GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #21: Pretty vs. mechanically satisfying space battles

Forget realistic space battles. In a real space battle, the ships would be incredibly far apart and only missile weapons that are flying at relativistic speeds would matter. So putting that aside, let’s talk about the challenge of making space battles look pretty.

The Mechanics

We want kinetic weapons (guns), direct energy weapons (beam weapons) and payload weapons (missiles) to have very different ranges.

Missiles have a long range and a long cooldown.

Direct energy weapons are much shorter and a medium cooldown. Half the time of missiles.

And kinetic weapons have a very short range but a very short cooldown.

Space bugs

And of course, we want pretty decent scale differences between the ships.

Meanwhile, the marketing and artists want to see really cool looking ships battling it out.

Putting aside the camera controls we need to improve on, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a dichotomy between visually pleasing battles and ones that are strategically sophisticated.

So what say you? How do you think this should be approached?

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

Greetings!

We're excited to announce the release of GalCiv IV: Supernova v1.55, a significant step forward. This update brings a collection of new features, key balance changes, and improvements that will transform your intergalactic adventures. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Gameplay Overhaul: Expect a major rework of the technology tree, including an entirely new approach to Exotic World colonization, Interstellar cabinet, and Space Weapons. We've fully rebalanced the AI's tech prioritization, and you can look forward to seeing them focusing more on weapons and hull research. 

2. New Anomaly Events: We've introduced several new anomaly events to keep things fresh. If you've been tired of the "stealth field", you're in for a treat!

3. Improved Ship Mechanics: Ships can now attack multiple times per turn as well as invade multiple times per turn if that's applicable.

4. Custom Factions: We've improved AlienGPT and added a host of improved abilities for civilizations including new citizen types.

5. Economy and Diplomacy Tuning: Trade routes have been revamped to be more valuable, with their value multiplier increased from 15% to 33%. Various factions, including the Banking Clan and Capitalist Society, have undergone balance tweaks to offer a more fair and engaging gameplay experience.

6. You can move your Civ Capital. Enough said. We've also done a full balance pass on planetary improvements.

7. Many many small and large improvements: We've been spying on you as much as we can. Or at least, we've been reading your feedback and have jammed as much as we can into this.

NOTE: This update will break the previous version's (1.51).  If you have a game in progress you want to finish, you can use the 1.51 branch. Read here to learn more.

We hope these updates will significantly improve your game experience in the GalCiv IV universe. As always, your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don't hesitate to share your thoughts on these new features and improvements.

Full change log:

• Update siege ship strategic icons and stat icons.
• Resized faction logos resized to reduce scaling artifacts.
• Visual display of ship hull sizes modified to make it easier to view them in battle.
• You should see fewer "failed generate error" messages.
• Fixed the Voyagers ability to actually for realsies give a +2 moves, +2 sensors.
• "Hive Mind" ability HP buff in territory decreased from 25 to 5.
• Several new anomaly events (tired of the "stealth field" yet?).
• "Grand festival" length decreased from 25 turns to 12.
• Major rework of technology tree.
  • Full rebalance of the AI prioritization of techs to get it to better research weapons and better hulls.
  • Exotic World colonization replaces the myriad of specialty planet types techs.
  • Interstellar cabinet replaces the myriad of "Ministry of X" techs.
  • Space Weapons. Early game tech to give some additional weapons before specialization.
  • Point Defense tech tree removed (point defenses and other specific weapon counters will become part of a specialized defense branch later along with new evasion techs).
  • Beam weapon theory renamed Directed Energy Weapons.
  • Space Lasers (sigh) renamed Photonic Alignment.
  • Devastator Missile System renamed to Phoenix Missile System to match the weapon it gives.
  • Shrunk the size of the cruiser tech description.
  • Removed drones as a resource / element of the game until we can do something more interesting with them.
• Self Determinism now grants 3 leaders.
• Ministers unlocked mostly between Interstellar cabinet, political capital and colonial bureaucracy.
• Various exotic world planet types (like radioactive worlds) are unlocked by a single tech: Exotic World Colonization.
• Several new ship components for early game use.
• Ideology naming updated to fit new culture system.
• Festron no longer take a penalty for not being on an aquatic world because they don't actually like water. They're not water bugs. They're bug bugs and prefer jungle which they now get a huge morale boost of if they're on those worlds.
• Invite leader cooldown reduced from 50 to 10, control cost increased from 10 to 20.
• Trade route value multiplier increased from 15% to 33% to make trade routes more valuable.
• The number of Trade licenses greatly reduced.
• Tech Inflation multiplier reduced from 11% to 10%.
• Number of rounds in a battle increased from 40 to 100 so that battles have a better chance to play out.
• YOU CAN MOVE THE CAPITAL. Players can destroy their capital and then place it on any tile they want.
• Colony capitals can now be destroyed and relocated as well.
• Civ capital maintenance removed.
• Durantium Processor level bonus increased from 1% to manufacturing to 3%.
• A new upgraded research project added.
• Garrison now increases Planetary Defense instead of Resistance.
• More improvements moved to earlier in the tech tree.
• Low quality planets now rarely have any food output to make food more valuable.
• Coerced colonization approval penalty increased from 5% to 15%.
• Hull Reinforcing changed form providing 25 HP to every ship to 20% (percent) buff to a ship.
• Major Prestige Victory balance pass. Should feel a lot better.
• Siege Ships are now Frigate class.
• Carriers are now Dreadnought sized.
• Siege ship template changed from medium to small.
• Tactical speed of ships altered to be better balanced.
• Cruiser hull Manufacturing cost increased from 40 to 100.
• Battleship hull manufacturing cost increased from 100 to 300.
• Dreadnought hull manufacturing cost increased from 250 to 1000.
• Dreadnought hull usable space increased from 32 to 36.
• Updated starbase modules to fit with the updated tech tree.
• Various command ship requirements updated for new tech tree.
• Banking Clan faction diplomacy penalty increased from 0.5% to 1%
• Capitalist Society faction gross income buff changed from a flat 1 per intelligence of leader to a 1% buff to income per intelligence of leader while increased the approval penalty from 0.1% to 0.5% per social.
• Emporium faction Bazaar discount changed from 0.005 flat to 0.5% per intelligence of leader added wile Crime is now increased by 0.01% per diligence of that leader.
• Trade routes no longer create the trade ship mission. Kills perf. 
• Minister of Finance provided a 1% buff per colony income per intelligence.
• Minister of Defense now provides a Planetary Defense buff instead of resistance.
• Cleaned up which ideology gets a buff from event choices.
• Cleaned up ideology buffs based on event choices.
• AI ships will no longer bother with marginal colonies unless it can take them in less than 2 turns.
• Improvements to AI tax rate handling some issues with the way the AI was choosing techs to research.
• Planets will rebel much faster than before.
• Fix to the galactic market changed to simply see if they have the universal translator. No fancy stuff.
• Economic Power no longer takes the treasury into account.
• Much bigger approval penalty from high crime.
• HP buff to ships based on # of colonies is now the square root of the # of colonies rather than linear.
• Raw fleet weapon rating greatly reduced for determining the siege rating of a fleet.
• Update to support cheesing of building capital improvements on all your planets.
• Renamed Explorers ability to Voyagers.
• Lots of new lines of text for the AI to speak to the player rather than "we want peace".
• Trader renamed Independent Trade ship.
• Prison World explains what it does now
• General UI text update to fit better on screens (especially for people in Germania) and clearer descriptions of stats.
• Forum link now goes directly the GalCiv IV sub-forum.
• 3 new citizen types: Avian, Canine, Feline. 
• Placed limit on AI Freighter construction 
• Improved Map Generation 
• Tiny maps are now slightly bigger. 
• Fixed common, abundant black holes over spawning. 
• Updated Orders menu to display the relevant stat each profession uses. 
• Damage numbers no longer float off before they do damage on hit.
• Adjusted the tactical speed of ships.
• Terror stars always show up in the battle replay
• Custom faction Traits tab to fit single column
• Make sure that when you edit the name and short name fields, the faction data is updated
  correctly.
• Strip additional invalid characters from the "name" and "short name" fields.
• Custom factions no longer default to Totalitarianism.
• Fixed a problem where the Steam authentication cache silently fails.
• Abundant map setting resources balanced.
• Massive change to the cultural trait system.
• Consolidated cultural traits used to create factions.
• AI manages its defenders better.
• AI players won't start covering worlds until much later.
• Fixed missing anomalies.
• Fleets automatically form at rally points.
• Made it so that sentinels only attack ships.
• Make fleets can attack more than once per turn.
• Updated AI to use a new ship class system.
• When you pick a given ideology, ALL of them increase the cost by N, not just the one in that tree.
• Yor home system always starts with a Durantium resource.
• If the player has a strong military, some civs will give you some respect.
• New Mercenary added.
• Set up data for commander ships for Korath and Seeing.
• Fixed broken triggers on anomalies.
• Added missing Tech prereqs.
• Added misused Tech prereqs on events.
• Slight buff to the conquest ability.
• Compassion Trait now gives the correct approval bonus.
• Fairness trait only gives 1 colony ship now.
• Synthetic life civs can no longer get the "Dwindling Numbers" event.
• The "Culture Clash" event is now using the correct strings.
• The Starport improvement restored.
• Removed cultural awareness buffs from improvements.
• Precursor Accelerator event:
  • Changed "Individualism" choice to improve planetary defense.
  • Removed "Totalitarianism" choice (was OP).
• Fixed ideology effects from the "Legacy" and "Prototype" events.
• Crimelords get a new executive order: Impress Constructors. Make the workers an offer they can't refuse.
• New improvement: Heritage Center. Early game tourism improvement.
• Terror Stars no longer show up in the cargo hulls when you play as the Terrans.
• Fairness culture trait now correctly spawns a colony ship.
• Trade routes create a mission ship.
• The Festron are NOT aquatic.
• Festron homeworld is no longer aquatic.
• Bazaar is now unlocked by the "Universal Translator."
• Fixed a problem where if you unlocked the bazaar and then started a new game, the bazaar was unlocked at the start. Bizarre!
• Steam achievements are now enabled.
• Make asteroids go to the nearest core world, not the nearest colony.
• Added more Anomaly images.
• Big changes to the culture tree:
  • Iron Fist control reward increased from 50 to 100
  • Fairness now spawns 3 colony ships.
  • Deep Investigation spawns a bunch of anomalies.
  • Kindness now spawns 3 constructors with it
  • Individualism(new) - Lowers decay, the player is awarded a flagship.
  • Added a bunch of new placeholder traits that aren't functioning yet.
  • Getting a trait increases only the discount for the next tech by 1%.
• Shorten some of the quest events that were too long.
• Changed references of "Empire" to "Civilization"
• Cultural affinity choice now gives a 25% upfront discount.
• Updated resistance bonus description.
• Inconsistent improvement warnings have been removed (for now).
• Military consistently renamed to Shipyard Production.
• Tweaked culture window
• Planetary Crime tooltip breakdown is less confusing.
• Removed redundant stat breakdowns in the Planetary defense tooltip.
• The planet tooltip for colonies shows who they send their resources to at the bottom of the
  tooltip.
• The Y and N keys should no longer hide the shipyard window.
• We are updating our combat U.I to display battle rating, conquest, and HP stats. Screens updated so far include:
  • Ship design "stats" box
  • Starbase and Shipyards
  • Battle start and results screen
• Changed distances to be consistently measured in KM
• Disable Tech brokering by default.
• Improve the Rally Point UX flow. Now you click on the map to set the point, rather than going
  through a series of menus.
• Mission Rewards are now in whole numbers, not fractions (e.g., you won't get 1.45 Elerium as a
  reward anymore).
• Resource Popup should show how much you already have.
• The splash screen is longer stretched on ultrawide screens.
• The tech tooltips need to show what stats they change.
• Update Planet Tool tip icons to be consistent with the yield tokens.
• Made a pass on all techs and ensure they are color coded most sensibly and aesthetically.
• Show Ship Range on the ship tooltip and ship details.
• Upgrade Window - Text is no longer cut off for the lowest line of text.
• Fleet names no longer include their faction's name and instead just uses their call sign (e.g., TAS if playing as Terrans).
• Anomaly alerts now display the event name, description, and choice.
• Updated Starbase Missile Salvo text.
• Fix String issue with "Pirate" Frigate and Cruiser. The name was given to the Onyx and the Baratak.
• Disabling the Tutorial really really disables the Tutorial robot.
• The options screen only warns of restart needed due to graphics changes only if you've actually changed the graphics.
• Move the controls so that they're docked to the top bar. 
• Shrink the writing in the log such that you can fit 2 more rows. 
• Increase the size so that it goes to the very bottom. 
• Fix missing ideology traits in custom civs created in builds prior to v1.55. 
• Prevent core world capital from being able to be built on the capital world. 
• The Shipyard manufacturing value is now referencing the correct number  
• Updated battle viewer combat stat displays to just battle rating and HP 
• Update Galaxy Settings slider icons for Minors, and Entities. 
• Updated the Bazaar popup card to support one more line. 
• Make more room for long custom faction names on the turn button. 

Good luck!

Screenshots:

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #20: How people use AlienGPT

The Generative AI feature of Galactic Civilizations IV seems to be the breakout feature so far.

To recap: When a player wants to create a custom civilization, they can choose to enter in a short description and then press “Generate”.

There are two parts of this.

The first part uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT which generates the text and code for describing the civilization as well as quests in the game.

The second part uses AI to figure out what key words to look for and then see what already existing AI generated images exist for this. Since these images are trained solely off of Stardock’s own considerable library of art, it isn’t infinite. If the AI determines the match quality is poor, it will then queue it up for generation later while sending the best results it has back.

Stardock’s Tachyon backend for this only gets the text entered and works with that. So for example, let’s say the player enters in “A civilization made up of beautiful amazon women” (one of the most common entries apparently it just looks at the text and the final result would be something like this:

And then the images it matches with. It sends 9 at a time. 3 are the best it can find. 3 are a bit looser and 3 are totally random.

So what are the results we get?

Broadly speaking, the types of inputs we get can fall into these categories:

Custom Citizens

Now, what the AI doesn’t currently do is pick your citizens for you.

You would need a couple dozen images for citizens to work, otherwise, there’d be excessive repetition of the same face in game. So obviously it’s not currently possible to have dozens of citizens for each species as the generation time would go off the charts.

However, what we can do is start looking at the broader categories. While there are infinite possibilities when it comes to species, the number of general categories (human, robot, cat people, insect people, rocks, etc.) is quite finite and thus takes a massive issue and makes it much more manageable.

The top 10

You might be wondering, what are the top 10 most popular alien choices people put in? Wonder no longer, here they are:

1. Humans

2. Women

3. Robots

4. Female

5. Cat

6. Girls

7. Elves

8. Cats

9. robot

10. human

Now, if we get rid of the duplicate meanings it goes more like this:

That’s how the top 10 are distributed. People like women and cats. Which makes it unsurprising that the 11th entry was catgirls.

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

Greetings, Sins II players! We have been receiving valuable feedback from our players, which has enabled us to make numerous improvements to the game. We appreciate the input and will continue to use it to enhance the gaming experience for everyone.

Before we talk about what's in the new update, here's an important note: this update is NOT save game compatible with prior versions! This means you'll need to start fresh games to play with the features in this update. For the highlights in this update, read on - if you'd like more nitty-gritty details, be sure to check out the changelog at the bottom of the post.

Get Sins of a Solar Empire II Now

Top Features

TEC Titans - The Ankylon and Ragnarov

The loyalist Ankylon titan can serve as the core of any combat fleet. The Ankylon features several abilities to augment both friendly and enemy forces:  Disruption Matrix is a powerful area ability that will damage enemies over time and prevent them from using abilities; Furious Defense great increases the Ankylon's weapon damage and repair systems; Shield Surge can instantly restore shield points to the Ankylon and to nearby friendly units; and Invulnerability Field super-charges the titan's shield emitters making all friendly ships within range invulnerable for a short time.

The rebel Ragnarov titan is a mobile weapons platform build entirely for offense. It's special abilities enhance it's massive railgun which spans half the ship's length:  Piercing Shot fires a powerful, long-range shell to deal massive damage to a single target; Explosive Shot fires a concussive blast shell at a target to deal AoE damage; Warpath grants the Ragnarov a stacking weapon damage bonus for a short duration; and Novalith Cannon fires a devastating nuclear payload at an adjacent hostile planet.

TEC Novalith Cannon

This deadly superweapon returns exclusive to the TEC Rebel faction, granting them incredible power. The Novalith Cannon is a powerful railgun developed through extensive research, capable of launching devastating Novalith Warheads at incredible speeds. These warheads cause massive damage to a planet's infrastructure, making the weapon a formidable force on the battlefield.

New Fleet System

The new Fleet System in Sins II allows players to create and customize their own war fleets of ships to command, providing a more personalized and strategic gameplay experience. Fleets can be easily managed and reinforced through a special build bar, which enables players to order new ships from nearby factories. This streamlined system ensures that players can efficiently expand and strengthen their fleets, adapting to the ever-changing dynamics of the battlefield.

Planet Updates

The latest update reintroduces constructor ships, planet elevators and orbital traffic. Constructor ships are back for building and expanding your empire, while planet elevators reflect the development of your planet. Plus, ships will now fly out of the factory when construction is completed. Gas giants also received a refresh for this update.

Changelog

Fleet System

• Players can now form fleets of ships via the left-side empire window.

  • Add a new fleet by hovering over the left-side empire window and left-clicking the + button.

    • Selecting unit(s) and right clicking the fleet button will also create the fleet and add the units.

    • Selecting unit(s) and right clicking an existing fleet will add the units to the fleet.

    • Remove a unit from a fleet by clicking the ‘Leave Fleet’ button in the advanced ship actions menu.

  • Units rallied to a fleet will join it.

  • Remove a fleet by dragging it out of the empire window.

• Reinforce

  • Fleets can reinforce their ranks using the fleet’s build interface when the fleet is selected.

    • The fleet will optimize where ships are produced based on the fleet’s location and various other factors.

• Orders

  • In addition to reinforcement, fleet orders include move, attack, hold position and stop. Based on feedback we will add new orders, states and behaviors.

• Fleets that have lost enough ships to empty a row of the formation will automatically compress to tighten the formation as appropriate.

Unit Control

• Added rotate-in-place command to ships. Hold ALT when right clicking in a gravity well to have selected units face the direction you specify.

• Changed left and right click to attack all enemy units in a selection window stack (e.g., to attack all siege frigates just click once on the stack in the selection window; instead of shift queue attack each unit in turn).

• Removed strikecraft from the highest-level bandbox priority so they no longer get included with regular units.

• Fixed order lines conflicting with phase lane rendering. Phase lanes are now suppressed and smoothly fade back in when order lines go away.

• Improved ability button UI for channeling abilities.

• Forced new key bindings to be used.

Gameplay

• Added Trader Rebel and Loyalist Titans.

• Added Novalith Cannon to TEC Rebels.

• Upgraded TEC Rebel Insurgency to 300 supply (up from 50).

• Auction Updates:

  • Added auction losing refund percentage (50%) for all players.

  • Added auction lost refund bonus research to TEC Rebels.

• Minor Faction Updates:

  • Added Metal Monopolization reward: Provides you with a time limited exclusivity contract with the metal market.

  • Added Crystal Monopolization reward: Provides you with a time limited exclusivity contract with the crystal market.

  • Added Black Market Andvar reward: Provides you with a smuggled cache of Andvar.

  • Replaced Elite Mining Crews reward with Advanced Mining Rig: Highly customized mining machinery boosts metal extraction rates.

• Added initial planet elevators and orbital traffic to help signal planet development level.

• Added initial construction ships to build structures.

• Ships in drydock will now fly out of the factory when construction is completed.

• All planet bonuses were given more accurate planet_type constraints.

• Added planet bonus constraint to avoid surface level conflicts.

• Removed various obsolete planet bonuses that will be replaced in a future update.

• Added queuing of ship components without a shop.

• Added queueing of starbase components while under construction.

• Changed home planet starting bonuses to planet components.

• Upgraded Retrofit Bay to recharge its antimatter faster (to keep the heals coming!).

• Fixed research prices.

• TEC Rebel insurgent units that are no longer at enemy planets will auto-scuttle to avoid insurgents sitting around planets they shouldn’t be.

• Starbase Docking Booms changed to do in-combat repair rather than passive regeneration.

• Fixed inappropriate ships from acquiring strikecraft as their primary target (e.g., capital ships).

• Restricted some ships' point-defense to only fire at strikecraft and torpedoes.

• Slowed down orbits of planets closer to the star.

• Fixed default factory rally points.

Garrisons

• Added new garrison states “roam offensive” and “roam defensive.”

• Garrison supply reduced by 25% (except for the home planet garrison).

• Doubled garrison unit build times.

• Moved garrison order management to the garrison planet component. The component itself will now represent the three different behaviors.

• Fixed garrison units being stacked with normal units in selection window.

Galaxy Generation

• Added formation spawning for player starting units.

• Improved how formations spawn in a gravity well.

• Setup formations for minor factions.

• Update map names and descriptions.

Minor Factions

• Added Advent Apostate Merchants as the merchant NPC.

• Added Vasari Outcast Miners as the mining NPC.

Visuals

• Added initial star model.

• Added initial gas giant model.

• Updated Trader normal and adaptive shield effects.

• Updated various weapon and ability particle effects.

• Added initial ship and structure under construction effects.

• Added initial star and star surface texture.

• Updated asteroid props.

• Updated Dunov materials.

• Added visible missiles on a variety of ship meshes.

• Adjusted some mesh icon visible distances.

• Updated beam effect on starbase.

• Updated capital ship light autocannon hit effect.

• Added depth fade to a variety of effects.

• Updated some death sequences for large units/structures.

HUD

• Updated bottom bar.

• Added Exotic Factory building counts blink duration.

• Added flash to Exotic button when any exotics received.

• Added flashes to top bar buttons (e.g., trade import points acquired).

• Added invalid ability target planet alpha. Replaces old unused underlays; now consistent with picking alliance offer planets.

• Added new dialog frame to all HUD dialogs.

• Added saving of notification cards.

• Aligned Exotic Factory owned and building counts with one another.

• Changed alliance offer notifications to be persistent with progress bars.

• Changed top bar assets text to be consistent with other components.

• Fixed delay between consuming last item and it being removed from inventory.

• Fixed notification card layout off by 1 errors.

• Fixed notifications aligning with top bar buttons.

• Fixed players window opening sometimes when closing alliance offer window.

• Fixed selection of single ships not showing up in planet pip group rendering.

• Improved errors around missing research labs. Now explicitly says “labs” instead of just “research” to avoid confusion.

• Removed extra thick phase lanes for PSIDAR.

• Split up count text on all HUD buttons to top and bottom when building, consistent with the Exotic Factory window.

• Stabilized clock text as it increments.

• Updated victory window to use new dialog frame.

• Update orbit direction line colors and length.

• Improved unit selection outline aliasing.

• Reduced size of garrison unit underlay.

• Added a wide variety of icons for build menus, research, abilities, components and auctions.

• Adjusted ui_status_border sizes.

• Fixed research tier upgrades waiting for research labs messaging.

• Added tab to toggle between research windows instantly.

• Exposed camera settings for edge panning, invert horizontal rotation and invert vertical rotation.

• Fixed mesh outlines appearing through meshes as if they were transparent.

Tooltips

• Added unit order tooltips. You can now see that units are attacking a group of units and not just one unit.

• Improved auction tooltips.

• Fixed hit box used for auction tooltips.

• Improved modifier tooltip rendering to show ratio values.

• Added exotic count action tooltip line rendering.

• Added click instructions to garrison tooltip.

Audio

• Updated Dunov Energy Transfer sound fx and duration.

• Added TEC ambient music track.

• Updated phase jump sound fx.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed scouts no longer exploring due to autocast wiping out orders every update.

• Fixed alliance offers expiring not refunding assets and exotics.

• Fixed autocast of untargeted abilities not working when given explicit orders.

• Fixed bug in late game culture rate spread. Resistance and synergy were not properly checking the update tick, so old phantom resistance that doesn’t exist anymore was being factored in.

• Fixed create_unit atomic failing to create units. Caused two abilities on the Marza to no longer work.

• Fixed death sequence effects spawning when zooming in after a unit has died.

• Fixed higher research tiers being acquired before lower tiers are finished.

• Fixed hyperspace exit effects showing when zooming in late to a gravity well.

• Fixed player window auto-opening when game is over.

• Fixed built ships all coming out of the same factory.

• Fixed some buff effects not being released.

• Fixed “Underdevelopment” spelling.

• Fixed confusing culture resistance research subject names.

• Fixed various strings.

• Crashes and Asserts:

  • Fixed hard crashes in d3d11 when meshes are missing.

  • Fixed crash bug when using consumable items.

  • Fixed crash in firing missiles.

  • Fixed crash when moving planet track upgrades.

• Fixed sync errors caused by different processor architectures (e.g., AMD64 vs ARM64). Only users with the same processor architecture can play with each other.

• Fixed empty-id alert.

Misc.

• Added the ability to render WebM format videos.

  • Added teaser trailer to game start.

• Added more optimizations to mesh rendering.

• Fixed various collision issues.

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

The feedback we got from Beta 1 of GalCiv IV: Supernova was that the Cultural Progression tree was too big and too “soft”. Soft meaning the choices didn’t have meaningful consequences. We read all the feedback and used it to rethink the concept of culture in a 4X game. Here’s what we’ve come up with.

Culture vs. Influence

Influence affects how far your borders go from your planet. Culture is the input that comes in that is transformed into influence.

So in this example, Mars has a cultural significance of 1 which goes to its core world Earth.

Then influence takes that Cultural Input and turns it into influence growth per month which then goes to the planet’s bank of influence which becomes the radius (in tiles) that influence flows from the planet.

Now, what we want to have happen is that this culture coming int goes towards how many culture points in you generate per turn. In the current build, you just get 1 per turn. So it’s still way too convoluted and messy for our liking.

So to recap:

• Culture is the raw resource.

• Influence is one of the byproducts of culture.

• We want “Culture points” to also be derived by how much culture you have coming in.

Feel free to leave comments on how you think this should be improved. We have our ideas but I’d like to hear yours.

Cultural Progression

So then your culture should also feed into your cultural progression where the cost of a given cultural trait will increase the further in you go (as well as overall).

If this were an RPG, I’d say your Cultural Progression would be like your character and the traits unlocking new powers. That’s essentially the goal we have anyway.

So the idea then would be to have a Cultural Level for your civilization which would use this formula:

Where N and B are “magic numbers” and X is the next level and Y is the total number of points you need to go up a level. If you’re a game designer, save that formula, it’s what we all use for leveling up costs.

In our case, it would be the base cost of another unlock with each category having discounts based on how much awareness you have generated in that category based on your decisions in the game.

The long-term plan is for players to have a “Level” for each category that we can key new events off of.

______________________________________________________

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

Sandbox 4X games generally lack a campaign, but that changed with GalCiv III, which introduced one. Over the past 30 years, a wealth of lore has been created for the GalCiv universe. I started writing the lore that would come to be used for GalCiv when I was in college which is when I wrote the first game.

The question remains: should we include a campaign in the base game or offer it as DLC?

Each GalCiv game has been guided by a central theme, inspired by a backstory that dates back to my college days. Here's a recap:

The Backstory

Long ago, the universe was guarded by beings known as Mithrilar. One Mithrilar, Draginol, was malevolent and twisted, having originated from another universe. The Mithrilar created various beings to aid them, including the Arnor in the Milky Way galaxy. Tasked with guiding sentient races to the stars, the Arnor aimed to prevent any one race from dominating the rest.

The Iconians

The first race to reach the stars was the Iconians. The Arnor fiercely debated how to prevent them from becoming too powerful, leading to a civil war. The losing side, called the Dreadlords, was banished to a pocket universe.

During the war, the Iconians built sentient machines that eventually overthrew them, becoming known as the Yor. Lacking faster-than-light (FTL) travel, the Yor fled to a new world but suffered a significant technological setback, restarting as a pre-industrial civilization.

The Flight of the Precursors

With the Arnor mysteriously gone, their artifacts, junk, and devices were scattered across the galaxy, and their knowledge faded into obscurity. They became known as the Precursors.

The Younger Races

The first races to expand into space were the Drengin and the Arceans. Both races independently constructed Stargates to enable travel at 100x the speed of light. The Drengin discovered and enslaved the minor race of Torians, while the Arceans found humans.

The Humans

The Arceans had towed a Stargate towards Earth for millennia. By the time they arrived, humans had advanced technologically, populating the solar system with robotic vessels and nuclear weapons. Humans studied the Stargate and developed a portable version called Hyperdrive. Fearing monopoly abuse, human activists shared Hyperdrive technology with other alien species, sparking a great space race.

The Present Day

The stories of the Dread Lords, Crusade, and more are detailed elsewhere. As GalCiv IV: Supernova begins, the Drengin Empire is confined to their home system, monitored by the "benevolent" Terran Alliance.

Fortuitously for the Drengin, they discover a crashed ship belonging to a species called The Navigators. The ship holds technology capable of teleporting to other parts of the galaxy using subspace streams...

Pros and Cons

Now, it’s easy to just say “Oh yea let’s have a campaign” but we only have finite resources. So if we make a campaign for the 1.0 version of Supernova that means other parts of the game won’t get as many features.

So the question is, should we do this as part of the release of Supernova or save it for a DLC?

______________________________________________________

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

View the full changelog here

Get into Early Access:  Steam  |  Epic

Additional Custom Civ Portrait Options

Users can now select "More Images" until they get the image they want (based on the description of your civ).

Previously, to get more potential race images to choose from, you had to regenerate the entire civilization. Because of how taxing that is on the AlientGPT system, we had to limit that to 5 tries per civ and 25 per day. But since most people just want to try out to see more images, we are separating the civ regeneration to the reroll of the images.

More Civs Unlocked

Players can now play as the classic GalCiv civs, the main GalCiv III civs and the the new GalCiv IV civs. The new Supernova civs are still locked for now as we are still working on them.

New Settings

We are starting to tweak the civ traits and will be working on these throughout early access to make all of them more interesting.

New Default Strategic Zoom Settings

If you found the iconizing agonizing (I’ll show myself out) then you’re in for a treat. We’ve rebalanced when and how different icons show up as you zoom out.

AI to Supernova

Beta 1 of Supernova was focused on AlienGPT and making sure it didn’t blow up on your computers. It mostly didn’t. Beta 1A brings the new AI over. Which isn’t to say the AI in Beta 1 didn’t work, it just hadn’t been updated yet to support all the changes to Supernova yet. You will find it much more engaging.

Updated Visuals

We’ve done our first pass on the visual style of the map itself. Gone is the blah grays. Also, you can set it so that you can see which tiles have been explored.

More Sophisticated Diplomacy

The computer players have a lot more nuance now in how they deal with each other. There are a lot more things that can happen in GalCiv IV: Supernova that affect relations. Sometimes you’ll have to pick who are your friends and who are not and live with that. It also means the other civilizations will be more likely to have diplomatic challenges with each other as well.

Major Balance Pass

Everything from how the galaxy gets generated to how much a pulse cannon costs has been looked at and adjusted. We’ve also brought back a lot of starbase upgrades that were previously only available to the Synthetic civs (By popular demand).

This list will be too big to cover here but it’s a big set of changes. We’ve been reading every forum post and every Discord talk.

Bug Squashing

From typos to crashes, we’ve been squashing bugs to get this update ready for you guys. We’ve even brought in a veteran game industry editor to finally deal with the typos.

View the full changelog here

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

In both GalCiv III and in the Epic release of GalCiv IV (GC4Epic) we were very generous with how much the player could “see”. On turn 1, you could see several solar systems away. Go ahead and see for yourself.

When I began designing GalCiv IV: Supernova, I wanted to emphasize the exploration aspect of the game, which was something I loved in GalCiv II. After all, exploration is one of the key elements in 4X games.

So how much can you see? Well, I figured the player should be able to see most of the solar system but not all the way out to Pluto. In both GalCiv IV: Supernova and Star Control: Origins I added a 9th planet called Artemis, and since we haven’t discovered a new 9th planet (sorry Pluto) then I figure our sensor range shouldn’t quite make it out that far.

Decreasing sensor range at the start has a lot of benefits throughout the game. It makes those upgrades to sensors a lot more interesting and it makes the exploration a lot more interesting. I can’t wait to see what people think.

______________________________________________________

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

Long ago we had these things called “user manuals”. I loved reading a good user manual. I’d sit back with my copy of the Civilization manual or the Ultima IV manual and just spend a weekend afternoon reading it.

The days of manuals seem long gone. Gamers expect that the game will walk them through how to play the game and there is a real art form for doing this.

For Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova we are adding not just in game tutorials, but the leadership assistant to help explain what a given screen does and how to use it (and it can be turned off of course).

Here’s the one we’ve added for choosing what ship to build:

…and for designing a ship:

Now, I know if I were to ask those reading this if they prefer these to user manuals, many of you would say “We prefer a user manual!”. And of course, we are going to provide one of those too. But I actually do like these screens because they allow us to keep our game from being “dumbed down” as Supernova is a pretty complicated game.

What do you think?

______________________________________________________

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

GalCiv IV: Supernova - The new combat system discussion thread

Greetings. I’m making use of two particular threads as background for this one:

https://forums.galciv4.com/518716

Feedback on the new weapon system and class system » Forum Post by Halicide (galciv4.com)

The currently designed system for Supernova

I say designed because it’s not actually working correctly. But here is how it is supposed to work:

Weapons

Weapons have 4 primary characteristics:

1. Potential Damage

2. Range

3. Cooldown

4. Accuracy

To hit: Weapon rolls a 100sided die from 1 to 100. If it’s lower than the modified accuracy (base accuracy - target evasion roll) it hits.

Defenses

Each type of defense has its pros and cons as well.

Problems/Criticisms

These are soft mechanics. They’re more realistic but you can’t really make a strategic ounter like you could in previous GalCiv games where if a race focused on beam weapons you could counter it by focusing on shields which blocked beam.

Now, keep in mind, different weapon systems require researching up the tech tree for them. A civilization is almost never going to be equally good at all of them. Rather than a rock-paper-scissors system, I’d rather see counters involve ship designs that make use of something that targets a particular class of weapon.

Ship Classes

Ship classes are intended to setup the rules for the ship – order of attack as well as set up buffs. These are just the combat ones not including the Terror Star.

We haven’t exposed a lot of this to the UI because it’s still a work in progress.

Evasion, like Accuracy, is a dice roll.

But as you can see here, a mass of Dreadnoughts won’t do so well against a giant fleet of bombers.

Communicating this to the player

If we can’t communicate this nuance to the player, it doesn’t matter. That’s why we’re putting in so much time to iterate on this new system. It’s going to take quite a few tries before we can communicate this system to the player.

And THIS is why people used to like to join early access projects like this. Before early access got turned into a demo or a bug testing thing. Here we (you and us) can try out different things until we like what we get.

GalCiv IV: Supernova: May 11

Lots of big updates coming the second week of May. Here’s some highlights:

Civ image re-rolling

Previously, to get more potential race images to choose from, you had to regenerate the entire civilization. Because of how taxing that is on the AlientGPT system, we had to limit that to 5 tries per civ and 25 per day.

But since most people just want to try out to see more images, we are separating the civ regen to the reroll of the images.

So just reroll until you get the image you want (based on the description of your civ).

The system returns 9. 3 of the picks are always totally random and the other 6 are it’s best guess of what goes with the description you gave.

For fun, guess what my civ’s description was!

More Civs Unlocked

The classic GalCiv civs plus the main GalCiv III civs plus the new GalCiv IV civs are now unlocked. The new Supernova civs are still locked for now as we are still working on them.

New Settings

We are starting to tweak the Civ traits.

What we want to do is make all of these quite interesting between now and release.

Updated visuals

We’ve done our first pass on the visual style of the map itself. Gone is the blah grays.

Also, you can set it so that you can see which tiles have been explored.

New Default strategic zoom settings

If you found the iconizing agonizing (I’ll show myself out) then you’re in for a treat. We’ve rebalanced when and how different icons show up as you zoom out.

One smooth zoom out:

(if you look closely, you can see the milky way slowly moving – not here, this is just a screenshot, I mean in the game, screenshot doesn’t do it justice).

AI to Supernova

Beta 1 of Supernova was focused on AlienGPT (would it work) and making sure it didn’t blow up on your computers. It mostly didn’t. Beta 1A brings the new AI over. Which isn’t to say the AI in Beta 1 didn’t work, it just hadn’t been updated yet to support all the changes to Supernova yet.

You will find it much more engaging as a result.

Diplomacy gets more sophisticated

The computer players have a lot more nuance now in how they deal with each other.

There are a lot more things that can happen in GalCiv IV: Supernova that affect relations. Sometimes you’ll have to pick who are your friends and who are not and live with that. It also means the other civilizations will be more likely to have diplomatic challenges with each other as well.

Major balance pass

Everything from how the galaxy gets generated to how much a pulse cannon costs has been looked at and adjusted. We’ve also brought back a lot of starbase upgrades that were previously only available to the Synthetic civs (By popular demand).

This list will be too big to cover here but it’s a big set of changes. We’ve been reading every forum post and every Discord talk.

Feedback addressed / Quality of Life

We are glad so many people are liking Supernova. The biggest complaint, by far, has been that it’s so different from GalCiv III that the game needs to do a better job at explaining how things work.

While we work on making sure the game explains things, one tip: In GalCiv IV you can hold down the SHIFT key to lock a tooltip and then you can mouse over the tooltip to get more information.

Experiments

We are going to try out a pretty big change this week: We are going to make it so that colonies can’t be conquered. Only the core worlds. If you take the core world, you automatically get all the colonies that sponsor them. We haven’t decided if that will be a permanent change but we want to see how that affects pacing. Let us know in the comments what you think.

Scratch that. That’s too immersion breaking. We’ll need to find some other way to ensure that conquest isn’t too much of a slog. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Bug Squashing

From typos to crashes, we’ve been squashing bugs to get this update ready for you guys. We’ve even brought in a veteran game industry editor to finally deal with the tipoes.

We're excited to announce that we'll be hosting a special Community Dialogue / AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with our CEO, Brad Wardell, to discuss and bounce ideas around while answering your questions about Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova!

This event will take place on our Discord server on Thursday, May 11th at 2PM ET 4PM ET. This is a good opportunity for you to share your thoughts, ask questions, and get insights directly from Brad about the development and future of GalCiv IV: Supernova.

To participate, simply join our Discord server (if you haven't already) and head over to the designated AMA channel on the day of the event. We look forward to seeing you there and engaging in some lively discussions about the game!

Where: https://discord.gg/6cWPPuKh

When: Thursday, May 11 at 2PM ET NOW AT 4PM EST

RSVP: Discord AMA

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about Planets

I feel like the GalCiv IV planet management is missing something.

I think the bones are right but seems like there’s a lot of nobs that ultimately amount to very little.

The philosophy of being king of the world

In GalCiv IV the basic idea is that raw materials come, you do stuff with them, and the output can then be used in various useful ways. The concept is simple. The execution is…complicated.

Adjacency Bonuses

The idea here is that the player should be rewarded for where they place their improvements. Putting them together should give the player a bonus and sometimes, there should be something there to naturally enocurage someone to put a certain type of improvement there.

Percentage bonuses

In GalCiv IV, the raw inputs that come in are upgraded as a percentage into something else.

For example:

My mineral input is 25. Lots of stuff happens to that raw input and at the end, you end up with 74.26 which is then multiplied by approval to get you to 46.

What about the people?

So you have a simple idea: Raw resources come in, stuff is done to those resources that are all % effects which are then affected also by adjacency and you have an output.

Here’s my problem with this: Look again at that screenshot. The worker. The worker provides a +5% bonus. What? Isn’t the worker the one DOING the work? Why is he just another bonus?

Finding the fun

I don’t know quite yet what the best solution here is. But here is where my head is at today:

See these guys:

I really like the drag and drop interface we have in the game for the improvements. I would really like it if we could drag and drop our people and even move them around as we see fit around the planet. Get rid of the districts.

Instead you would move your people onto the tiles directly and they would give bonsues based on their job. Players could spend control to force someone to change their job (which makes sense to me, you’re forcing people to change their job).

Moreover, we could make it so that what they do is based on the improvement you put them adjacent to. So you could only put people adjacent to existing improvements (i.e. you can’t just throw them into the woods and expect space ships to get built!).

My crude mockup

So the idea would be that when you place down an improvement, it unlocks the adjacent regions. You can then drag an drop your citizens into those regions and they will provide BIG buffs to any improvement they are adjacent to (Especially if their profession matches the adjacent one).

A citizen could still be adjacent to two different improvements and it would give a buff to both (because these aren’t individual people mind you, they represent blocks of people).

Thoughts?

______________________________________________________

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

GalCiv IV: Supernova - The First 10 Turns

Today we’re going to do a fairly simple game to “smoke test” the AI and general game mechanics. Here we will find bugs, AI issues and balance issues.

Setup

I’m playing as the Terran Alliance, the default civ.

Small galaxy, ONE sector. This lets us do an apples and apples comparison with GC3 and GC2.

Only 3 opponents.

In the beginning…

Our home solar system. I wouldn’t mind if Mars was moved so that it was closer.

Month 1: February 2307.

Picking research districts as my first tech:

Choosing Fast Exploration for more moves. I don’t really care about my HP.

Going to rush build my Industrial Center. I got a really good starting spot.

Before:

After:

We got some good feedback saying that this sort of seemingly minor change just doesn’t feel very good. Let’s see what happens if we boost the level up bonus on this from 1% per level to 5%:

Thoughts?

One idea we’re playing with:

Replace region districts directly with your citizens here. You would drag and drop them onto a region. You could move them around however you want.

This would require a lot of work because we’d need to deal with the fact you need these people to also man your special starships and we woudln’t want to yank them once they were placed or put players in the min/max position of extreme micro management.

We’d also have to deal with the fact that your colony would, mostly, not be building anything. But on the other hand, is that bad? Let us know.

Zooming out

Now, I feel like there should be tooltips for star systems. Something like this:

1. Yellow Star.

   1. Yellow Stars are the most inviting for most forms of life. Habitable planets are more commonly found around them.

2. Violet Star.

   1. Purple Stars are rare and are where Promethion can be found. Promethion is used is many advanced technologies.

3. Red Star.

   1. Red stars tend to be larger and is where Durantium is most commonly found. Durantium is an exotic alloy needed for most mega structure efforts.

4. Blue Star.

   1. Blue Stars are fairly uncommon. Their unusual gravimetric fields result in Thuilium, a highly dense material used for certain types of weapons can be found.

5. White Star.

   1. White stars are a wild card. One never knows what htey might find.

 Anyway, still on turn 1.

For leaders, I went with the one that pumps up my tech. Now I almos thtink we have too much going on on turn 1 but I’m not in love with the idea of locking leaders behind a tech. Feel free to share your ideas.

Same thing with Executive orders. I almost think we could make some of these abilities be locked behind the Cultural Progression tree (and have fewer of them) to make these a lot more intersting.

There’s an amazing world not too far away.

So I’m going to draft colonists and send them over there.

For my first shipyard project, I have to go with the colony ship.

So who do I put on the ship? Always the least happy person I’m afraid. That said, this gets back to wanting the professions to be more powerful and varied from the start (And not easily changeable).

And at last, we have finished Month #1.

Month 2

The Endeavor has arrived at Mars. Now, there’s a bit of lore behind why isn’t there a Mars colony by this point?

I only see two possibiltiies:

#1 We will never go to mars as meat humans.

OR

#2 We will not colonize Mars until we have a new type of propulsion.

In GalCiv, we assume #2.

Our flagship, the TAS Discovery is investigating an artifact just outside the solar system.

So we reach Mars and there’s a situation. Depending on the game, I pick different things. In this situation, I’m going to go with minerals because I happen to know it’s a crowded little sector and I want resources coming in quickly.

I’ve nearly doubled my output by the second month.

Our probe has flown near a pre-hyperdrive world. We can’t talk to them yet. This is going to be an area we’ll be expanding on a lot this Summer.

Meanwhile, the Discovery has finished investigating the artifact:

This will be nice for later. Now off to the next anomaly:

Month 3

My colony ship has reached the Malmo system.

This planet used to be a Precursor world that refined Promthion.

It’s an amazing world, so I’m going to assign a governor so we that we can manage it.

It’s funny, people in GalCiv III always said they wanted to place their colony capital. Well here you go!

Month 4:

First contact with another hyperdrive capable civilizations.

I have a good feeling about them.

Month 5

I’ve gotten research districts technology.

Now, I want to make it clear: I have total confidence that we and this “Drengin Empire” are going to be best friends. But I’m still going to research armed shuttles.

Let’s take a look at their world and compare it.

These Drengin don’t have much cultural output (Influence). And their pollution is relay really bad. But who are we to judge?

Meanwhile.

I have no idea what a Techpod Hive is but I’m going to get it (actually I do know but a new player won’t/shouldn’t).

Month 6

I’m actually pretty torn this time. I want Asteroid Mining and Universal Translator. But they’re so much more expensive than the ones getting a research bonus. I have to go with Space Elevators.

And I am going to get a Constructor to start claiming the shiny resources I’m finding.

Month 7

This doesn’t make me happy. The GNN is now in action and they have heard rumors there are two other civilizations out there. And both of them are better than ours.

Month 8

Artemis, the 9th planet of our solar system (didn’t you know?) is colonized.

And we’re going to sell it to Big Planet.

I also have enough culture points to choose a trait for my civilization.

Cultural Progression

This is an area of the game we are still lookingi at. I feel like it’s too much bread for the butter.

There are 14 different cultural paths here. Let’s assume they average 6 traits each. First off, that’s not many traits and second, even if you only can get half of them due to the balance, that’s still 42 of them. Let’s say you pick one every 10 turns, it would take 420 turns and that’s longer than we expect the average game to take. I’m 45 minutes into this game and I”m on turn 8.

Next, let’s look at the choices available right now:

1. Self-Governance. Gets me a free leader. That is worthwhile.

2. Iron Fist. +50 control. That’s worthwile.

3. Ambition. Leaders cost less to hire. That’s weak.

4. Fairness. 10% approval boost on my worlds. That’s weak

5. Sacred History. 1000 influence on your home world. THAT’S HUGE. Ok fine.

6. Eureka. 30 research. That’s pretty good.

7. Kindses. +1 Diplomacy. Boo.

8. Practicality. You get 3 SUpply ships. Ok that’s quite good.

9. Amiable. +1 Diplomacy. Double boo.

10. Spycraft. +5 Deception. The game doesn’t explain what that means so it’s worthless.

11. Independence. -15% decay rate. Meh.

12. Unification. +50% homeworld influence. This is too powerful.

13. Intolerance. Citizens of other species don’t care if you’re at war with the homeworld of their species. This is nice but not a good one for the first choice.

14. Tolerance. Core world start with 1000 influence. HOLY cow that’s OP. We need to take a 0 off that.

So of these I see a few good ones and a lot of weak ones.

Culture Traits should be more like a Loot Box. You get a thing with it. Something right then and there. Not a stat boost. So we’re going to have to revisit.

Month 9

From here I’m going to start really getting into the game and come back later….

…Time

Passes…

Ultimately, I was able to conquer the other AI players pretty well. The issue is that the weapons are just too expensive for them and it messes with the value they put onto other things.

This in return resulted in an update we released to the game on May 2.

A from here we created the 1.6 requirements document.

______________________________________________________

GalCiv IV: Supernova First 10 Turns Series

• First 10 Turns, May 2023

Same thing happened after I assigned and unassigned leader to be minister of finance the intelligence went down from 11 to 9. I guess its possible leader can lose skill over time but I think this is a bug.

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

So how many turns should it take to get a thing? Turn based games live and die on pacing balance. We don’t have a speed button to zip over bad pacing choices. So we have to be very, very careful on the number of turns something takes to get.

Take research for example. How many turns? 1 turn seems too generous. 8 turns is pretty long. But do you make the tech cost more or find ways to reduce the amount of research or whatever you’re getting in.

Let’s take a look at this example and work our way through it. So Armed Shuttles shows up at taking 1 turn. That’s too fast I think. On the other hand, it has a 50% discount which means it would have taken 2 turns. That still seems pretty quick though.

So is the tech too cheap OR is the amount of research we’re starting out with too high?

Let’s look at how much research we’re getting:

First off, why do we get 2 free research? That seems overly generous. Let’s get rid of that. So I got into the globaldefs.xml file and find that and get rid of it.

Now we’re here:

Ok. But still, start of game, that’s a pretty big number too.

Holding down the SHIFT key lets me do tooltips within tooltips.

The technology input seems like a lot for this early.

More tooltips within tooltips:

Wow, Rebe is giving me a lot of tech. That’s one of my colonies.

So it starts with 4 and 3.27 is getting to me. That’s pretty generous.

Let’s go back to the globaldefs.xml

I increase the rate to 2% per tile away. This changes the number to:

Now with this changed, let’s go back to the research center:

Armed shuttles are now at 2 (they would normally take 4 turns). Now the question is, is the 50% reduction to research cost too generous? I feel like if we changed that it wouldn’t be tempting enough to pick one.

And so the iteration goes.

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

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GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #13 - GPT

GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” and since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT the world of generative AI has really taken off. For the past several months, we have been working to build GPT technology into our Tachyon engine, Stardock’s cloud-based metagaming technology that has previously been seen in Ashes of the Singularity, Offworld Trading Company and Star Control: Origins. Thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT API and Tachyon, we are proud to demonstrate what this technology can do for games.

AI generated civilizations

In the past, Stardock would release new civilizations for $4.99 for 5 as a DLC. Creating a new civilization was a lot of work. Lots of writing and lots of new art and game balance. With Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova, it’s just a matter of entering a description of your civilization and pressing a button:

Step 1: Enter a description for your civilization.

Step 2: Press the button.

There is no step 3.

It’s not just cosmetic. How you set up your civilization will affect how other civilizations will react to you and interact with you.

Let’s jump into the game:

I should also mention that when you save your civilization you can also play against them in the future… Such as…

Don’t judge me.

And other civilizations will refer to your civilization as you would…well, expect.

We are, after all, sentient ice cream.

And the Drengin are never impressed.

AI generated quests and challenges

Why stop with AI aliens? Another source of DLC in games has been new quests and related content. With Tachyon, our games, starting with Galactic Civilizations, can just ask for a new quest. Where is gets really crazy that we can ask in the language of the player so the result comes back as a native speaker (or alternatively, as good/bad at it as English).

Sharing

Players can take their custom civilizations and share them with others online. So we expect to see…well you know deep down exactly what we are likely to see.

What about the art?

As mentioned in a previous blog, Stardock has been making space games for 30 years. So we have a fairly extensive library of aliens to train AI image generators on.

The Human future

Ironically, this work has resulted in us putting out the call for even more artists, writers and editors. While on the surface, this may seem counterintuitive, let me walk you through how this works out.

Before: You hire artists, writers and editors and produce N assets per month which is insufficient to be commercially viable. I.e. the consumer market just won’t pay enough to justify focusing them on these tasks.

Now: You hire artists, writers and editors and product 100N assets per month. Now it’s enough to justify the work. The stuff the AI generates is really good and getting better all the time, only a human being knows our game well enough to know whether the output fits in with what we’re trying to do.

So the short answer is, we expect to hire more artists and writers and editors in the future.

We’re just starting

AI generation helps us greatly increase content but it won’t make a bad game good. It does, however, make the game a much more personal experience for the player.

We are hoping to make Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova the most immersive space strategy game ever. Combining Stardock’s inhouse AI capabilities with generative AI we can build a truly living universe.

During the early access period for GalCiv IV: Supernova we will be balancing the game, adding more content, optimizing and polishing and listening to your feedback. It’s going to be quite a ride!

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

• Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

• Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

• Dev Journal #18 - Should there be a campaign?

• Dev Journal #17 - How much should you see?

• Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

• Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

• Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

• Dev Journal #13 - GPT

• Dev Journal #12 - Humanoids?

• Dev Journal #11 - The AI Elephant in the Room

• Dev Journal #10 - Little New Things

• Dev Journal #9 - The FAQ

• Dev Journal #8 - The Supernova Crisis

• Dev Journal #7 - What's New in Supernova

• Dev Journal #6 - Technology and Ideology Changes

• Dev Journal #5 - The Planets are Liars

• Dev Journal #4 - Event Updates

• Dev Journal #3 - Battle Viewer And Ship Behavior Improvements

• Dev Journal #2 - Updating Visuals

• Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan

[Early Access Gameplay Trailer]

Stardock has released the latest sequel of its award-winning space strategy game series today into early access. Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova sees the player as the ruler of a united home world that has just discovered faster-than-light travel.

Join Early Access Now: www.galciv4.com

Explore an enhanced ideology system by building up Cultural Points and spending them on the traits you want to see reflected in your growing empire. 

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova continues a 30-year trend of innovation in the series. This latest sequel introduces AI-generated content OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology allowing players to create their own civilizations that uses AI to create the lore, conversation dialogs, quests and more. The game also uses AI, trained on decades of Stardock’s alien art to deliver custom graphics for their custom civilization.

"We are thrilled with the new additions that Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova brings to the genre,” said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. "The use of cutting-edge AI technology allows players to generate entire civilizations that look and feel unique with just a few lines of text has us particularly excited."

In this space-based strategy game set in the 24th century, players take on the role of a leader of a spacefaring civilization, tasked with exploring and colonizing the known universe. With an array of new features and improvements, Supernova offers an unparalleled 4X strategy experience for players of all skill levels.

“We’ve really focused on making the game more approachable to new players,” said Wardell. “This is the most sophisticated strategy game we’ve ever made, so we have put extra time into UI improvements, tutorials and context-sensitive information.” 

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova focuses heavily on replayability. Players can choose several different galaxy setup options, a different opponent to play against and now with the AI generated events and quests, each game will feel like an epic moment in the history of the galaxy.

Design unique ships, assigning them classes and roles that you can utilize both in and out of combat to keep a step ahead of your enemies.

New features in Supernova include cultural progression, new combat and planetary invasion systems, galactic sectors, new alien civilizations, AI assisted computer opponents, and the integration of ChatGPT and AI art generation. Additionally, the game boasts a multi-sector map design, planetary sieges, multi-turn battles, a host of new weapon designs, starship classes, Terror Stars that destroy entire star systems, and hundreds of other improvements for enhancing the player's ability to build the ultimate space empire.