Galactic Civilizations 4 Early Access

I am a huge fan of Masters of Orion and Civilization even Sins of a Solar empire. I even played the original Galactic Civilizations on OS2/Warp back in the day but I had lost touch with this game even if it was later available in Windows and on Steam. So when this game became available for early access, I jumped at the chance to play it. Now, completely a newbie I am truly enjoying this 4x game.

The most exciting thing about this game is the new chatgpt inspired AI that helps generate new custom races that you can play with or against. You can start out as the humans (Terans) and slowly go to conquer the galaxy and wni the game through several win-conditions: Prestige (which is like a total score), economic, conquest, research, alliances, ascension, end of turns.

According to the dev notes entry #9, the map has been reworked to allow for sectors of tiles within the galaxy and subspace streams to warp between them.

The idea of the game is you start out on your home world with a few ships, a probe, a colony ship and a fighter ship. You slowly expand and explore until you find some suitable areas to colonize until you meet your neighbors (friend or foe). Rinse and repeat until you win the game. Pretty standard formula for most of these types of games. Besides of where the game takes place (space, the mideval period of europe, earth) what makes them all different is the nuances of how you expand and succeed.

Galactic Civilizations 4 (Galciv4) toys with the idea of a completely randomly made universe that has a lot of surprises via anomolies which are discoverable objects that can give you resources, money, ship enhancements or unleash monsters, ships or pirates. These anomalies can be discovered by a flag ship and every civilization is supposed to get only one. This flag ship becomes more powerful as it discovers more and gains more experience.

Leaders are introduced into the game which can rule planets (core planets) which take minerals from colony planets. Once a leader is established then the player can direct the resources of the core planet.

Cultural progression is a feature similar to the tech tree where you earn points to spend to determine the type of civilzation you are. These give bonuses on various things from tech/research to military combat to how many government policy slots you have.

Micromanaging is not tedious although you do appear to have a lot of choices, on the home world you can designate several different types of tlies according to need.

The difference races do have politics and diplomacy, you can trade with them, create treaties or go to war with them.

It took me about three play throughs until I got the hang of things and I was able to win without waging a single war.

This game is still in early access and can be bought on steam or directly form the epic launcher. I play it on steam which the developers are updating regularly. In fact during the time I wrote this another version of the game with bug fixes was already released based on comments on the early access discord.