Galactic Civilizations 4: The eXplorminate Preview

It’s time to talk about Galactic Civilizations 4. Any 4X fan should know of the Galactic Civilizations (GalCiv) series. While the first of the series was hardly noticed, its sequel Galactic Civilizations 2 is still considered one of the greatest 4X experiences you can have and made our Top Ten 4X Games of All Time list. It was a tight, engaging experience with an above-board AI that made Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock, a name many in the 4X and strategy community now recognize, as he was the principal AI developer for GalCiv 2.

Now, almost 18 years after the first iteration, Galactic Civilizations 4 has reached its “beta” phase. And I’m here to discuss my impressions so far with about 60 hours of gameplay under my belt.

Let me preface this preview with a warning. I’m not going to go easy on GalCiv 4, but I’m also not assuming that my critiques will be addressed. I’m most critical of games at this stage that I feel have the most potential and I think Galactic Civilizations 4 could very well be the best Galactic Civilizations game, and perhaps even one of the best 4X games, ever. But it’s not there yet.

Some of my complaints, as a result, may seem a bit nit-picky, but I feel compelled to voice them in the hope that GalCiv 4 reaches its full potential.

That being said, let’s talk about this potential gem.

An Obvious Level-Up

There’s no doubt that Stardock has learned a thing or two about animations and graphical fidelity from their experience with Star Control: Origins. Galactic Civilizations 4 is positively beautiful and its character animations are easily among the best in any 4X game, ever. Just starting a new game offers a clear showcase of how Stardock’s collective animation skills have improved:

Beyond that, even your starting system and setup looks wonderful:

At this zoom level, you can see individual asteroids, objects orbiting planets, solar flares, and more. Space is pretty beautiful. You can also hear the dull thrum of your ships, while an epic-sounding soundtrack plays into your nostalgic Star Trek or Babylon 5 memories (although I’d love to see more music tracks). It’s an immersive start, both visually and audibly.

Almost immediately, any 4X enthusiast starts to see where Galactic Civilizations 4 breaks the series’ mold. Players start with a “Core World”, a colony that the player manages similar to the previous games in the series. You’ll build improvements, capitalizing on adjacency bonuses, and shape the resource output of that planet based on your building choices. In a new departure for the series, your initial colony ships will set out to establish feeder worlds. Feeder worlds aren’t actively managed like Core Worlds, they automatically send a portion of their resources back to the nearest Core World.

For any fan of the underrated Star Ruler 2, this system will sound pretty familiar.

It’s in this system that Galactic Civilizations 4 attempts to focus on a more macro-level gameplay experience. You’ll only have a minor-to-moderate amount of Core Worlds, but many, many more colonies that feed into them. This leads to fewer settled planets in need of management and building queues, which shifts the player’s focus to exploration, fleet building, and colony accrual.

It’s a system that mostly works really well. And it has the potential to be genre-changing with some polish.

In order for the player to make any of their worlds a Core World, they’ll have to hire a leader – we’ll get more into those later – to govern a planet, thus allowing the player to manage their world more closely:

Colony management builds on GalCiv 3 in many ways. You’ll take advantage of hexes that provide bonuses for particular building types and you can place buildings in them for adjacency bonuses. You’ll upgrade them along the way, as you research the technology to do so. It takes some getting used to, but once you figure out how colony management works, it’s a bit more intensive than previous iterations.

And here comes my first complaint, albeit a minor one: each Core World has the exact same background and the exact same rotating planet. Be it a terran planet, an icy planet, a water planet, none of that matters, as you’ll see the same planet in your core world’s background. It’s a minor gripe, for sure, but it detracts from immersion and feels like a step back from GalCiv 3’s varied planets in its planet management system.

This system of requiring the player to hire a leader to make a system a Core World allows the player to tailor the amount of management that they shoulder. If the player wants, they could very well make most of their worlds a Core World. This allows you to control every aspect of that planet’s output.

But if you’re like me, you’ll only “core” worlds that are of higher quality. That keeps the micromanagement of planets to a minimum.

It’s a pretty elegant system that’s at the very least partially inspired by Star Ruler 2’s planetary management system. I think it should be a feature of more 4X games, honestly.

A Tech Tree for Controversy

Another radically new system for Galactic Civilizations 4 is its tech tree. Taking a page from Stellaris’ or Old World’s book, GalCiv 4 has adopted the tech card system. Instead of working down a linear technology tree, randomly drawn technology cards are presented to the player, adding interesting decisions to be made. Do I take Space Elevators to bolster my core worlds’ industrial efforts, or do I take Agricultural Districts to grow more food for my people? You’re initially given a choice between four technologies, but a Minister of Technology, who boosts your research rate also adds an additional choice to the mix.

It’s also important to consider that whichever one I don’t choose may not be there the next time I’m ready to take on a research project, so I need to think ahead.

There will be those of you that don’t like the “RNG factor” of this system, but I, for one, appreciate it, as it mitigates the feeling that there’s an optimal way to navigate the tech tree every game that many, many other 4X games fall into.

However, I would like more “rare” technologies that have a lower chance of being drawn, so as to make each campaign feel more unique. In addition, if each faction had weighted card draws, it would mean that certain factions are more likely to specialize in a particular area, such as industry techs for example. That would provide more asymmetry to a game that I still think needs more, but that’s another subject we’ll discuss a bit later.

Whether you like this system or not, I still think it’s a step in the right direction to shake up 4X research. Games like the aforementioned Stellaris and even the classic Sword of the Stars have done some really unique things to make research feel more random and interesting, so seeing the GalCiv series adopt a new system to feel more random is great.

The Leadership Gamut

As I’ve mentioned a few times now, Galactic Civilizations 4 features player characters called Leaders. Each of these leaders can be recruited using credits and assigned to a variety of different responsibilities: Ministers, Governors, Diplomats, Commanders, and Factions.

Ministers provide bonuses to various aspects of your faction, like the aforementioned Minister of Technology that boosts your research capabilities and gives you more tech choices. A Minister of Colonization boosts approval rates, while a Minister of Defense increases ship hit points and your planets’ defensive capabilities. There are ten in total and they’re all completely optional.

Governors are assigned to core worlds and act as I explained above.

Diplomats are assigned to foreign factions and increase relations and gather intelligence. Sometimes, the right leader will also covertly steal from factions they’re assigned to.

Commanders, possibly my favorite leader type, take charge of a variety of ships that, for the most part, each have unique abilities and strengths. The Baratak Grove, the sapient plant people, are focused on “seeding” other planets and on their growth, hence their command vessels spawn colony ships to spawn and boost local planets. These ships really lean into the Grove’s strengths and focus.

However, some of the other factions’ commander ships don’t feel quite as unique. For instance, the Drath have some really barebones commander ships:

So, the asymmetry wand hasn’t been waved over all of the factions yet, which is to be expected when you’re still in beta. However, it’d be a crying shame if this wasn’t addressed before the full release. It’s a replayability aspect that shouldn’t be overlooked and quite frankly, I hope that they use the commander ships to really focus on this a bit more, along with adding more ships per alien race along the way.

Finally, leaders can also be assigned to Factions. Factions are also unique to each race and provide the player with different possibilities of play. The Drengin have a Slavers faction, so when the player assigns leaders to this faction, the Drengin are able to increase manufacturing and reduce maintenance on their colonies. Meanwhile, the Corporate Sector has a faction called the “Banking Clan”, which allows leaders to increase gross money income, but at the expense of diplomatic prowess.

It’s in these mechanics that GalCiv 4 really begins to shine. Almost as if building a character in an RPG, your choices in how you allocate your leaders will either make your race a jack-of-all-trades or allow it to focus on its inherent strengths and boost them to god-like strength.

Whether or not the AI will be able to efficiently use these tools is yet to be seen, but if the team at Stardock isn’t able to manage it, I don’t know who would be, honestly.

Forging Your Ideology

Throughout a typical game of Galactic Civilizations 4, you’ll run into numerous events (quick note: I’d like to see many more for variety’s sake) that will allow the player to make a choice that will affect their ideology, along with possible other bonuses or maluses. Here, we’re met with a precursor ship and given the choice between sharing the spoils of the ship among the discovering ship’s crew, or giving the engineer the spoils, in hopes that he may discover something important to you.

Each comes with its own benefit, but also and just as importantly, each pushes you down an ideological path that may or may not benefit your empire’s goals. Sure, sharing the booty increases your coffers by 500 credits, but is your empire really interested in exploring the Equality Ideology path?

Once you’ve increased your awareness of an ideology, and you’ve accumulated a culture point (you’ll find those in a variety of different events, too, among other methods), you can start to “purchase” ideology tree perks:

Throwing your first culture point into Tradition (Sacred History) increases your homeworld’s influence by 1000! It also unlocks the Heritage project. Meanwhile, allocating a point into the Transparency tree’s “Amiable” node will increase your diplomacy capabilities by 1 and improve your trade values, too.

In many ways, these skill trees, er… um, ideology trees, feel a lot like an RPG and how the genre approaches character progression. I think it’s great and the potential to really expand on this system could really help shape different “builds” of the same races, thus providing replayability that most 4X games only dream of.

As long as the ideology trees can really lean into worthy rewards for investing more points into them, I think this system could really blend 4X and role-playing in a way that perhaps only Stellaris has managed to achieve so far.

Executive Privilege

Another new gameplay mechanic added to Galactic Civilizations 4 is the Executive Action system. These actions are active skills of sorts that allow the player to instantly acquire various resources using accumulated Control Points. You can “Draft Colonists” using 20 control points, thus instantly granting a colony ship with a citizen already on board, or you can use a telescope action for 10 control points to uncover areas of the map that haven’t already been discovered.

A lot of these actions can dramatically change your capabilities, too. Say you’re short on cash for one of those aforementioned leaders that you just need to hire. Well, you can use an executive action that will add 1000 credits to your coffers, but hits your approval rating by 10%. But now you can afford that excellent leader that just popped up and you won’t have to worry that they’ll leave before you can save up enough dough.

Likewise, the ability to purchase a colony ship right away is essential to being able to keep up with the AI when there’s a newly-found level 33 world that’s ripe for the taking.

There are cooldown periods for these actions, so you can’t just spam a bunch of colony ships with all of your remaining Control Points, but it does give you a bit more flexibility on how you might take advantage of a new opportunity.

That being said, I’d love to see race-specific Executive Actions added. Stardock has no problem ripping great gameplay ideas away from other 4X games, so they should take a look at Ascendancy, where each race had a unique active skill that made them play very differently. Take Ascendancy’s Frutmaka race: they could expel enemy ships from their territory every so often, or the Dubtaks, which could steal any technologies that were known by at least two other races.

With that inspiration, imagine playing as the Festron and having an Action that would allow me to feast on an alien population within my empire, providing a food bonus for a ten-turn period. As the Drengin, an action that would allow me to draft slaves into my war, thus doubling the amount of time it takes to siege my planets planet. Or as the Arceans, using an action that fortifies my ships, providing a 50% bonus to their hit points for a short period.

I could go on, but you get my point. It’s another talking point for the asymmetry soapbox that I get on all too often. The point, though, is that this system can and should be taken a bit further to feel truly unique.

Policies, Because Why Not

Policies act as another way to further hone in on how you want your empire to run and what its focus will be.

As you progress through the tech tree, more and more policies will be at your disposal. They range from small boosts to your resource generation, to a moderate trade of outputs, which leave a bit more to consider. Do you want to give up 20% of your ships’ durability for higher attack power? Or do you really want to drop your morale by 15% for a 10% boost in production?

Finally, you won’t have to hear me complain about a lack of race-specific options, as there are some policies that are only available to the race you’ve selected. These are great! And while I’ll admit that the policy screen isn’t exactly unique or new, it’s a solid take on this type of mechanic and it can really help you shape your empire.

There’s not much else to say here.

Cosmic Scale

Stardock has gone the way of Paradox or Distant Worlds and has really increased the size of what’s possible with their maps. Not only do you have sectors, which are roughly the size of the maps found in a game of Galactic Civilizations 2 or 3, but you can add multiple sectors to your game, thus increasing the potential of your game size to, quite frankly, unreasonable scales.

I’m sure there will be those players out there that play with multiple large sectors (god help you), but personally, I prefer to play on smaller maps with an additional sector or two, as I appreciate playing games that feel manageable. Despite everything that Galactic Civilizations 4 does to reduce micromanagement, large maps and now, many sectors of large maps, feel overwhelming to a player like me.

Thankfully, the map settings allow each player to customize their games, thus catering to every type of gamer.

Miscellaneous Musings

There are a lot of things to consider with a game as large as Galactic Civilizations 4. I’m really enjoying a lot of the game, despite it being in an Alpha/Beta state. I say Alpha because at least one major gameplay element is missing: the battle viewer and after-action report. Both of these combine to provide the player with vital feedback in ship combat that’s missing now.

And as much as I hate to admit it, a 4X game can be made or broken by its combat system and the player agency that’s provided. There isn’t a 4X game in existence that doesn’t devolve into combat at some level, so if a game’s combat system doesn’t pass muster, it detracts from the overall experience.

So, I’ll be very interested to see how Stardock implements these vital parts of the game. Brad Wardell (the CEO of Stardock) has said many times that the team is building the combat viewer from the ground up, so I’m hoping that they take past criticisms of the battle viewer and the post-combat information summary to heart.

Many of the complaints mentioned wanting the ability to have multi-turn battles, so that the player had the ability to reinforce fleets and better affect the outcome of a battle, more variety to backgrounds, and more information provided to players as combat played out.

I’d love to see a combat viewer for ground combat, too. Even something as easy as Master of Orion’s ground combat, or a combat viewer as flashy as the ship combat viewer would be nice, too. It’s an often-overlooked aspect of 4X games, but when it’s done well, it adds a lot to the presentation of the game. Even Endless Space 2’s ground combat was fun to watch a few times.

Another aspect of Galactic Civilizations 4 that I really enjoy is the “flavor text” that exists during alien interactions. It adds a lot to the immersion of a playthrough to see the Festron talk to you about how well your cute, furry bodies will hold their eggs, or the Drengin speaking to you about your former enslavement to them.

That flavor text is curiously absent from other random interactions in the game, like when a race will warn you of the pirates in the sector or the space monsters near your colonies, but I feel like that’s something that can and should be added and wouldn’t require too much production time. Hell, I saw Brad Wardell add a ton of new flavor text in a matter of a weekend, so adding some more unique messages to these types of interactions shouldn’t be too hard.

I’ll add that the current state of the game has human-sounding names for every leader in the game, too. That’s a bit immersion breaking, so I’m hoping that my Mimot leaders don’t remain Roberts and my Drath dragon-people don’t remain Herberts. Just saying.

Beyond that, some frustrations have been aired within the community about the process by which Galactic Wonders are built. Many have said that queueing a wonder to be built, only to have someone else beat you to the punch at the very last minute often felt unfair. The suggestion to allow players to claim wonders much like Humankind allows, basically using a resource (influence in Humankind) to purchase that claim, would give the player more agency and control.

I proposed that the player be allowed to use Control to purchase those claims. Brad seemed to like it. We’ll see where that mechanic ends up.

Lastly, Galactic Challenges, a gameplay element that I’ve not really dove into yet, is something that I can’t quite report on yet. Galactic Challenges are a gameplay system that allows the player to turn on the “End Game”, so to speak. These Galactic Challenges are a variety of events that you initiate that will lead the player on a path of various quests that will either annihilate you or provide the winning conditions for your game.

Take the “Orb of Draginol” galactic challenge, for instance. In its description, it states that the quest will involve you finding a rare artifact, opening a pocket dimension with it, and then searching that dimension to find the “Orb of Draginol”, an item of such overwhelming power that all others will be forced to bend the knee to your empire.

On one hand, I appreciate that the player has the option to set these in motion whenever they want to, effectively giving the player control over when the game could end. On the other hand, it feels a bit too “game-y”, in that these events don’t happen naturally, like in a game of Stellaris, but rather because you hit a few menu buttons.

The system is a bit reminiscent of Sid Meier’s Colonization, as in that classic game, you can elect to overthrow your “mother country” at any time of the game, but it’s usually after you’ve accumulated enough power that you feel you can take on the full might of a major European Power as an upstart nation. Colonization’s end game is a culmination of everything you’ve done up to that point, as you’ve worked hard to build up supply systems, accumulate wealth, and produce effective military units to fight off the trained legions of England, Spain, or the Netherlands.

I’m hoping the Galactic Challenges system becomes something equally as satisfying, but I’ve not yet played a game long enough to successfully navigate through one.

I’ll be sure to report on it once I do, though.

Bugs, Typos, and Balance

In many ways, Stardock feels like it’s punching above its weight with Galactic Civilizations 4. Stardock is a solid AA studio, but GalCiv 4 feels like a AAA product in its presentation, gameplay structure, and scope.

However, its roots as a smaller studio start to shine through when you begin to see scratches in the polish.

Granted, we’re still in GalCiv 4’s Early Access period, but I’m no stranger to Stardock games and GalCiv 4 follows in the footsteps of many previous Stardock-developed 4X games. That is to say that first and foremost, the game is still riddled with many grammar and spelling issues and a general lack of polish with its text elements. Sure, the flavor text mentioned above is usually pretty good, but it won’t take long to find a few typos.

Second, you’ll find your fair share of bugs, too. Numbers that don’t add up as they should, events that don’t trigger the rewards that they promise, and more. Right now, there’s an influence bug that appears to get really out of control when a planet changes possession often, like a border planet between two warring empires.

Speaking of influence, it also seems to be bugged with regards to your empire’s influence production. Even if you’re clearly outdoing your neighbors in influence, the ranking will always show you to be in last place.

Those are just a few examples of the many, many small to moderate bugs I’ve encountered in my time with GalCiv 4 so far.

And finally, balance. I hate the word, honestly. I don’t think that a 4X game should be too worried about balance, as heavy-handed balance starts to make a game feel boring and stale most of the time. However, I should be able to play a game of GalCiv 4 and expect that elements like the aforementioned rankings are actually balanced correctly. Right now, if you have a lot of money and military, your power rankings are going to be sky-high. Even if someone has an equally powerful industrial economy, the game really seems to favor money and the military as indicators of strength.

Also, as the game stands today, there are races that are just more fun to play than others, thanks to their unique commander ships and gameplay focuses. The Mimots, while cute and new, don’t feel very fun to play compared to the Baratak Grove, the plant people. That’s because the Grove has those great commander ships that I mentioned earlier, whereas the Mimots feel very vanilla in their current form.

Could all of this be fixed by release time? Abso-fricken-lutely, but I’ve gotta be honest here: I’m not going to bet my next paycheck. Stardock has a knack for getting **really** close to shoring up weaknesses in their games, only to drop the ball and leave major bugs or exploits in them for far too long.

4X fans will remember GalCiv 3’s sensor exploit (their ranges stacked) and immediately know what I’m talking about. They’ll also probably remember how this exploit was defended by Stardock on their forums for a long, long time, only for them to finally address it after many of their fans complained long and vehemently enough.

Their Best Title Yet?

It could be.

I wasn’t kidding or being hyperbolic when I said that Galactic Civilizations 4 has the potential to be Stardock’s best game, ever. It combines the solid gameplay of the GalCiv series, with fresh, new ideas that look to minimize micromanagement and subvert the longstanding issues surrounding the 4X genre while coating it with a triple-a paint that looks fantastic. Now, the important aspects of further fleshing out the base factions, killing those bugs, adding a battle viewer and after-action report that the fans will appreciate, and proofreading everything are what’s left, and from where I’m sitting, that feels like a bit of an undertaking.

With Derek “Kael” Paxton, the legend behind the “Fall From Heaven” mods, Cari Begle, a lead developer on Galactic Civilizations 2, Paul Boyer, a well-regarded art lead, and not to mention the AI-master, Brad Wardell, I’m more confident than I’ve been in a long time that Stardock could pull this off.

But you’ll have to check back here at eXplorminate in a few months when it releases into v1.0 to see if they did.

Until then, be sure to check out my current video series, playing v0.75/v0.77 as the Mimots:

Until next time 4X fans, keep eXploring!