Our localization teams are hard at work across the world. And the community has done some great work too.
However it is clear that we are not going to get all 185,000 words fully translated in time for release. It takes about 60 days for the linguists we work with to edit and translate.
That said, we are fairly far along. Stay tuned!
When utilizing Stardock's AlienGPT, one might naturally ponder the question: which animals are the most sought-after choices for building a civilization around? Well, here's the answer.
Nearly 40% of users opt for cats, followed by foxes, fish, dogs, snakes, and more.
| Animal | Number of Mentions | Percentage (%) |
|---|---|---|
| cat | 1445 | 30.90 |
| fox | 331 | 7.08 |
| fish | 320 | 6.84 |
| dog | 319 | 6.82 |
| snake | 258 | 5.52 |
| bird | 251 | 5.37 |
| tiger | 219 | 4.68 |
| wolf | 190 | 4.06 |
| rabbit | 170 | 3.63 |
| monkey | 151 | 3.23 |
| bear | 139 | 2.97 |
| elephant | 133 | 2.84 |
| shark | 125 | 2.67 |
| lion | 102 | 2.18 |
| giraffe | 102 | 2.18 |
| turtle | 97 | 2.07 |
| horse | 84 | 1.80 |
| sheep | 83 | 1.77 |
| dolphin | 82 | 1.75 |
| whale | 76 | 1.62 |
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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals
Lots of cool stuff going in this weekend.
Lots of new planetary improvements
New executive orders
Let's go over it.
In no particular order..
Drath homeworld gets a backdrop
Removed references to empires in flavor text, replaced with civilizations.
New Executive Orders:
Mitosis
Swarm
Planetary Clairvoyance
New updated Planetary Improvements:
Colonial Generator now called Planetary Generator. Can be built on homeworld.
Unique improvements for Ammonia based species:
Network Nexus
Irradiated Foundry
Contagion Source
Golgi
Amoebic Incubator
Knowledge Melding Hub
Unique improvements for insectroid (consuming) species:
Work Instruction Chamber
Cerebral Chamber
Harmonious Antennae
Hatchery
Work Hive
Mother Hive
Planetary Improvement Updates
Many improvements are no longer available to insectoids or Amoebas.
Updated graphics for Planetary Generator and Industrial Center
Civilization capital no longer auto-placed.
Resource income from planetary mines (like Thulium mines) greatly increased at level 2 and 3.
Level up bonus for districts generally reduced from 2% to 1%.
Possibility Engine icon replaced and cost increased while research bonus reduced from 100% to 50% (yea this was seriously OP)
Leader Backstory changes:
Ammonia (Amoebas) get their own backstories
Insectoids (like Festron) get their own backstories
Synthetic (like Yor) get their own backstories
Amoebas no longer have ridiculous backstories like arranged marriages
Insectoids (like Festron) no longer get ridiculous backstories like missing twin
Silicon based civs no longer get ridiculous backstories like wanting to be a chef
New late game flavor text for asking for peace and such.
AI speech to you changes more based on the current status of the galaxy.
Cultural Progression Tree:
Approval boost from Eureka is temporary and reduced to 5%.
Sovereign Identity stat buff reduced from 200% to 50%.
Big Brother stat buff removed.
Big Brother diligence buff set to 100%.
Legacy citizen stat buffs removed
Legacy provides a 200% buff to resolve
Utopia citizen stat buffs removed
Utopia buffs Social stat by 200%
Singularity trait stat buffs removed
Singularity trait doubles Intelligence of citizens
Sanctuary trait buffs reduced from 300% (4X) to 25%
Terror Star trait buffs removed. (just unlocks the Terror Star tech to research)
Hive Miind buff reduced like the Sanctuary ones.
Technologies:
Synthetic Species get their own technologies
Aggressive civs get their own technologies
Ammonia (like Cosmic Contaminate) get their own technologies
Greedy civs get their own technologies
Radiated civs get their own technologies
Ship Components
Sensor ranges for high end sensors reduced slightly
Word on the street:
Different species now get different word on the street summaries on their planets.
Star names:
Took out some goofy star names (hat tip: Astasia)
Research costs
Tech Inflation multplier further increased from 2.5% to 5%
Specific tech tree research cost now given a slight exponential growth (^1.02 power).
Map Generation:
Slightly more stars on occasional and abundant and common settings
Planet balancing for more satisfying starts.
Planets and Stars:
Festron home world planet class increased from 20 to 24, Resources on it reduced
Contaminate home star system now comes with 3 high quality planets since everyone else is gonna hate them.
Policies:
Festron and Contaminate civs (and similar) blocked from various policies
Balance
Balance pass on the conversion between citizen stats and their output.
Workers no longer provide research benefits.
Ammonia based species base stats reduced because they basically amoebas. They make it up in quantity.
Various events that don't make any sense for a particular species not blocked. (The Yor do not mutate)
AI
The Fleet Commander AI will not counter the Primary Strategic AI’s order to leave for battle against a distant foe if it doesn’t believe its fleet is ready. (stop sending out tiny fleets!)
Balance pass on AI shipyard manufacturing priorities.
Various Bug fixes:
Lots of small bug fixes
Fixed bug where trading screen wouldn’t recognize you already have the tech
Fixed bug where techs wouldn’t always show what they unlock
Mooorre:
and lastly
We are coming to the finish line for GalCiv IV: Supernova!
Our once reasonable scope has, of course, exploded over the Summer as we got our hands into making this the best space 4X game we've ever made!
The next major BETA update, 1.90 will be focusing on making the game more appealing to a much wider group of people.
This feature is expected to expand significantly in the coming weeks. We're excited about its potential and are hopeful to integrate capabilities allowing modders to add their own entries.
Speaking of modders...
We are gearing up to unveil the GalCiv Workshop. It will start by supporting uploads of civs and ships.
Design your ship, hit a button, and upload. The same goes for your custom civilizations. Moreover, in various places, you'll have the option to pick from a range of ships. In beta 1.9, we're interested in your feedback on where additional integration points could be located.
Stay tuned for updates on code modding!
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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals
GalCiv III Language Support and Translation
Introduction:
Greetings!
For those of you who played GalCiv III, you might recall that its language support was somewhat limited. Given the sheer volume of text in the game, coupled with our small studio size in America, our linguistic reach was a bit narrow...to put it mildly.
With GalCiv IV, we want to try to make sure we can get to as many people as possible and for that, we need your help.
Languages We Aim to Support for the Next Release:
Translation Resources:
For the community and anyone interested in the localization process, check out our Github repository:
GalCiv IV Localization Repository[github.com]
File Importance Ranking:
We would like to guide the translators and enthusiasts on the most crucial files for the game:
Please note: We first update the English version and swiftly move to the translations.
Translation Process Overview:
Bear in mind, while human translators ensure quality, they might not always be aficionados of space strategy games. 
Thanks for your support! Also, for those looking for contract work on this, we are looking for more translators. For volunteers who are interested in helping here and there, we will be looking at the checkins to add people to the game's credits.
Cheers!
Generally speaking, in GalCiv games there has been three types of players:
The first player is the relatively new or casual player who finds the AI ridiculously hard and will post "The AI is cheating" (the AI doesn't cheat unless you make the settings super high). They say this because the AI is able to expand fairly quickly because it is quite good at scouting (the AI tends to build a lot more scouts than players) and finding planets. It has no idea where the planets are.
The second player plays the game fairly normally and is eventually able to win at levels up to and including the "Bright" difficulty where the AI is given a bit of help in the form of a slight money boost. These are people who tend to like the game the most because they see the AI playing fairly intelligently and each game is quite different.
The last player is the player who has figured out all the tricks with their Civ setup. They know which traits to pick and will make their custom civilization pretty amazing. They also know every weakness the AI has and can exploit that. These players can crush the AI even on Godlike.
Now, for the first type of player, we are doing more to slow down the AI on expanding on lower difficulty levels. They can't, for instance, rush starship construction.
For this discussion, it's the second and third type of player we want to discuss. And for that, we have to get into the sausage factory that is how terrible the AI is at managing planets.
WHY is the AI so bad at managing planets? The answer has been because of performance. Turn times. We've always had to really be careful on how sophisticated we make the AI's planet work (like we can't let it look ahead because that's an N^2 algorithm).
We've stuck with the same basic AI algorithms for planet stuff since GalCiv II.
BUT not anymore. It's 2023 and there's enough CPU power (and we've gotten enough time back thanks to other optimizations we're working on) that we could totally rewrite it. This will show up in 1.8.
Let's take a look at the old AI. Here is earth after 130 turns.
You will see a lot of obvious issues here (and we're not even counting the bad citizen setup which we'll have to get into later).
Look in particular at the terrible Shipyard production.
Now let's look at the new AI:
So what has changed?
A few things.
Thus, in this example:
The knock on effects of this remain to be seen. But this will be available shortly.
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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals
Greetings!
So if you look back at GalCiv III you'll notice it wasn't translated into that many languages. There's just a ton of text in this game and being a small American studio we don't really have ready access to a lot of people who speak a lot of languages.
Here are the languages we are just about to put out into the Insider's build:
German (improved over what is there now)
French
Russian
Polish
Brazilian Portuguese
Italian
Spanish
However, the quality of these translations are not necessarily...great.
We also want to get
Simplified Chinese
Japanese
Korean
What we are looking for help on (and we're willing to pay for your time) is to improve the quality of these translations.
The text is located in the directory Data subdirectory. You'll see the name of the language there and the files. It's fairly straight forward.
It's mostly editing work as often times, 95% of the text will be fine. But it'll be some translation where it doesn't make sense in a sci-fi setting.
If there is some other language you'd like us to support, let us know.
So what did you do on your Summer sunny day? Oh, you know, I um…played GalCiv and made tweaks!
Let’s see how it worked out.
I created a custom civ of explorers. Humans.
Statistically, you reading this have OCD. I should know because we’re all the same guy playing this game. So you probably find a lot of the font stuff in this game annoying. I know I do. So if you look closely, you’ll see some headers given their own sizes instead of everything being the same bloody size.
Also, moved up the citizens area so we can have at least two rows until those bums at Stardock put a proper scrollbar to get to that third row…hint hint.
Pro tip: You can destroy your capital and move it. It’s a population improvement so see the little house icon? You can put the civ capital there.
I was watching World Ddraig on YouTube and really noticed how bad the game was at explaining why you might want to colonize a low quality planet. So we updated the descriptions of planet types to explain them a lot better.
I’m writing this from Northern Michigan.
We read the forums and saw this request and agreed. Here it is.
While a bit more expensive to build on the surface of a planet, starbase modules can now be built there as well.
Just a few examples of the polish for this weekend.
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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals
AlienGPT in GalCiv IV focuses on the text generation for the game but also picks out alien images that were pre-generated based on previous inputs.
So while the text generation is real-time, the art is not.
The way it works is as follows:
So post your wishes below. I'll get it started:
A race of sentient grasshoppers
A species sentient lawn chairs
A civilization of exotic space slime
A race of aphids
A race of praying mantises
A race of sentient bipedal ladybugs