Galactic Civilizations IV

[Komutan]

https://forums.stardock.com/504710/now-announcing-galactic-civilizations-iv

"Stardock announced Galactic Civilizations IV today. The newest installment of its award-winning space 4X strategy sandbox game series takes the best of what its predecessors had to offer and adds to it with many new and exciting features.

As the all-powerful leader of a spacefaring civilization, the player must seek out new star systems and discover the exciting potential of the subspace realm. There are thousands of worlds to colonize and dozens of civilizations - both old and new - to encounter.

The new game, scheduled to go into early access later this Spring, aims to vastly increase the game’s scope and depth by introducing AI characters, star sectors, ministers, central control, a much bigger technology tree, and more.

“The focus in Galactic Civilizations IV is the player actually dealing with AI characters,” said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. “In previous versions, the computer AI meant other civilizations. Now, every civilization is made up of hundreds of characters who have their own agendas. In 4X terms, it’s like dealing with Civs of Civs.”

To go along with the greater depth in the way civilizations are handled, the game’s galactic scale has been vastly increased. 

“In previous games, players would pick a map size and the game would generate a cluster of stars with planets. This time, those same clusters of stars and planets will be connected to other clusters via a new concept called Subspace Streams,” said Wardell. “Each cluster is known as a sector. It’s like having a map of maps.” 

To deal with the much greater number of stars and planets from previous games, the concept of “AI governors” has been thrown out and replaced by the Core world / Colony World metaphor. 

“There’s no point expecting players to micro-manage dozens, let alone hundreds of worlds,” said Wardell. “Instead, virtually all planets are simply colonies – worlds that simply output raw resources to their associated core world. The player assigns one of their precious leaders to a particularly good world in order to turn it into a core world. The core worlds are the ones the player directly manages, with the leader character providing various bonuses and unlocking various features based on the attributes of that character.” 

Much of the game deals with the player carefully balancing their personal power versus that of the leader characters they’ve recruited. Leader characters are what unlock many features of the game - from research, to planet management, to diplomacy - but they also have their own agendas and individual stats that can lead them to do things to the player (or to each other).  Moreover, the player can bypass their leaders and issue executive orders using control points. 

“Executive orders work a little bit like say a ‘spell’ would in a fantasy game,” said Wardell. “One executive order might be to fast build a ship on a target planet, and another might be to draft armies to invading planets. But these orders are paid for via the new ‘control’ resource.” 

Acquiring control points typically involves actions that result in reducing the loyalty of various leaders. Thus, the player has to carefully balance their desire for control with getting along with their leader characters.

“We are a long way away from the old raising and lowering taxes to affect approval,” said Wardell. “Our goal here is to make use of AI to give players the experience of foes not just being foreign, but potentially domestic as well. It’s been interesting to see how much insolence play testers have taken from an AI leader if that character provides really good perks to their civilization.”

With the entire galaxy now being part of the game, Galactic Civilizations IV includes several new canon alien civilizations to play as or against each with their own unique abilities, lore, and features.

Popular features from the previous versions of the game have also been greatly improved, including ship designs, planetary invasions, combat, diplomacy, research, planetary improvements, and more.

Replacing the traditional campaign system of previous Galactic Civilizations games is the new “Missions” feature. These story-driven elements allow players to feel like every game is effectively a unique, compelling campaign unto itself.

“We eliminated the ideology tree we had in previous games,” said Wardell. “Now, players will find themselves choosing between personal liberty and collectivism, authoritarianism and anarchy and seeing what kind of civilization they want to create. These choices not only unlock additional gameplay features, but determine what kinds of ‘missions’ will spawn.”

Because of the dramatic changes from previous Galactic Civilizations games, the early access program for Galactic Civilizations IV will start at the Alpha phase rather than the more typical Beta phase, so that player feedback can be incorporated early."

Bu aşağıdaki de Brad Wardell'in serinin tarihçesini anlattığı bir developer diary. 

Spoiler

 

A little background

Before we start, I should introduce myself. I’m Brad Wardell. I designed and programmed the very first Galactic Civilizations game back in 1993 for OS/2. I literally programmed it out of my college dorm room after picking up “Teach Yourself C in 21 days”. 

While OS/2 didn’t take off like IBM thought, it gave me the opportunity to make a game that focused on really good AI and a unique style of gameplay. For the past 30 years, I’ve been making space strategy games, albeit with more resources than back in 1993 when I was hand drawing space ships with an icon editor.

Two philosophies

While I was programming on my 386SX and talking on Usenet, the guys at Simtex  were making a game called “Sar Lords,” which was eventually released as Master of Orion. These games represented two main philosophies on how to do a space strategy game – the free form movement style of Galactic Civilizations, and the phase-lane/star to star method of Master of Orion.

 Most space games seem to have taken the MOO route of point to point. It’s not hard to understand why. Every tile, even in space, uses RAM. Think how small Civ maps were back in the 90s. Since GalCiv was on OS/2, we had entire MEGA-bytes of memory to work with.  Even in GalCiv III, those huge maps consume a lot of RAM.

Modern Space Games 

In the early 2000s, we became friends with a company called Paradox.  They were our European distributor for Galactic Civilizations II.  The guys at Paradox and Stardock worked like peas in a pod. In 2012, the Master of Orion IP went up for auction. Both Stardock and Paradox were eager to get this IP. However, we were both narrowly outbid by Wargaming.net, who later went on to make a new Master of Orion.

Instead of a Stardock or Paradox Master of Orion game, we ended up with Galactic Civilizations III and Stellaris.  While one can speculate how things might have gone if either of us had acquired the Master of Orion IP, I think most people are glad with how both games turned out.

Galactic Civilizations III preludes

After Stardock sold its Impulse platform, I decided to focus my energies into co-founding a couple of start-ups. The first, Oxide, was made up of the lead Civ devs over at Firaxis.  They had recently finished Civilization V and some of them had interviewed over at Stardock to investigate what came next. We ended up hiring Jon Shafer, who was the lead designer of Civilization V - he did the original design for Galactic Civilizations III.  A whole bunch of our internal terminology is based on some of his UX innovations (such as the “Shafer button”).  

The Oxide team was focused on making a next-generation game engine.  Stardock had tried to make a 4th generation engine for Elemental and it was a disaster. Oxide developed Nitrous, which powers Ashes of the Singularity.  Today they’re working on a big secret project.

Meanwhile, Soren Johnson and I were putting together another studio made up of some Firaxis vets called Mohawk to create Offworld Trading Company.  Today they’re about to release their second game, Old World.

Being the CEO of Oxide and the President of Mohawk (and President and CEO of Stardock) meant I wasn’t available to work on Galactic Civilizations III. Early on, Jon left to make At the Gates and Cari, the lead developer of GalCiv I and II (for Windows), was on extended maternity leave. So, GalCiv III was quite a challenge to develop.

Launch

The GalCiv III that launched in 2015 is a very different game than the one in 2021, as the two screenshots (launch and current) make clear.

At release, Galactic Civilizations III got great reviews and was a good game at launch.  But it wasn’t a great game.  We had our work cut out for us.

Lessons from GalCiv III

To understand why some people felt GalCiv III was a step back from GalCiv II, we need to look at GalCiv II.

GalCiv II was filled with story-driven events.  I hard-coded these in C++, but made a lot of them and they could be very in-depth and interesting.  This meant that every game of GalCiv II could end up feeling like an epic story.

But it wasn’t just the events, it was hundreds of tiny touches that increased immersion. For example, the player could look on any species ship and get a readout of its equipment with race-themed named for these components. The Altarian weapon names were always super passive aggressively named like “Not necessarily friendship giver Mark IV”

Plus the stats. The endless, unnecessary stats.

Even the combat seemed more interesting.

But, Galactic Civilizations III was a design of its time.  Designed in 2012 and released in 2015 the goal was to make it more mainstream.  "Streamlining" was the word of the day. GalCiv III wasn’t the only casualty of this line of thinking.  Elemental: War of Magic might have been buggy, but it had depth. So many details. 

But by 2016 we were making Sorcerer King, which had streamlined all the “rough edges” out. In a pre-Unity world, this strategy made sense. We wanted to make sure these games would appeal both to hardcore gamers and also more mainstream gamers (not “casual,” but people who might not appreciate a half dozen modifiers on a weapon).

Once Unity games started to flood the market, GalCiv III found itself to be too complicated for the casual market, but too light for the hardcore gamer who now had options like Stellaris.

New Directions

If you ask someone if you should get Galactic Civilizations III today they will say “YES But you have to make sure you get Crusade”.   After Ashes of the Singularity and Offworld Trading Company shipped, I was able to come back to GalCiv.   I had had my own design document for GalCiv III back from 2010 which focused heavily on the concept of citizens and civil wars. Some of these ideas went into GalCiv III: Crusade.  We were able to begin adapting GalCiv III for the new market reality.

Updating GalCiv III’s design via expansion packs, however, is a bit like trying to find new missions for jet aircraft whose designed mission has become obsolete. This is where GalCiv IV comes in.

Where we want to go

With GalCiv IV we now have enough memory and processing power available to build what amounts to a simulator behind the scenes while presenting it in a nice, easy to understand, turn-based strategy game UI.  What this means is that we want a game of GalCiv IV to feel like you’re actually running a space faring civilization filled with interesting characters. Rather than having an AI just for each alien player, we want an AI behind every single character in the game – and your civilization is made up by a lot of characters. And every character has a potential story to tell.

This means, from a gameplay point of view, that the player is still in charge of a vast, interstellar empire that is exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating things, but the galaxy is a livelier place than it was in the past. There are many more mechanisms in play that can affect things, a lot more moments of “Well crap, in hindsight, I feel like I should have seen that coming..” which results in players feeling like they keep getting better and better at the game each time they play.

The gang is back together

So Cari is back from maternity leave, I’m back from managing Oxide and Mohawk, we have Derek (Kael of Fall from Heaven fame) as the lead designer. Paul is back to being able to focus on UI and space ship making, Jesse is back to make sure our graphics are amazing, Sarah is back to make sure our underlying UI system is insanely powerful and useful, and we have new people on the team who previously worked on games ranging from Star Control to Sins of the Prophets. 

It’s going to be a good time!

 

 

[arcane]

stellar kings

yeni bir yaklasim hem stellaris ile yarismak zorunda kalmamak adina hem de galciv'in eskilerine benzer bir oyunla tatmin etmeyecegi nedeniyle iyi olur.

[GERGE]

Favori serilerimden. EA'sına gireceğim ender oyunlardan olur.