GalCiv IV: Supernova: May 11

Lots of big updates coming the second week of May. Here’s some highlights:

Civ image re-rolling

Previously, to get more potential race images to choose from, you had to regenerate the entire civilization. Because of how taxing that is on the AlientGPT system, we had to limit that to 5 tries per civ and 25 per day.

But since most people just want to try out to see more images, we are separating the civ regen to the reroll of the images.

So just reroll until you get the image you want (based on the description of your civ).

The system returns 9. 3 of the picks are always totally random and the other 6 are it’s best guess of what goes with the description you gave.

For fun, guess what my civ’s description was!

More Civs Unlocked

The classic GalCiv civs plus the main GalCiv III civs plus the new GalCiv IV civs are now unlocked. The new Supernova civs are still locked for now as we are still working on them.

New Settings

We are starting to tweak the Civ traits.

What we want to do is make all of these quite interesting between now and release.

Updated visuals

We’ve done our first pass on the visual style of the map itself. Gone is the blah grays.

Also, you can set it so that you can see which tiles have been explored.

New Default strategic zoom settings

If you found the iconizing agonizing (I’ll show myself out) then you’re in for a treat. We’ve rebalanced when and how different icons show up as you zoom out.

One smooth zoom out:

(if you look closely, you can see the milky way slowly moving – not here, this is just a screenshot, I mean in the game, screenshot doesn’t do it justice).

AI to Supernova

Beta 1 of Supernova was focused on AlienGPT (would it work) and making sure it didn’t blow up on your computers. It mostly didn’t. Beta 1A brings the new AI over. Which isn’t to say the AI in Beta 1 didn’t work, it just hadn’t been updated yet to support all the changes to Supernova yet.

You will find it much more engaging as a result.

Diplomacy gets more sophisticated

The computer players have a lot more nuance now in how they deal with each other.

There are a lot more things that can happen in GalCiv IV: Supernova that affect relations. Sometimes you’ll have to pick who are your friends and who are not and live with that. It also means the other civilizations will be more likely to have diplomatic challenges with each other as well.

Major balance pass

Everything from how the galaxy gets generated to how much a pulse cannon costs has been looked at and adjusted. We’ve also brought back a lot of starbase upgrades that were previously only available to the Synthetic civs (By popular demand).

This list will be too big to cover here but it’s a big set of changes. We’ve been reading every forum post and every Discord talk.

Feedback addressed / Quality of Life

We are glad so many people are liking Supernova. The biggest complaint, by far, has been that it’s so different from GalCiv III that the game needs to do a better job at explaining how things work.

While we work on making sure the game explains things, one tip: In GalCiv IV you can hold down the SHIFT key to lock a tooltip and then you can mouse over the tooltip to get more information.

Experiments

We are going to try out a pretty big change this week: We are going to make it so that colonies can’t be conquered. Only the core worlds. If you take the core world, you automatically get all the colonies that sponsor them. We haven’t decided if that will be a permanent change but we want to see how that affects pacing. Let us know in the comments what you think.

Scratch that. That’s too immersion breaking. We’ll need to find some other way to ensure that conquest isn’t too much of a slog. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Bug Squashing

From typos to crashes, we’ve been squashing bugs to get this update ready for you guys. We’ve even brought in a veteran game industry editor to finally deal with the tipoes.