Galactic Civilizations IV Reviews

The balance, polish, and quality of life in this game are significantly better than previous entries in the series. For me at least, the game finally feels like what I always wanted Galactic Civiilizations to feel like. For example, in previous games I liked to play heavy income/tourism/influence but it was very easy to end up with more income than I could spend and cultural victory felt overpowered (and thus less fulfilling). Strategic resources like durantanium and elerium also felt underwhelning in their usefulness and thus investing research into mining tech felt like a waste. I could go on about other aspects of the games that sounded really cool but were less than satisfying to engage with. In this iteration, however, there is such a satisfying array of things that require significant credit and/or resource investment that, even with a high income, I find myself having to pick and choose what to spend on. This leads to a constant, enjoyable process of meaningful decisions. And. so far, all of the (impressive variety) of approaches I've taken have been fun to do and have felt really good in terms of effort -> difficulty -> reward.

Loving the game. Different enough from Gal Civ 3 to keep things interesting, but the same feel of exploration and crushing all before you is still strong. Some balance issues, but they are making updates and keeping a grip on things. Overall, if you are fan of these types of games, a big 2 thumbs up!

This glitchy mess of a game is fantastic, found multiple ways to exploit the game mechanics. Can't wait until The Spiffing Brit gets his hands all over this. 10/10 would recommend!!

Fun game but a couple annoying bugs and the AI needs a lot of tweeking.

I love the concept but there are a few things I am not too fond of. 1. turns take forever! makes it difficult to stay interested. 2. ships in battle too close together and sometimes overlap. 3. on my current playthrough, I lost the ability to build certain ships for some reason. they were not marked obsolete, they just vanished from the shipyard build list. 4. generally just buggy. What I love: 1. the cinematics have great promise 2. the overall game-play is fun 3. the ability to download custom designs as well as design your own ships is great. What I think could be improved: 1. better ship designer with more custom parts and the ability to alter color schemes etc. in some ways the ship designers from previous editions of this game were easier to use. 2. the game runs slowly sometimes even on a very graphic capable computer such as mine.. it just seems like they could improve its performance a tad.. maybe by cleaning up or optimizing code

In summary, still a great game! Fun to play! Just one more turn... I've been a fan of this game since the original. While I think this latest game has many improvements, it's not groundbreaking in my opinion. But that's OK, because the game was already great. This is the kind of game I can leave running beside my work computer, and take a few turns throughout the day, without having to invest a lot of time. Or, on occasion, I find myself getting caught up in the "just one more turn" habit, and before I know it, hours have passed and my wife wonders where I've been. If you like 4x turn based games, I think you'll really enjoy this.

- UI is clunky, feels like its from a bygone era - Ship Designer is filled with bugs and weird hard to use functionality (moving one object can cause a different object you hover over to move instead, you can't select objects easily even though your cursor is over them, you can't bulk delete parts because you have to delete all connected parts first, some parts don't have proper alignment on their attachment point with random slight offsets or rotations) - Fleets just randomly merge together even though ships have their own trajectories that are not in any way suggesting they should be combined (like if I tell a bunch of ships to go to the same spot, sure make them a fleet, instead if they just pass through each other, boom that fleet you must have wanted...) - Performance is not great for the graphic quality of the game (my computer is not the problem.) - Changes from Gal Civ 3 are weird, leaned into even more resources to manage, the changes to planet governance are appreciated, but so much else is garbage - Leaders have a bunch of random traits that don't do anything, and just add noise to trying to select the best leader for a given role - Appreciate the ability to edit colour schemes now, much needed improvement from 3 - Code smell vibes, the game can't change resolution without a full restart, it can't change fullscreen without a full restart, pretty much all graphics changes require a full restart... (apps can change from fullscreen to windowed without a restart guys)

This is a great turn based space strategy game in the likes of MOO. Played it 20 years ago, and after all that time, it still feels the same. None of the massive complexities of current games. Just a fun play of building, strategy an conquest in space.

If you like Stellaris, you'll love Gal Civ IV. I've played the older version of the game and this is a proper next step, old familiar friends/enemies and of course frenemies are all here for you to trade with coerce and war with. The only thing I'd like to see changed it the Galactic Bazaar, it doesn't take long before you are literally having to click hundreds of times to sell off your excess, PLEASE give us the option to sell in multiples, 5-10-100-1000 would be a great progression.

I played II and enjoyed it very much. This one is boring, I couldn't compel myself to explore more to justify the purchase.. I felt claustrophobic. It's not even clear what they were trying to improve over previous versions. The changes definitely did not improve the experience.