of the game was lost under annoying mechanics (invasions for example). Gal Civ 4 + DLC returns the game to what made it so fun before, ruling a huge empire without micromanagement. The UI is the best I’ve seen in a 4x space grand strategy game, with everything so accessible and easy to follow. Love the colony management system of core worlds with building management run by governors vs colonies that require no management, but contribute less resources to the empire. The new invasions system is awesome. No more building tons of troop units and micromanaging that. Now the player builds ships dedicated to conquering planets (Siege ships) and just need to overcome a planets defense and resistance rating. As for exploring and moving through the galaxy, Space is broken down into sectors, and you need special technology to travel to new sectors. Allows the player to build up a bit before facing every other civilization. Also, I play these games for the big picture view, so I think it’s a plus that the ship designer is simplified (a leader of a huge civilization would not be wasting time tweaking ships). Lastly, civilization generation is awesome with AI powered features. Many species and customization truly makes this game seem alive with unique races and vice that play so differently. Overall, Gal Civ4 takes all the best aspects of the series and improved upon them, while eliminating the micromanagement. Highly recommended!!

The failed son. Preface this by saying this is related to 3 assuming all dlcs. The good Citizen and leader overhaul which makes them more unique with good plot lines and interesting additional things to manage. Edit established races so you can play what you want how you want. The anomalies are more interesting to interact with. Warfare is overhauled so that you can attack outside of combat. New abilities make for interesting ways to mod game play. Diplomatic capital. New interesting and fun races. Colonial policies. Control points. Culture points. You actually have to work to get an influence victory now, in 3 i would get it by mistake. Colony to colony trade is buffed. Tourism is nerfed. The bad Limited range forces very slow starts. You can fix this by purchasing star bases from other factions but it puts you behind. It feels like a slow start is forced on you intentionally. The research time in the beginning is crippling unless you get a good roll with the inspiration. You can change that by adjusting research times pregame but without a good roll you essentially empower other races who are going for tech that show up in their quick research which means in no small part they will out tech you. Scrap it all together or give a reroll option that isn't just research and hope. You are broke as hell at the beginning making taking wealthy basically required. The credits should just be doubled, or you should have an option to double starting credits for all players. No mini map, this was honestly the worst, you spend most of the game zoomed out so you can nav, making your civ little more than dots on a screen, it loses charcter and fast. It detaches you. UI is a mess, everything is on this tiny little bar. In three it was slick up at the top and easy to access. Culture points take forever to generate and outside of your specific focus which is most likely the chosen one at the beginning you ain't spending it out side of that specific focus. Ship editor is slashed down with player freedom. Still can't go to which starbase or ship or planet during trade so i can see what the hell I'm actually doing. I traded for a lot of these so i had close to 50+ at some point it gets truly impossible to manage. Trade is glitchy, hit persuade, can't add something to screen due to glitch, back out, can add again, can't persuade because i used it. Ship construction Automation is super glitchy, I had to manually redo automation every turn and it would still have to manually add ships. Colony automation will not upgrade buildings. Needs an option to auto change citizens depending on trait. Dil 4=< become worker, Dil, Soc =<4 auto go to worker, for example. Queuing is rough. The art feels, wrong. I can't explain it but the direction doesn't have that impact that 3 had. Infl growth causing between -12 to -20 diplomacy is stupid af, If i wanted war I would have not gone for an influence win. Needs a larger indicator of player turn. I also had a few glitches where after some time the game would not pass beyond another players turn. The grid looks like ass, compared to three it feels bad to use. Military star bases still suck. They are effectively useless, bring more ships, that is always the answer. Da ♥♥♥♥ you mean that I can't build a starbases in another ZOC, hell it told me that in my own ZOC. I'm already taking a dip penalty and now I can't do that, you get surrounded to early and you're dead in the water. But I had NPC build them in my ZOC. Still can't tell them to blow up their starbases in my ZOC, at a Dip penalty sure, but I should still be able too. Still randomised on rare resources that won't show up anywhere in game. This is a longstanding problem that should have been fixed by now. The specialisations for citizens to be basic things like entrepreneur being locked behind certain focuses is dumb as hell. Overall; the game lost it's charm. It feels disconnected from both the player and itself. Playing 3 i jumped from game to game, i had dreams about it, I thought of strategies in my head while in bed, i spent hours pouring over the game. This? this is a chore. I finished my first game last night and I don't want to play again. It's hard to say if it will get better because 3 took a lot of time to get going but rn, stay away.

This game still feels like an unfinished project. It has a clunky UI, where simple functions are not working, like clicking on a new info to locate the source, but you can't find it. Diplomacy is... well, it really doesn't matter as for some reason every treaty is timed, so you create an alliance, and poof, 50 turns later you are no longer allied. We can call the graphics "retro style" if we want to be kind. Although the series has a history of (somewhat dumb) galactic events, here we only have sandbox. The random events are repetitive and not meaningful. Probably the best part is improving the planets - and that's sad.

I am perplexed by the studio's seeming inability to build upon their legacy, particularly given their three decades of experience within the gaming industry. The fourth installment in this esteemed series falls short of expectations, offering little more than a superficial graphical update. In comparison to its predecessors, particularly Galactic Civilizations III, this title exhibits a marked decline in quality. I must confess, even at a price as low as four dollars, I was not prepared for the depth of disappointment that awaited me with this title. Despite its promising pedigree and series legacy, it falls woefully short, offering little more than a shallow veneer of graphical polish to mask its numerous shortcomings.