Galactic Civilizations IV Reviews

I like that its not so in depth as some of the 4X games I play. This feels a little more casual.

its a great game as long as you like long games for 4X and its fun a lot of custom options to make your factions if you cant create stuff like me then mods lots of mods

Unimpressive all around plus it kept running in the background after I closed it, eating like 6% of my PC resources. Refunded.

I have played most previous versions of this game. The last couple, I couldn't really get into, but this one is great! I like the sector system, it fits better into a space opera narrative, allows a player to develop their own "space" in both sense of the word, before launching into combat. The mod system is intriguing but still clunky, the developers seem very active, so I suspect it will get better with time.

This is a very good turn-based space adventure strategy game. The lore is rich and varied. The different races all have a part in the overall story. The only downfall is it gets a little bit tedious once the game devolves into a military conquest game.

Fantastic update to one of my favs. The UI is completely revamped, nice and clean now and very easy to follow. Graphics benefit from the update as well. Definitely yes if you are a fan and fans of 4x games.

This game is extremely bland, even mediocre in its design. I’m not sure I’ll put more hours into it, as my playtime is valuable. Perhaps a major overhaul through modding the data could improve it, though. That said, if you’re looking for a simple, no-brainer push-piece kind of game, very conventional, it might be fine for some light, undemanding sessions. But expect, regardless of the race you choose, to deal with the same very standard and predictable tech tree (for example, weapons: you get 3 types, and each tech just upgrades one type by one level up to about level 12—nothing more, nothing less, zero originality or variety. And there are plenty of examples like that, really the whole game is designed this way). The 3D graphics are good; the 2D ones, not so much (everything looks the same, and you could swap the starport icon with the clinic one—if you’ve never played the game, I challenge you to identify any recognizable elements!). The design, as I said, is mediocre and formulaic. The AI is very average. Many minor irritating bugs, perhaps some regression ones as well, as it is baffling that commonly found and reported bugs are not fixed at this stage of development. For comparison, and to show the standards by which I judge the game, here are the sci-fi titles I’ve played: Space Empires III–V, Distant Worlds I and II, Stellaris, Aurora, EFS, Stars!, and plenty of others I’ve forgotten (including, of course, MOO I and II). PS: 75% of my gaming time is letting run GC4 in suspended mode in an alternate virtual desktop while I do something else.

The PowerPoint presentation of 4X space games Pros, Cons, and review. Pros: - huge waste of time, you can play 100s of hours on drafty brain mode without getting ahead. Cons: - sloppy UI and AI design on the level of an undergrad student doing a JAVAscript model of viral proliferation - no intelligence, purely a war of attrition simulation - results in delusional, simplistic AI behaviors that expect you to respond on the same trash-level performance - deliberate waste of time. game stacking obstacles for no other purpose than giving you "clean-up" chores. - conculsion: this game treats you as an equal. A brainless parasitic entity without standards or a concept of dignity or self-awareness, and it gets upset if you don't comply with its expectations. Review: If GalCiv 1, 2, 3, and 4 have proven anything, it is that the corporate Zeitgeist seems to be that you can do anything to pull money out of people's wallets with the least effort and they will take it up the a*** A carbon copy of the previous game, including a blur of new issues and a lesser impression than the predecessors. It plays like a PowerPoint presentation of other notable game titles, where ship icons shuffle about the map like cheap overlays, because the dev team did not manage to bridge the gap between prolific project size and streamlined solutions. Factually this bogs down a game with flare, bloom, antialiasing and all the graphic bombardment that you will not experience because it is simply impractical to manage a 15000 item map with the zoom factor of a microscope. That aside, the game shows how sloppy developers have become with their work, basically outsourcing quality control onto the consumer to acquire the hardware needed to smoothly run a faulty, shameless product. This slopiness shows everywhere. The game noticeably bogs down as time goes by, it also begins to stall with every task it is given, like generating fresh maps, loading the game, etc. The game uses an AI voiceover to read all the tooltips and event blurbs. HOWEVER the AI is not part of the game. Instead they used the AI to read all the blurbs and put the voice clips in the game at some beta stage. At some point they made smaller and bigger changes to the text blurbs, thus the AI voice narrates a different text. They could not even be arsed to force an intern to use an AI tool that robbed an artist of an income, so that the consumer would have a proper, up-to-date game. Thats how little effort and worth they put on you, it would cost them nothing and still they did not do it. And then the game itself, its technical ideas and their implementation. First comes the AI proliferation which seems to be viral. The AI expansion is not driven by resource restriction, but follows the same spread pattern as "everything I touch is mine" which creates an incredible slog of "hoovering the galaxy" to remove them. A conquest victory is akin to drilling a hole in your skull with a spoon. Likewise "building tall" is impossible, because you can not compete with a system that proliferates exponentially by using quality sources. Simply put 5 times a 10 can not trump 479 times a 1, and while the AI does not have to spend *any* effort at all (since your PC is doing the work) you have to decide if you want to spend the time managing the expansion at trash level, or in fact if you will be satisfied being a mostly uninvolved passenger on autoplay as you watch the simulation "under your control", and in that case, why do you play at all? No matter how bad your life is, you can do better than that with a bag of chips. Other design choices, like DLC come with a baffling display of incompetence that barges in with the bravado of a drunk bloke. Stargates? YES! however, you can not build a network that connects all dots. A WHOLE DLC package introduces megastructures that add ZERO quality of life. The gates only work on black hole positions which are randomly placed on the map, they can only connect to one counterpart at another black hole and do not automatically connect to ALL gates. So not only is this item dependent in its usefulness on the random placement of the resource, it also requires you to re-wire the gates by hand, every time you wish to..."dial in" another destination, and that destination depends again on where it was placed. Remember you spent $15 on that privilege. The other items you can build are...an empty ring world that is somehow worse than any other trash planet you can upgrade by hand, and star upgrades which give 5% to this, 40% to that, at a point in the game where it is completely irrelevant to have that bonus. The dealbreaker though was that the game decides to overrule your agency. Concrete example was an enemy empire declaring war. The result was them losing about 200 ships, 7 planets and 30% of their territorial influence, while destroying 3 ships, taking no ground. Not only did the AI subsequently offer "peace treaties" which were like "things are going poorly, give us 50% of your GDP for 100 turns, but it eventually decided that *my* advisors brokered a peace deal overruling me, because the war was going poorly. The game literally decided to give itself a bonus for losing and says it was a kindness to you. Make of that what you will, but if you want to compete in a game that proves it is better at stacking shit than you are, at your dime for buying the game, and powering it using your electric bill, and calling you a loser despite beating it bloody...this is on you.

I've owned GalCiv 3, but never gotten truly warm with the franchise. But GalCiv 4 showed up in a sale, so I figured why not give it another try. Literally turn 1 into the tutorial, the game made me throw my hands in the air at somehow being a modern hex-tiled, turn-based 4X, but also not having units display movements paths as you're setting up a move order. This is fundamental basics that Civ3, almost two decades ago, already had down, and a feature that, no joke, EVERY SINGLE GAME (of similar genre) had. Because it's just that fundamental to being able to plan out your unit movement across the map. Pet peeve, surely, but there's such as a thing as absolutely faceplanting first impressions. But, alright, playing on, meeting a potentially hostile new faction, usual 4X stuff. Get an event, chose to piss off the AI player for internal culture gains. 1 turn later, I'm contacted by the AI player. Oh, instant declaration of war? No, actually. They offered me their full treasury, open borders, and 2 techs (worth pretty much the entire research I had done up to that point, if not more)... for me showing them my map (which is really just a couple turns of a single scout probe). What. In which game is that anything resembling a reasonable deal? Much less from a supposedly hostile, more powerful military power? I mean, I did grasp from the reviews that the AI isn't necessarily THAT good... but there's bad AI and AI outright throwing the game the first chance they're given. I stopped at that point. Like, I'm not particularly getting warm with the franchise to begin with (though I like the split of colonies into autonomous 'outposts' and actual core worlds), the fanbase seems to split on whether GalCiv IV is even an upgrade to GalCiv III or not, and when you just keep piling on bad impressions... sorry, that's a refund.

Games in near unplayable on a large map. Why? There is no way to find the currently selected ship. 1 minute of each turn is just trying to find the current ship on the map. All they needed was a red flashing circle, or clicking on the ship would take you to the ship, but no...... Hotkey C, should in theory center the map, but it doesn't work either. I found people complaining about this a year ago. It didn't get fixed. I played 1 game, but it too painful to have a second one. There are also a whole bunch of other minor bugs, but nothing game breaking. It's a shame to have it ruined by something this simple, as they seem to have put a lot of effort into the game otherwise.