Galactic Civilizations IV

There’s been a lot of innovation in strategy games in the last few years, and Galactic Civilizations IV is not a revolution. It’s a sequel, bigger, neater, and smoother. All the things a sequel hopes to be. With so many new, fizzy strategy games, it’s nice to see a long-running series retain its core and its spirit. Galactic Civilizations IV is safe and deeply playable.

The developers have done a good job of balancing a nice visual appearance with the low power requirements of iron. There is also good use of the fact that no one knows what the universe looks like. The colours, textures and spaceships look believable and the moving parts look like they are supposed to move. Not forgetting the soundtrack, which has just the right vibe for intergalactic battles and enhances the atmosphere of stellar infinity. [Issue#320]

Galactic Civilizations IV is another satisfying space-faring extravaganza that introduces some smart tweaks to the long-running series’ formula, although a lack of guidance, bloated tech trees, and some other minor lingering issues hold the game back from true top-tier status. Hardcore sci-fi strategy fans will undoubtedly find plenty to enjoy here, but this game may not quite have the gravitational pull needed to separate you from your 4X favorites long term.

Galactic Civilizations 4 is a vast and dependable grand space strategy. But there's little here that radical, and expect to meet it halfway.

Unfortunately, I can’t say I have had huge amounts of fun with Galactic Civilizations IV. Although all the basics are there for an enjoyable experience, and Stardocks added a good amount of specific systems to make the experience unique, crucial aspects like war management and IA behavior ended up ruining my time with the game.

Stardock has created a game with good bones. Some of the new systems, such as the core world management and ideology system, add to/improve the game. Unfortunately, other systems feel tedious at times. They are not broken per se but are not quite there yet. They either bog down the gameplay or lack impact on the experience. The core gameplay loop is decent, but it just didn’t hook me into feeling the need to play one more turn before bed. If you enjoy the series, Galactic Civilizations IV is worth picking up. Otherwise, I would wait for a few patches or DLC to help flesh out some of the systems.

Despite a few ideas for improving the 4X genre, Galactic Civilizations IV misses the mark on almost all of them to succeed only at feeling bland, derivative and soulless.

In the current stage, the game is unfinished. Minor race operation does not work. Invasion is flat, bad calculation of forces and even more simple than we had in previous GalCiv games. Trade with other players is unbalanced. Ship upgrade approach is missing, except some experience related bonus. Need to redesign your ships and make new ones. Not totally bad, we have interesting new concept for starbase modules, nice graphics and planets, citizens and governors, ideology, etc. It is clear, software team is following Agile development approach and **** sales wanted to make money. So publish the unfinished game. It was really pity.

I want to like this game but the truth is that Stellaris did this so so much better. The galactic Civilization series has been treading water ever since Stellaris started getting DLC patches that made the game better.

I hate to say it, but as someone who's played every installation of Galactic Civilizations in the last two decades, this one is outright the least fun experience I've had with. In general, it feels like a very conservative iteration of its predecessor which I am sad about because it always, even in the weaker part 3, it felt there was a major direction and an overarching design goal. The first two games did thrive on quirky humor and comical approach to morality. As someone who even did have a stint on the metaverse (the original global scoring system) I'm aware that this game allowed for traditional as well as exploitative gameplay altogether. Evolving from that into a serious game can be a challenge, and I feel that the developers seemed to have got too scared of that after they tried it with part 3. There are a few aspects that really draw criticism from me, and which feel like a let-down, especially when you know that 4X games are still popular. There are competitors on the market who really have shown that evolution is still possible. The previously defining aspects for this game’s series seem to have all but gone now. There is no United Planets anymore, morality has been replaced by a ying-yang’esque set of ideologies that form the basis for factions. Since no game ever lasts long enough to make use of this aspect, it feels like a waste of potential. Combat for instance has always been an oversight of the series and never been a staple since you could still win in different ways. However, while you could excuse the lack of complexity and scope by lack of technology, experience, and manpower, this doesn’t work two decades later anymore. It feels archaic, clumsy and much like a token feature with a very non-intuitive nature, and I know that **** is capable of developing combat systems. Worse yet, the ship editor, a staple of this genre, feels like an afterthought too. Like never before I felt the need to not bother at all. Research and economy feel a lot more stripped down this time around. I'm not a fan of the tile bonus system on planets, since it feels like you could ignore it altogether or use it and be less efficient overall. It's like a minimalistic attempt to emulate the tile bonuses from Civilization 5 and 6. Another core aspect were starbases, it is also exemplary for how a developer struggles with finding a working iteration. In part 2 you spammed constructors until starbases were fully upgrades, in part 3 they added modules and in part overcomplicated it for balance purposes, this time around you only place a starbase once and then start spam-building modules at your shipyards. This is probably the best approach so far; however, the upgrades are still a mess, since you still must figure out in-depth what each starbase is missing. In general, the game could do better with information. A lot of information is simply not available. Do you want to see the tile layout of a planet? It’s not available until colonization. You want to see what modules are missing on a starbase? You must get into the screen. Do you want to see what protects an anomaly? Save, test and reload! Obscurity is not a good feature anymore in 2022! The sector system is a new feature whose existence could only be explained by technicality. It doesn’t really add fun to the game, its control is easily cheesed, and the AI will still spam your sector even if it has plenty of space in its own home sector. In the late game, some sectors will be swarmed with pirates, space monsters and precursors, making settling it feel like cleaning up a flea-ridden attic. They are an annoyance without a major threat. The last two issues I have concern balance and technical issues. You can win the game through accumulation of prestige. However, prestige is the sum of several powers, and these powers are not calculated in a normalized fashion. For instance, there is a species that gets a duplicate, albeit weaker ship after building one. Ignoring that the combat system favors swarms anyway, it is also handsomely rewarded by score. Lastly, like its predecessor, the game still struggles with parallelism, which result in stuck turns or UI elements blocking turn progression by being placed in front of critical dialogs or other elements. In conclusion, there are a host of issues that probably get resolved over time, but the initial player base is already smaller after the disappointment of its predecessor. It being available on Epic store only is an even worse decision. It adds another limiting layer of exclusivity, causing a major lack of interest in a franchise that could really need some innovation. If the initial base after a release is too small, then no amount of DLC can revive it. This is more so true for Galactic Civilizations, which once stood at the forefront and now has been marginalized to a game that barely registers on the radar of 4X enthusiasts.

With every feature, the designers choose to remove player agency when it comes to your choices. Can't appreciate that in a strategy game and it rarely works well in other genres. It's also very similar in many ways to GC3, just with less features, more barebone and with fewer mods. It might not be that big of an issue had they delivered some more content since release, but it's not the case.

Pros: Highly customizable races/game setup. Large maps, with unique sector mechanics. Large tech tree. Good graphics/sound Cons: Shallow gameplay, poorly balanced, feels incomplete. UI is very good in places, but where it's bad, it's really bad. Annoying cutsie race selections. Epic Games exclusive.