Galactic Civilizations IV

I've been following GC Series since 2nd installment. I cannot say I'm huge fan of 4X, but I do love them. With GC4 even after few years since release it still kinda feels like step back comparing to GC3. It feels dated, clunky and without meaningful depth. Events are boring AF, interactions with other empires feel artificial. That said with great deal of sadness I do not recommend GC4, better play GC3.

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

I realised game is using over 90% GPU at all times, other than when in main menu, no matter what , if anything, is happening. It's gotten to the point that it stop or stutter a youtube video i have in the background. Ridiculous.

Generally a decent game, essentially space-based Civilization. However the constant crashing (in Vanilla) when using beam weapons ruins it for me. No DLC until there's a fix.

I like this game, it reminds me some of Master of Orion, mostly MOO 2. Of course its much more modern and has stuff beyond MOO 2. I have played a few full games, I'm currently playing a large map and have 6 or 7 other civilizations left that I'm competing with, a couple civs got conquered. The graphics are good, the stars and planets on the map are vivid with colors and there are nebulas, black holes, etc where some of the resources can be harvested. The game has had a few updates since I bought it. It mostly runs well and smoothly. But occasionally some glitches happen. The sound effects cut out sometimes I noticed once you have a game going with a lot of ships / colonies, etc. I think the game could be improved some too. One of my biggest complaints right now is that once you have a large empire going, I have probably 15-20 core worlds and many colonies / starbases, the management can became tedious. For instance, there is no way I know to put the shipyards on "Idle", so a shipyard has to be building something or it will keep bringing you back to the idle shipyards. I wish there was a way to "shutdown" or put shipyards into an "idle" status and then bring them back online when you need them to build ships. If you have 15-20 shipyards, this becames a real task every turn if you don't need to build much currently. The other issue I see sometimes once I have a large empire is that as you get the focus moved from one idle fleet to another to give it orders, sometimes after moving a fleet or ship the turn will just end, not giving you a chance to do anything else. Normally you get an "end turn" icon when nothing is left to focus on. Then you can end the turn if you want to or active another ship, check out a core planet, etc. But sometimes the end turn just "happens" after telling a ship to move and this is annoying if you wanted to do something else before the end of the turn. I still recommend the game, its fun and I enjoy playing it.

Overall it's still one of the best turn-based strategy games I've played. But & as with all of the Sid Meyers Civilisation games this one has a similar AI that becomes predictable over a few restarts of the game. This means that adversaries on the map automatically surge towards & enclose your player as soon as contact is made. This game also randomly inserts hostile enemies at you despite the settings you input. Thirdly; there is A GLITCH involving the economic policy settings page that sometimes prevents you from adding or changing policies until the next time you open another policy box on this page.

I played 3 and coming into this one I was expecting more. I really wanted them to get better controls, better feeling of the game, but personally I played it for a little while before regretting buying it. 4/10 game would rather play 3.

just boring research build explore destroy blah