KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

They've had a couple of open beta periods and people have been posting about them in the Humankind thread

The last one was okay, I thought, haven't tried the latest but people seem to be up on it.

Ardryn posted:

Reach For The Stars had such a cool campaign, but the final mission in it was incredibly unstable for me and kept crashing repeatedly until I was forced to shelve it. Still, a game, nevermind 4X, that had such unique races as one that was so tiny it lived on asteroids and never got anything bigger than destroyers. Another that was the devouring swarms from Stellaris but had to go All In on rushing because its tech tree was less than half the size of the rest of the races, and all of them interacted with the very simple combat system in different enough ways even though it boiled down to whether you wanted to stay at short, medium, or long range. I was pretty disappointed when I found out I couldn't buy a copy that worked on modern systems anywhere (and my own copy has long since been lost in moves over the years).

Bremen posted:

The difficulty of that campaign drove me crazy. Maybe I just sucked at the poorly explained ship designer, though.

Dirk the Average posted:

Thea and Thea 2, I imagine.

quote:

What is new in Galactic Civilizations IV?
GalCiv IV focuses strongly on the idea of the player dealing with characters (called citizens in GalCiv III but fleshed out heavily in GalCiv IV) who help run the player’s empire. The maps are vastly bigger and the number of worlds in a typical empire are an order of magnitude more than in GalCiv III.

Can the characters (leaders, citizens, etc.) die of old age or are they immortal?
The plan is for them to be immortal.

How do you prevent overwhelming micromanagement?
Unlike in previous GalCivs, where the player had to manage every planet, the opposite is now true. By default, a colony simply provides resources (tech, wealth, minerals) to its governing world.

So rather than players assigning “AI Governors” to manage a planet, players now only assign a “governor” to a world they want to manage themselves. Since governors come from a finite pool of leaders, players will have to make some choices as to whether they want to manage a planet or use that leader to provide some other bonus. As a result, the typical colony requires no management at all.

Like in previous Galactic Civilizations games, most planets aren’t all that nice nor would they be fun to manage. In Galactic Civilizations IV, there are far more low-quality planets to colonize since they require no player management by default.

Can a governor be removed from managing a colony? If yes, what happens to the colony?
The current thinking is that you will be able to do that but it depends on whether this results in crazy amounts of micro management.

Why wouldn’t I want to manage every world?
Each managed (governed) world has its own set of colonies that connect to it. Thus, a good planet directly managed by the player (by assigning a governor leader) can import a lot of food, wealth, technology, minerals, etc. from potentially dozens of colony worlds which can be greatly magnified by the governed world.

Why wouldn’t I just have every world feed into Earth and not manage any worlds?
For the player to manage a world, they must assign a leader to be governor. Governors in GalCiv IV are full on characters with their own stats and personalities which determine what bonuses they provide (or what penalties to cause) to the planet and its colonies.

The more colonies a governor has, the more powerful that governor becomes, which can affect their relationship with the player until they decide they don’t really need them anymore and try to break off and form their own civilization.

Thus, too many governed planets means that none of them will benefit from the economies of scale of having colonies feeding resources and not enough governed planets means having to deal with overly ambitious governors.

How are the maps different?
Galactic Civilizations IV maps are much, much bigger. However, unlike in previous GalCiv games where various star clusters would have a bunch of empty space (which meant a lot of drudgery late game) GalCiv IV introduces the concept of “star sectors”.

A Galactic Civilizations III tiny, small, medium map could be considered a single star sector with its normal free-form movement between stars and such. In fact, someone could play GalCiv IV the same as GalCiv III in terms of setting up a single big star sector.

The most powerful player in a given sector is considered the sector owner and gains various bonuses for owning that sector.

However, there can now be more than one star sector which are connected by subspace streams. Players do not know where subspace streams are at the start of the game nor can they navigate them (they must be found and then researched). This allows players to effectively travel to other maps (star sectors).

We plan on also having a late game technology that allows players to bypass the streams entirely (quantum drive), that aren’t quite as fast as using a subspace stream, by allowing them to enter subspace and travel to any part of the edge of a star sector.

Thus, map travel will have 3 acts:
Act 1: Star sector travel (just like GalCiv I, II, III)
Act 2: Subspace stream travel (traveling to new star sectors via a subspace stream)
Act 3: Quantum tunneling travel (entering subspace and exiting at a specific point)

Are hypergates and hyperlanes still available to be built?
Yes. A given sector can still potentially be very large.

What is new with technology research?
The new technology tree is intended to be much, much bigger than previous GalCiv games. However, the main change is that only 5 (and eventually 7) technologies are available to be chosen from to research at a time.

These 5 technologies are chosen semi-randomly based on the innovation rating (think rarity) of the technology. Early game, this just works like previous GalCivs since there are only 3 to 5 techs to choose from. However, as the tech tree explodes, the number of potential choices can grow to far beyond that.

Players aren’t wholly reliant on the random number generator, however. If they are seeking a specific tech, they can “inspire” their scientists to brain storm a new group of 5. Players can inspire as many times as they want with the understanding that each time they do so during a given turn it will increase the cost of the tech they eventually choose.

Will techs available for research to a civilization still be determined by its abilities?
That is the plan.

Will governments return?
Not in the form they did before. Instead, we are going to have policies which allow players to pick and choose elements they want rather than the previous “all or nothing” thing of governments.

How is combat and war changing?
There is quite a bit more depth with both ship-to-ship combat and invasions. For this reason, combat doesn’t necessarily conclude in a single turn.

In previous Galactic Civilizations games, combat and invasions always finished in a single turn no matter how many ships or soldiers were involved. Now, the number of turns it takes to complete a battle or an invasion depends on the forces that are involved.

Early game and many invasions will still be single turns. The difference is that now, an invasion of a major world might involve several turns as besieging forces must deal with the possibility of reinforcements arriving. Similarly, with massive fleets involved, the possibility of retreating becomes possible as well as new abilities and modifiers for optimizing short or prolonged battles.

Will the Bazaar and mercenary ships return? Or the Galactic Market?
The galactic market for sure. The Bazaar will probably return in a different form.

What other changes are coming?
The list is very long as nearly everything about the game is being revisited.

The focus on citizens and governed planets having their own colonies makes planet management more interesting with new features being available.

We have done away with the way ideology was handled and replaced it with a much more sophisticated system that involves far more choices for the player.

We introduced the concept of missions. Rather than having a “campaign” we instead take story content and spread it out through the game using missions (think “quests” and such in an RPG) that allow us to have a lot of interesting things happen to the galaxy to make each game feel more unique.

Colonizing is a lot more interesting since population is now abstracted as individual citizen characters, each with their own stats and personalities to place on colonies.

We have a new concept called “Executive Orders” which allow players to make direct actions across the map based on how many control points they’ve accumulated.

Multiplayer is far more robust and modding should be a lot easier than in previous games.

Basically, we’ve had years of feedback and ideas from players that have been integrated.

If you have additional questions, ask in our forums and we’ll continue to update this document.

quote:

And so it begins…

Make sure you check out https://www.galciv4.com and in particular the FAQ and Game pages, which will give you a lot of details on what’s coming.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND
Before we start, I should introduce myself. I’m Brad Wardell. I designed and programmed the very first Galactic Civilizations game back in 1993 for OS/2. I literally programmed it out of my college dorm room after picking up “Teach Yourself C in 21 days”.

While OS/2 didn’t take off like IBM thought, it gave me the opportunity to make a game that focused on really good AI and a unique style of gameplay. For the past 30 years, I’ve been making space strategy games, albeit with more resources than back in 1993 when I was hand drawing space ships with an icon editor.

TWO PHILOSOPHIES
While I was programming on my 386SX and talking on Usenet, the guys at Simtex were making a game called “Sar Lords,” which was eventually released as Master of Orion. These games represented two main philosophies on how to do a space strategy game – the free form movement style of Galactic Civilizations, and the phase-lane/star to star method of Master of Orion.

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Most space games seem to have taken the MOO route of point to point. It’s not hard to understand why. Every tile, even in space, uses RAM. Think how small Civ maps were back in the 90s. Since GalCiv was on OS/2, we had entire MEGA-bytes of memory to work with. Even in GalCiv III, those huge maps consume a lot of RAM.

MODERN SPACE GAMES
In the early 2000s, we became friends with a company called Paradox. They were our European distributor for Galactic Civilizations II. The guys at Paradox and Stardock worked like peas in a pod. In 2012, the Master of Orion IP went up for auction. Both Stardock and Paradox were eager to get this IP. However, we were both narrowly outbid by Wargaming.net, who later went on to make a new Master of Orion.

Instead of a Stardock or Paradox Master of Orion game, we ended up with Galactic Civilizations III and Stellaris. While one can speculate how things might have gone if either of us had acquired the Master of Orion IP, I think most people are glad with how both games turned out.

GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS III PRELUDES
After Stardock sold its Impulse platform, I decided to focus my energies into co-founding a couple of start-ups. The first, Oxide, was made up of the lead Civ devs over at Firaxis. They had recently finished Civilization V and some of them had interviewed over at Stardock to investigate what came next. We ended up hiring Jon Shafer, who was the lead designer of Civilization V - he did the original design for Galactic Civilizations III. A whole bunch of our internal terminology is based on some of his UX innovations (such as the “Shafer button”).

The Oxide team was focused on making a next-generation game engine. Stardock had tried to make a 4th generation engine for Elemental and it was a disaster. Oxide developed Nitrous, which powers Ashes of the Singularity. Today they’re working on a big secret project.

Meanwhile, Soren Johnson and I were putting together another studio made up of some Firaxis vets called Mohawk to create Offworld Trading Company. Today they’re about to release their second game, Old World.

Being the CEO of Oxide and the President of Mohawk (and President and CEO of Stardock) meant I wasn’t available to work on Galactic Civilizations III. Early on, Jon left to make At the Gates and Cari, the lead developer of GalCiv I and II (for Windows), was on extended maternity leave. So, GalCiv III was quite a challenge to develop.

LAUNCH
The GalCiv III that launched in 2015 is a very different game than the one in 2021, as the two screenshots (launch and current) make clear.

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At release, Galactic Civilizations III got great reviews and was a good game at launch. But it wasn’t a great game. We had our work cut out for us.

LESSONS FROM GALCIV III
To understand why some people felt GalCiv III was a step back from GalCiv II, we need to look at GalCiv II.

GalCiv II was filled with story-driven events. I hard-coded these in C++, but made a lot of them and they could be very in-depth and interesting. This meant that every game of GalCiv II could end up feeling like an epic story.

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But it wasn’t just the events, it was hundreds of tiny touches that increased immersion. For example, the player could look on any species ship and get a readout of its equipment with race-themed named for these components. The Altarian weapon names were always super passive aggressively named like “Not necessarily friendship giver Mark IV”

Plus the stats. The endless, unnecessary stats.

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Even the combat seemed more interesting.

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But, Galactic Civilizations III was a design of its time. Designed in 2012 and released in 2015 the goal was to make it more mainstream. "Streamlining" was the word of the day. GalCiv III wasn’t the only casualty of this line of thinking. Elemental: War of Magic might have been buggy, but it had depth. So many details.

But by 2016 we were making Sorcerer King, which had streamlined all the “rough edges” out. In a pre-Unity world, this strategy made sense. We wanted to make sure these games would appeal both to hardcore gamers and also more mainstream gamers (not “casual,” but people who might not appreciate a half dozen modifiers on a weapon).

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Once Unity games started to flood the market, GalCiv III found itself to be too complicated for the casual market, but too light for the hardcore gamer who now had options like Stellaris.

NEW DIRECTIONS
If you ask someone if you should get Galactic Civilizations III today they will say “YES But you have to make sure you get Crusade”. After Ashes of the Singularity and Offworld Trading Company shipped, I was able to come back to GalCiv. I had had my own design document for GalCiv III back from 2010 which focused heavily on the concept of citizens and civil wars. Some of these ideas went into GalCiv III: Crusade. We were able to begin adapting GalCiv III for the new market reality.

Updating GalCiv III’s design via expansion packs, however, is a bit like trying to find new missions for jet aircraft whose designed mission has become obsolete. This is where GalCiv IV comes in.

WHERE WE WANT TO GO
With GalCiv IV we now have enough memory and processing power available to build what amounts to a simulator behind the scenes while presenting it in a nice, easy to understand, turn-based strategy game UI. What this means is that we want a game of GalCiv IV to feel like you’re actually running a space faring civilization filled with interesting characters. Rather than having an AI just for each alien player, we want an AI behind every single character in the game – and your civilization is made up by a lot of characters. And every character has a potential story to tell.

This means, from a gameplay point of view, that the player is still in charge of a vast, interstellar empire that is exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating things, but the galaxy is a livelier place than it was in the past. There are many more mechanisms in play that can affect things, a lot more moments of “Well crap, in hindsight, I feel like I should have seen that coming..” which results in players feeling like they keep getting better and better at the game each time they play.

THE GANG IS BACK TOGETHER
So Cari is back from maternity leave, I’m back from managing Oxide and Mohawk, we have Derek (Kael of Fall from Heaven fame) as the lead designer. Paul is back to being able to focus on UI and space ship making, Jesse is back to make sure our graphics are amazing, Sarah is back to make sure our underlying UI system is insanely powerful and useful, and we have new people on the team who previously worked on games ranging from Star Control to Sins of the Prophets.

It’s going to be a good time!

quote:

The more colonies a governor has, the more powerful that governor becomes, which can affect their relationship with the player until they decide they don’t really need them anymore and try to break off and form their own civilization.

THE BAR posted:

That's literally the thing I thought Stellaris wanted to do, but never did.

Grey Hunter posted:

I always want more organised rebellions in paradox games TBH. Even in EUIV its hard to run a country badly enough that you lose your colonies.

Darkrenown posted:

It sounds good, but after GC3 I'll be waiting for post-release reviews. Crusade did not save it IMO.

Murgos posted:

I remember Brad Wardell being one of the Internets more toxic personalities, up there with Derek Smart and Clive Blakemoor. Judging by how much the dev diary focuses on his greatness I'm guessing that hasn't changed much.

Mans posted:

Is Endless Space 2 good? I saw some DLC popped up a few days ago.

Outside of Sseth's reviews, I never really look at the game.

I loved Endless Legends, if that helps.

Thom12255 posted:

Gal Civ 4 announced! Looks like they've been heavily inspired by Stellaris and Endless Space 2 and are really shifting around how the core game works this time. Aiming for a 2022 release and an Alpha public test this summer.

https://www.galciv4.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qPGcO514Us


https://www.galciv4.com/article/504735/galciv-iv-dev-journal-1

Fuligin posted:

this actually sounds pretty good, loathe as I am to give brad anything. hell you could cut everything out of that diary except 'kael from fall from heaven 2 is back as lead designer' and i'd be sold

Bug Squash posted:

I'm not holding much hope. It's a sequel to a not great game, taking inspiration from two other not great games.

Is the CEO still that guy that keeps harassing his female employees or am I thinking of a different monster?

uber_stoat posted:

well not officially, he sued the woman who accused him and forced her to write him an apology letter as part of the settlement.

THE BAR posted:

Wasn't he the bee guy?

uber_stoat posted:

well not officially, he sued the woman who accused him and forced her to write him an apology letter as part of the settlement.

Poil posted:

Poil posted:

Yeah... I'm never ever buying a game he is involved with in any way.

grate deceiver posted:

I don't know what anyone sees in GalCiv, it's incredibly generic with terrible incremental tech tree. Just imagine the most average and boring space 4x, turned up to 5

uber_stoat posted:

he framed the letter and mounted it on his office wall.

Thom12255 posted:

Gal Civ 4 announced! Looks like they've been heavily inspired by Stellaris and Endless Space 2 and are really shifting around how the core game works this time. Aiming for a 2022 release and an Alpha public test this summer.

https://www.galciv4.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qPGcO514Us


https://www.galciv4.com/article/504735/galciv-iv-dev-journal-1

Neophyte posted:

Master of Magic is getting a remake from Slitherine and Muha Games for sometime in 2022.

Neophyte posted:

Master of Magic is getting a remake from Slitherine and Muha Games for sometime in 2022.

Mokotow posted:

Those GC blogs and Q&A sure sound like Brad. Having said that, the MOO-like sub genre needs to expand. I always found the sub-1000 star galaxies as too much of a stretch, sort of like Civ always felt like an abstract board game rather than an actually exploration of taking a Civ through history. This multiple sector idea is kinda cool. I guess Stellaris made some inroads into this topic with L-Space or whatever it was called, but nothing in that scale. I'll be curious to see what Distant Worlds 2 does - the galaxies there will also be larger.