Galactic Civilizations IV Reviews

Solid strategy game, very easy to sink hours into. Well worth it's cost in my opinion.

overall not a bad game. i do wish the company was not so money hungry and mad dlcs that should have been free like the species pack. that aspect alone makes me lose faith in this company and future products. be better stardock.

Great turn based Space 4X Game. Exactly what I was looking for. Hopefully it will receive further updates and expansions.

A very deep and replayable 4x space empire game, one of the classics. There can be a steep learning curve on how best to manage the resource economy. Best turn based space empire game to date.

Great 4x game, if you like MOO then this is it. However, multiplayer syncing issues happen too often, resulting in having to lose rounds to the last time the game auto saved. So, single player, top notch. Multiplayer, needs more work.

I like this game, it reminds me some of Master of Orion, mostly MOO 2. Of course its much more modern and has stuff beyond MOO 2. I have played a few full games, I'm currently playing a large map and have 6 or 7 other civilizations left that I'm competing with, a couple civs got conquered. The graphics are good, the stars and planets on the map are vivid with colors and there are nebulas, black holes, etc where some of the resources can be harvested. The game has had a few updates since I bought it. It mostly runs well and smoothly. But occasionally some glitches happen. The sound effects cut out sometimes I noticed once you have a game going with a lot of ships / colonies, etc. I think the game could be improved some too. One of my biggest complaints right now is that once you have a large empire going, I have probably 15-20 core worlds and many colonies / starbases, the management can became tedious. For instance, there is no way I know to put the shipyards on "Idle", so a shipyard has to be building something or it will keep bringing you back to the idle shipyards. I wish there was a way to "shutdown" or put shipyards into an "idle" status and then bring them back online when you need them to build ships. If you have 15-20 shipyards, this becames a real task every turn if you don't need to build much currently. The other issue I see sometimes once I have a large empire is that as you get the focus moved from one idle fleet to another to give it orders, sometimes after moving a fleet or ship the turn will just end, not giving you a chance to do anything else. Normally you get an "end turn" icon when nothing is left to focus on. Then you can end the turn if you want to or active another ship, check out a core planet, etc. But sometimes the end turn just "happens" after telling a ship to move and this is annoying if you wanted to do something else before the end of the turn. I still recommend the game, its fun and I enjoy playing it.

Very good game. Fixes some issues from version 2 and 3. Wish ship movement speed was on a slider. Would like the ability to sell off found items from anomalies as can have too many. Missile defense is not a straightforward as in past versions. Mining ships seem to ignore asteroids from planets turned into gigamass. Miss creating fast movement paths from anywhere to anywhere. Having to use black holes has limitations that I don't like. But these are all minor issues. Game is a definite improvement.

I have always enjoyed the Galactic Civilization games and this game have it moments, but being forced into a ceasefire (with negative terms) when you are wining the war. Not thank you! I assume it's a bug, but with this kind of game breaking bugs I can't recommend this game :-(

I loved Gal Civ 3. I was hoping Gal Civ 4 would bring more. On the plus side, performance is fantastic. No more waiting for 15+ minutes between turns in late game with huge universes - 30s is more the norm, now. On the down side, the game rules are now a complete dog's breakfast. I can build multiple colony and civilisation-unique structures on my planets. Influence is WAY over-powered, with my planets being culture-flipped from entire sectors away, with enemy planets producing 4k+ influence. (I'm not pursuing a culture victory, so I'm expecting my planets to produce less, but even my culture-optimised worlds produce only around 500.) I'm forced to declare war to avoid being culture-flipped to death, but even after capturing almost every planet for half a sector beyond my own. There is just no defence. That might be ok, if that were the only problem. Maybe a military-focused strategy is just not viable without significant focus on culture now. But the game is just plain flakey. Tech trading is completely broken. I regularly see trading screens where I can trade a tech for exactly the same tech from the other side. If a actually trade for the same tech again, I lose that tech. There are also other situations where tech I have just disappear. I have a whole fleet of ships that I was unable to build for several turns because I was no longer able to build the higgs field crusher. And then a few turns later, it was back. Which brings me to the ship designer. Deprecating ships no longer works. They're back again the next time I load the game. Any item of equipment that is too heavy to add to my design has it's tooltip changed to tell me this - and nothing else. Even if something is too heavy, I still want to see it's specs. Too heavy? Ok, how much does it weigh then? Only way to tell is by removing equipment from my design until my ship has space, so I can see the tooltip once again. And then there's the ridiculous combat rules. My dreadnought will fire ALL 15 higgs field crushers at the same fighter, they will hit the shields for well over 100 points of damage, and be deflected by the 1.2 points of shield that fighter is sporting. What would be great is if I could add extra targeting computers to target multiple enemies. And why is it that the enemy has an uncanny ability to target and destroy the weakest of the several fleets I have stacked on a tile? I could go on all day describing the problems with this game, from basic quality of life issues, to unbalanced game mechanics to bug after bug after bug. Bottom line, this game has the feel of an early access game. Gal Civ 3 was better.

This isn't it Game content feels unbalanced, poorly explained, and full of obtuse mechanics I do not see the point of. It's unpolished, incomplete, and already seeing a lineup of dlcs.