Galactic Civilizations IV

-1 "You asked us to leave you a review without really getting the full experience yet, but being routinely frustrated and disappointed by various lag-issues, bugs, or weird illogical conflicts and underdeveloped features." :( The game drags on, barely anything happens, AI does not seem capable of doing anything since their logic got frozen by me placing 4 fighters in front of a hyperlane creating a "blockade", and they simply station a number of their fleets beside them for the *rest of the game*. Good way to prevent drones when the "Warlords" expansion heavily punishes me for trying to destroy 4 of them. Didn't mean to prevent everything, OOPS. So much for Genius AI or fun DLC. Challenges Where do I begin to express my disappointment with these? Well let's see, I go for that "Orb of Draginol" that promises to grow my power forever... I unleash the Dreadlords on my enemy, don't see what happens but presumably the Dreadlords were wiped out quickly because almost immediately I'm told to invade my neighbour I've been protecting for the planet to retrieve the Orb. Alright, if you say so, infinite power probably worth it I guess? Get the Orb and... +30% to all weapons, and I have to research it. That's it. That was rather underwhelming.... What else do we got? I see a few of them require building a Wonder, that the AI gets to race me... but the cheating AI has a planet that's producing almost 2000 production a turn which is impossible for me and I'm just sitting at 150 which is 3-10x more than everything else in the galaxy. So all of those are obvious off-limits. There's a few "Survive the wars" which is probably possible but why... for some "Prestige" points? Lame. I'm done with that, not even interested in this Prestige victory. AI Don't even bother against the non-cheating AI. They're so lame you might as well just be playing alone in an empty galaxy. The tree people couldn't even figure out their own faction's gimmicks and seemingly got stuck. Dead planets everywhere forever. Random-ass builds on their planets. Zero-effort computer that can't even figure out their way around a 4-fighter blockade. Wars don't happen seemingly unless you start them. Start a war, conquer a planet, demand everything from them in return for that planet. Rinse and repeat. Games do exist where the AI is smarter than that which existed in the 90's on DOS games... but not this one. Ship Editor On one hand, that's a lot of customization and that's kind of neat... on the other hand, it's just as finnicky as a regular 3D editor but we've got far less to work with here... why the hell did you go this far for an in-game ship editor? This 100% should be an add-on separate TOOL at the very least. Why load this into the game at all? It takes so much time and effort to get something to look right, and it won't show the animations while editing, so you just have to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GUESS! This is ♥♥♥♥. Complete ♥♥♥♥. It needs to be said. You want this full-customization? GIVE IT ITS OWN EDITOR PROGRAM. WASTE OF ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RESOURCES!!!! The in-game ship-editing needs to be some basic-ass Master of Orion ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for how simple the rest of the game is anyways. What the hell is wrong with you people? You know how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long it takes to load this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in-game editor just to ADD SOME ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ EXTRA MOVEMENT POINTS TO A SCOUT?! THAT I HAVE TO SNAP TO 1 OF 3,000,000,000 AVAILABLE OVERLAPPING SNAP POINTS? Someone needs to slap some sense into you! You cruel sons of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. /endrant I can go on and on and on... the game's littered with issues. Tons of little things to, like playing as the Insectoid faction "Festron" I'm getting leaders with the "Tibetan Monk" trait, which, after taking 10 seconds and few mouseovers to properly load the tooltip reads some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about how they're obviously from Earth... and even better, the mission where I, the Festron, were asked if I should embrace something for the good of humanity or something like that... clearly a lot of this was written for just 1 faction and then they just gave up after that and made it for everything without even generalizing it. There are plenty of signs that this game was RUSHED and it's unfinished. Lack of money? Lack of professionalism? Just another grift? More enshittification? All of the above? Don't waste your time or money, even if it's on sale. They clearly aren't interested in game design, they clearly are only putting effort into marketing, and they clearly only want as much from you as they can get with having to put in as little effort as possible. ♥♥♥♥ these people.

It has a slick looking UI and the idea of sectors is pretty cool. BUT..... If you were someone who enjoyed customizing ship loadouts and designing ships for various uses, this game went 10 steps backwards. Really just not worth the money for the few extra management features that weren't present in GC3.

Hate to post a negative review for any game but this is really feels like a cash grab; a tiny iteration on Gal Civ III with a Gen AI smear over everything, the art direction is inconsistent and the relentless pop ups and events just throw nausea inducing AI slop in your face every ten seconds.

So I got this 'cause I played galciv2 a while back and it was OK. And this is... OK. Honestly the thing that tips it negative first is the price. You can get much better for this price (or much, much better if you pay a little more for Stellaris or Age of Wonders). The ship building is really dated, these days with the likes of Space Engineers where you can actually fly the things it feels a bit weak sauce. Also you never really get to use any of the systems it's all automated combat, also the models are so small it's hardly worth the effort but it is a fun minigame within the game. The other thing is the heavy use of AI. The portraits just look weird, the text is clunky and clearly generative LLM slop, and it just feels off. Like how AI feels. Sorry guys this game kinda belongs in the 00s still. It's a great core of a game but we just expect more from the genre now. Or at least I do.

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.

There seems to be a trend in 4x games of devs adding layers of unrelated systems that all contribute to the ultimate 'number go up' that turns the whole game into spread sheets and math puzzles. I'll confess, heavy micromanagement isn't my thing but I also don't like setting everything to automate as the game tends to just disappear and turns into rattling the end turn button, and here it seems like micromanagement is most of the game. It feels a lot less like making interesting strategic decisions, and more like playing sudoku. Like 90% of the decisions, there IS a best choice, you just need to compute it. It's not an interesting choice, or even a stylistic choice, it's a numerical choice. The graphics don't help, they've been the same since GalCiv 2 if you have the map zoomed out to any functional level. The descriptions of events seem to be read out by some AI voice, but it doesn't say the same thing as the text says. This dissonance kind of sums up my whole game experience. Squinting at the screen like Fry from Futurama wondering why it is like this and when does it get fun? Playing this game makes me physically tired. I guess it's good if you want to go take a nap.

So, I've played previous iterations of Galactic Civilizations, and this is really no different other than better graphics (only slightly). The game is more or less the same. But one big difference that I noticed is the abundance of AI use within the game. Event descriptions, Civilization descriptions, Governor traits, message acknowledgment responses - it all looks and reads like it was generated by AI. For example, you can recruit governors to govern planets, and you do so from a recruitment page. Every character has traits that describes that character, and some of the traits are things like "Lost their sense of smell in an industrial accident". Does this affect their ability, or add/subtract from them in any way? No, it's just fluff. It's as if the developers were like "We need to add some sort of descriptor here to fill in all the extra space so this doesn't feel empty". Oh, those same characters from the recruitment screen, AI art. All the portraits for the different citizens and governors are AI generated. The game also gets horribly buggy, laggy, and isn't optimized as you get closer the end game content - this was *very* noticeable on a 'small' map. So, at the end of the day, it feels like someone got their hands on the Galactic Civilizations III core software, updated it slightly, and used AI to generate all the content. And then kick it back out to market at its current price, and then slowly add DLC to the mix (for an additional price with much of the same). It held my interest as a time killer, but is it a complex, detailed, and deep game? No.

Poor craftmanship in what could have been a great game. There are simply too many poorly implemented issues in the UI, some examples: - You can't see the route your ships will take as you try to order them to move. - You can hardly select going to a place next to something, as the objects tends to shadow space. - During wars your fleets may perish to strange events that you can not see. - When you get a message about a battle, you can see a replay, but not where it took place. - It is absurdly hard to find the active ship on the screen, especially if it hiding under a planet name tag. All that being said, it could have been a great game. The feel is that of a good Sci-fi game, and there are definitely some interesting elements , so it could have been good. I just always end up being too annoyed by the poor quality...