Galactic Civilizations IV Reviews

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.

This game is definitely an improvement over GalCiv3 1: The fact that you can now besiege planets for a set number of turns before it falls as opposed to needing to land ground invasions. Ground invasions themselvse are not made up of disposable "legions" you lose after each invasion 2: The leader system makes internal politics a lot more interesting. Each leader has a backstory, stats that determine how good they will be at different jobs, and a loyalty stat. 3: More events show up, including ones related to leader backstories 4: GalCiv4's cultural focus system is better than Galiv3's ideology system. Instead of 3 simplistic ideologies with specialized perk branches and needing to rack up those ideology-specific points to buy these perks, you now have a system with 8 distinct ideologies each offering more of a variety to their perks, which can be purchased with generic culture points, which can be used for any ideology. You are still rewarded for making decisions that favor a certain ideology, as Cultural Awareness gives you discounts on its respective ideology's perks, but you are not forced to specialize like in GalCiv3. 5. This is the first game I have seen incorporate GenAI. The AlienGPT is a cool feature to help with the creation of custom factions, often tweeking stats to suit the playstyle you're going for, and it's nice to know that it is trained solely off the studio's own art library All of these features are available in the base game with NO DLC REQUIRED That said, there are a still a few mechanics that I miss from GalCiv3, such as the Mercenary Market and Government system

Good game. Was asked to review, never reviewed before, enjoyed the game that much that I put one on. Uhh... it's a game, that does game stuff. Like... stuff. THERES A REASON THIS IS MY FIRST ONE. JUST BUY THE 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 game has far too many bugs and the developers do not have any easy way to report bugs, nor am I seeing responses by them on the official galciv4 forums website. I would not recommend anyone buying or playing this game.

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.

Very shallow, unappealing tech tree. Boring combat. The way planets are designed and where/how you place planetary upgrades is pretty lame. Could have been a much better game.