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.
