Brad Wardell's Blog

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #24 - AIs Drinking Coffee on Planets

Published on Monday, August 28, 2023 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

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.

  1. The AI is now quite good at destroying an existing district or low performing improvement and putting a new one on it.
  2. The AI is quite good at terraforming.
  3. The AI is now good at measuring not what the native qualities of a region on a planet are but also the effects of the other buildings (a very expensive operation).  So the AI will happily ignore a +1 to wealth if  the civilization needs food or if it's going to get a big research bonus by putting something there.
  4. The AI is now much more intelligent about when to upgrade its districts. 

Thus, in this example:

  • Shipyard production jumps from 37 to 90.  
  • Manufacturing levels have gone from level 1 to level 3
  • The AI has destroyed some districts to for in high end buildings (look at all the unbuilt special improvements in the top right in the top right)
  • The AI is willing to build housing and food as its needs require it.
  • Look at the the placement of the Starport? That's a level 5 Starport versus not building one at all because it didn't want to destroy any existing tiles to build it.
  • It built a prison and a recycling center because the planet needed to reduce crime and pollution.

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

 

GalCiv Translations: WE NEED YOUR HELP

Published on Sunday, August 20, 2023 By Brad Wardell In Galactic Civilizations IV

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.

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #23 - A Weekend of Polishing

Published on Monday, July 31, 2023 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #23 - A Weekend of Polishing

GalCiv IV Beta 1.66 Test Game

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.

Play Test Time

I created a custom civ of explorers. Humans.

Change #1: We spell out that the survey modules came from a Precursor dig. That’s why you can’t just crank these out.

Change #2: Planet screen gets better fonts.

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.

Change 3: Better descriptions for planets

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.

Change #4: Constructor Area of Effect is easier to see

We read the forums and saw this request and agreed. Here it is.

Change #5: Planets can build starbase modules too

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

 

AlientGPT: Your Art Requests put here

Published on Thursday, July 20, 2023 By Brad Wardell In Galactic Civilizations IV

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:

  1. You enter a description for your alien race "A species of space cats seeking domination"
  2. You choose the traits for your civ (to the right of the description entry).
  3. You hit Generate
  4. Text is generated on our TachyonAI servers and sent back.
  5. Your description is parsed for nouns and verbs and adjectives and 9 pre-generated alien portraits are selected (3 random, 3 rough guesses and 3 best guesses) and sent back.
  6. the nouns and verbs are stored and used to generate new art.
  7. The art generation AI uses Stardock's existing art portfolio (30 years of art) for training. 
  8. New images are generated and put into the alien portraits library.

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

 

GalCiv IV: Supernova Wishlists for July 27

Published on Thursday, July 20, 2023 By Brad Wardell In Galactic Civilizations IV

I'm eager to test a new strategy with all of you. Our main goal is to prioritize the most important improvements to our early access build.

I'm looking for your input on weekly enhancements. We need to focus on changes that our team can realistically make, test, and release within one week's time.

Could you please suggest up to five enhancements you'd like to see made for next week? These could include modifications, fixes, or adjustments. Remember, no more than five suggestions, please!

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #21 - What to do about Space Bugs in Battle

Published on Monday, June 5, 2023 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #21 - Pretty vs. mechanically satisfying space battles

Forget realistic space battles. In a real space battle, the ships would be incredibly far apart and only missile weapons that are flying at relativistic speeds would matter. So putting that aside, let’s talk about the challenge of making space battles look pretty.

The Mechanics

We want kinetic weapons (guns), direct energy weapons (beam weapons) and payload weapons (missiles) to have very different ranges.

Missiles have a long range and a long cooldown.

Direct energy weapons are much shorter and a medium cooldown. Half the time of missiles.

And kinetic weapons have a very short range but a very short cooldown.

Space bugs

And of course, we want pretty decent scale differences between the ships.

Meanwhile, the marketing and artists want to see really cool looking ships battling it out.

Putting aside the camera controls we need to improve on, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a dichotomy between visually pleasing battles and ones that are strategically sophisticated.

So what say you? How do you think this should be approached?

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

GalCiv IV: Supernova v1.55 Early Access Update

Published on Thursday, June 1, 2023 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv IV News

v1.55 - Introducing New Features and Major Balance Overhauls

Greetings!

We're excited to announce the release of GalCiv IV: Supernova v1.55, a significant step forward. This update brings a collection of new features, key balance changes, and improvements that will transform your intergalactic adventures. Here are some of the highlights:

  1. Gameplay Overhaul: Expect a major rework of the technology tree, including an entirely new approach to Exotic World colonization, Interstellar cabinet, and Space Weapons. We've fully rebalanced the AI's tech prioritization, and you can look forward to seeing them focusing more on weapons and hull research. 

  2. New Anomaly Events: We've introduced several new anomaly events to keep things fresh. If you've been tired of the "stealth field", you're in for a treat!

  3. Improved Ship Mechanics: Ships can now attack multiple times per turn as well as invade multiple times per turn if that's applicable.

  4. Custom Factions: We've improved AlienGPT and added a host of improved abilities for civilizations including new citizen types.

  5. Economy and Diplomacy Tuning: Trade routes have been revamped to be more valuable, with their value multiplier increased from 15% to 33%. Various factions, including the Banking Clan and Capitalist Society, have undergone balance tweaks to offer a more fair and engaging gameplay experience.

  6. You can move your Civ Capital. Enough said. We've also done a full balance pass on planetary improvements.

  7. Many many small and large improvements: We've been spying on you as much as we can. Or at least, we've been reading your feedback and have jammed as much as we can into this.

NOTE: This update will break the previous version's (1.51).  If you have a game in progress you want to finish, you can use the 1.51 branch. Read here to learn more.

We hope these updates will significantly improve your game experience in the GalCiv IV universe. As always, your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don't hesitate to share your thoughts on these new features and improvements.

Full change log:

  • Update siege ship strategic icons and stat icons.
  • Resized faction logos resized to reduce scaling artifacts.
  • Visual display of ship hull sizes modified to make it easier to view them in battle.
  • You should see fewer "failed generate error" messages.
  • Fixed the Voyagers ability to actually for realsies give a +2 moves, +2 sensors.
  • "Hive Mind" ability HP buff in territory decreased from 25 to 5.
  • Several new anomaly events (tired of the "stealth field" yet?).
  • "Grand festival" length decreased from 25 turns to 12.
  • Major rework of technology tree.
    • Full rebalance of the AI prioritization of techs to get it to better research weapons and better hulls.
    • Exotic World colonization replaces the myriad of specialty planet types techs.
    • Interstellar cabinet replaces the myriad of "Ministry of X" techs.
    • Space Weapons. Early game tech to give some additional weapons before specialization.
    • Point Defense tech tree removed (point defenses and other specific weapon counters will become part of a specialized defense branch later along with new evasion techs).
    • Beam weapon theory renamed Directed Energy Weapons.
    • Space Lasers (sigh) renamed Photonic Alignment.
    • Devastator Missile System renamed to Phoenix Missile System to match the weapon it gives.
    • Shrunk the size of the cruiser tech description.
    • Removed drones as a resource / element of the game until we can do something more interesting with them.
  • Self Determinism now grants 3 leaders.
  • Ministers unlocked mostly between Interstellar cabinet, political capital and colonial bureaucracy.
  • Various exotic world planet types (like radioactive worlds) are unlocked by a single tech: Exotic World Colonization.
  • Several new ship components for early game use.
  • Ideology naming updated to fit new culture system.
  • Festron no longer take a penalty for not being on an aquatic world because they don't actually like water. They're not water bugs. They're bug bugs and prefer jungle which they now get a huge morale boost of if they're on those worlds.
  • Invite leader cooldown reduced from 50 to 10, control cost increased from 10 to 20.
  • Trade route value multiplier increased from 15% to 33% to make trade routes more valuable.
  • The number of Trade licenses greatly reduced.
  • Tech Inflation multiplier reduced from 11% to 10%.
  • Number of rounds in a battle increased from 40 to 100 so that battles have a better chance to play out.
  • YOU CAN MOVE THE CAPITAL. Players can destroy their capital and then place it on any tile they want.
  • Colony capitals can now be destroyed and relocated as well.
  • Civ capital maintenance removed.
  • Durantium Processor level bonus increased from 1% to manufacturing to 3%.
  • A new upgraded research project added.
  • Garrison now increases Planetary Defense instead of Resistance.
  • More improvements moved to earlier in the tech tree.
  • Low quality planets now rarely have any food output to make food more valuable.
  • Coerced colonization approval penalty increased from 5% to 15%.
  • Hull Reinforcing changed form providing 25 HP to every ship to 20% (percent) buff to a ship.
  • Major Prestige Victory balance pass. Should feel a lot better.
  • Siege Ships are now Frigate class.
  • Carriers are now Dreadnought sized.
  • Siege ship template changed from medium to small.
  • Tactical speed of ships altered to be better balanced.
  • Cruiser hull Manufacturing cost increased from 40 to 100.
  • Battleship hull manufacturing cost increased from 100 to 300.
  • Dreadnought hull manufacturing cost increased from 250 to 1000.
  • Dreadnought hull usable space increased from 32 to 36.
  • Updated starbase modules to fit with the updated tech tree.
  • Various command ship requirements updated for new tech tree.
  • Banking Clan faction diplomacy penalty increased from 0.5% to 1%
  • Capitalist Society faction gross income buff changed from a flat 1 per intelligence of leader to a 1% buff to income per intelligence of leader while increased the approval penalty from 0.1% to 0.5% per social.
  • Emporium faction Bazaar discount changed from 0.005 flat to 0.5% per intelligence of leader added wile Crime is now increased by 0.01% per diligence of that leader.
  • Trade routes no longer create the trade ship mission. Kills perf. 
  • Minister of Finance provided a 1% buff per colony income per intelligence.
  • Minister of Defense now provides a Planetary Defense buff instead of resistance.
  • Cleaned up which ideology gets a buff from event choices.
  • Cleaned up ideology buffs based on event choices.
  • AI ships will no longer bother with marginal colonies unless it can take them in less than 2 turns.
  • Improvements to AI tax rate handling some issues with the way the AI was choosing techs to research.
  • Planets will rebel much faster than before.
  • Fix to the galactic market changed to simply see if they have the universal translator. No fancy stuff.
  • Economic Power no longer takes the treasury into account.
  • Much bigger approval penalty from high crime.
  • HP buff to ships based on # of colonies is now the square root of the # of colonies rather than linear.
  • Raw fleet weapon rating greatly reduced for determining the siege rating of a fleet.
  • Update to support cheesing of building capital improvements on all your planets.
  • Renamed Explorers ability to Voyagers.
  • Lots of new lines of text for the AI to speak to the player rather than "we want peace".
  • Trader renamed Independent Trade ship.
  • Prison World explains what it does now
  • General UI text update to fit better on screens (especially for people in Germania) and clearer descriptions of stats.
  • Forum link now goes directly the GalCiv IV sub-forum.
  • 3 new citizen types: Avian, Canine, Feline. 
  • Placed limit on AI Freighter construction 
  • Improved Map Generation 
  • Tiny maps are now slightly bigger. 
  • Fixed common, abundant black holes over spawning. 
  • Updated Orders menu to display the relevant stat each profession uses. 
  • Damage numbers no longer float off before they do damage on hit.
  • Adjusted the tactical speed of ships.
  • Terror stars always show up in the battle replay
  • Custom faction Traits tab to fit single column
  • Make sure that when you edit the name and short name fields, the faction data is updated
    correctly.
  • Strip additional invalid characters from the "name" and "short name" fields.
  • Custom factions no longer default to Totalitarianism.
  • Fixed a problem where the Steam authentication cache silently fails.
  • Abundant map setting resources balanced.
  • Massive change to the cultural trait system.
  • Consolidated cultural traits used to create factions.
  • AI manages its defenders better.
  • AI players won't start covering worlds until much later.
  • Fixed missing anomalies.
  • Fleets automatically form at rally points.
  • Made it so that sentinels only attack ships.
  • Make fleets can attack more than once per turn.
  • Updated AI to use a new ship class system.
  • When you pick a given ideology, ALL of them increase the cost by N, not just the one in that tree.
  • Yor home system always starts with a Durantium resource.
  • If the player has a strong military, some civs will give you some respect.
  • New Mercenary added.
  • Set up data for commander ships for Korath and Seeing.
  • Fixed broken triggers on anomalies.
  • Added missing Tech prereqs.
  • Added misused Tech prereqs on events.
  • Slight buff to the conquest ability.
  • Compassion Trait now gives the correct approval bonus.
  • Fairness trait only gives 1 colony ship now.
  • Synthetic life civs can no longer get the "Dwindling Numbers" event.
  • The "Culture Clash" event is now using the correct strings.
  • The Starport improvement restored.
  • Removed cultural awareness buffs from improvements.
  • Precursor Accelerator event:
    • Changed "Individualism" choice to improve planetary defense.
    • Removed "Totalitarianism" choice (was OP).
  • Fixed ideology effects from the "Legacy" and "Prototype" events.
  • Crimelords get a new executive order: Impress Constructors. Make the workers an offer they can't refuse.
  • New improvement: Heritage Center. Early game tourism improvement.
  • Terror Stars no longer show up in the cargo hulls when you play as the Terrans.
  • Fairness culture trait now correctly spawns a colony ship.
  • Trade routes create a mission ship.
  • The Festron are NOT aquatic.
  • Festron homeworld is no longer aquatic.
  • Bazaar is now unlocked by the "Universal Translator."
  • Fixed a problem where if you unlocked the bazaar and then started a new game, the bazaar was unlocked at the start. Bizarre!
  • Steam achievements are now enabled.
  • Make asteroids go to the nearest core world, not the nearest colony.
  • Added more Anomaly images.
  • Big changes to the culture tree:
    • Iron Fist control reward increased from 50 to 100
    • Fairness now spawns 3 colony ships.
    • Deep Investigation spawns a bunch of anomalies.
    • Kindness now spawns 3 constructors with it
    • Individualism(new) - Lowers decay, the player is awarded a flagship.
    • Added a bunch of new placeholder traits that aren't functioning yet.
    • Getting a trait increases only the discount for the next tech by 1%.
  • Shorten some of the quest events that were too long.
  • Changed references of "Empire" to "Civilization"
  • Cultural affinity choice now gives a 25% upfront discount.
  • Updated resistance bonus description.
  • Inconsistent improvement warnings have been removed (for now).
  • Military consistently renamed to Shipyard Production.
  • Tweaked culture window
  • Planetary Crime tooltip breakdown is less confusing.
  • Removed redundant stat breakdowns in the Planetary defense tooltip.
  • The planet tooltip for colonies shows who they send their resources to at the bottom of the
    tooltip.
  • The Y and N keys should no longer hide the shipyard window.
  • We are updating our combat U.I to display battle rating, conquest, and HP stats. Screens updated so far include:
    • Ship design "stats" box
    • Starbase and Shipyards
    • Battle start and results screen
  • Changed distances to be consistently measured in KM
  • Disable Tech brokering by default.
  • Improve the Rally Point UX flow. Now you click on the map to set the point, rather than going
    through a series of menus.
  • Mission Rewards are now in whole numbers, not fractions (e.g., you won't get 1.45 Elerium as a
    reward anymore).
  • Resource Popup should show how much you already have.
  • The splash screen is longer stretched on ultrawide screens.
  • The tech tooltips need to show what stats they change.
  • Update Planet Tool tip icons to be consistent with the yield tokens.
  • Made a pass on all techs and ensure they are color coded most sensibly and aesthetically.
  • Show Ship Range on the ship tooltip and ship details.
  • Upgrade Window - Text is no longer cut off for the lowest line of text.
  • Fleet names no longer include their faction's name and instead just uses their call sign (e.g., TAS if playing as Terrans).
  • Anomaly alerts now display the event name, description, and choice.
  • Updated Starbase Missile Salvo text.
  • Fix String issue with "Pirate" Frigate and Cruiser. The name was given to the Onyx and the Baratak.
  • Disabling the Tutorial really really disables the Tutorial robot.
  • The options screen only warns of restart needed due to graphics changes only if you've actually changed the graphics.
  • Move the controls so that they're docked to the top bar. 
  • Shrink the writing in the log such that you can fit 2 more rows. 
  • Increase the size so that it goes to the very bottom. 
  • Fix missing ideology traits in custom civs created in builds prior to v1.55. 
  • Prevent core world capital from being able to be built on the capital world. 
  • The Shipyard manufacturing value is now referencing the correct number  
  • Updated battle viewer combat stat displays to just battle rating and HP 
  • Update Galaxy Settings slider icons for Minors, and Entities. 
  • Updated the Bazaar popup card to support one more line. 
  • Make more room for long custom faction names on the turn button. 

Good luck!

Screenshots:

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

Published on Tuesday, May 30, 2023 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #20 - How people use AlienGPT

The Generative AI feature of Galactic Civilizations IV seems to be the breakout feature so far.

To recap: When a player wants to create a custom civilization, they can choose to enter in a short description and then press “Generate”.

There are two parts of this.

The first part uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT which generates the text and code for describing the civilization as well as quests in the game.

The second part uses AI to figure out what key words to look for and then see what already existing AI generated images exist for this. Since these images are trained solely off of Stardock’s own considerable library of art, it isn’t infinite. If the AI determines the match quality is poor, it will then queue it up for generation later while sending the best results it has back.

Stardock’s Tachyon backend for this only gets the text entered and works with that. So for example, let’s say the player enters in “A civilization made up of beautiful amazon women” (one of the most common entries apparently it just looks at the text and the final result would be something like this:

And then the images it matches with. It sends 9 at a time. 3 are the best it can find. 3 are a bit looser and 3 are totally random.

So what are the results we get?

Broadly speaking, the types of inputs we get can fall into these categories:

Category

 

Humanoid

['human', 'woman', 'female', 'humanoid', 'male', 'men', 'boy', 'girl', 'person']

Cat-like

['cat', 'cats', 'catgirl', 'kitten', 'lion', 'tiger', 'panther', 'leopard', 'cougar']

Dog-like

['dog', 'dogs', 'puppy', 'wolf', 'wolves', 'fox', 'foxes']

Robot-like

['robot', 'robots', 'ai', 'borg', 'machine', 'machines', 'android', 'cyborg']

Dragon-like

['dragon', 'dragons', 'reptile', 'reptiles', 'snake', 'snakes', 'lizard', 'lizards', 'dinosaur', 'dinosaurs']

Other Mammal-like

['bear', 'bears', 'mouse', 'mice', 'rat', 'rats', 'horse', 'horses', 'monkey', 'monkeys', 'ape', 'apes', 'goat', 'goats', 'deer']

Insect-like

['insect', 'insects', 'bug', 'bugs', 'ant', 'ants', 'bee', 'bees', 'spider', 'spiders', 'butterfly', 'butterflies', 'moth', 'moths']

Bird-like

['bird', 'birds', 'eagle', 'hawk', 'falcon', 'parrot', 'sparrow', 'pigeon', 'chicken', 'chickens', 'duck', 'ducks', 'goose', 'geese', 'swan', 'swans']

Aquatic-like

['fish', 'shark', 'sharks', 'whale', 'whales', 'dolphin', 'dolphins', 'octopus', 'squid', 'crab', 'crabs', 'lobster', 'lobsters', 'shrimp', 'mermaid', 'mermaids']

Plant-like

['tree', 'trees', 'plant', 'plants', 'flower', 'flowers', 'grass', 'vine', 'vines', 'leaf', 'leaves', 'mushroom', 'mushrooms']

Fantasy Creatures

['elf', 'elves', 'vampire', 'vampires', 'ghost', 'ghosts', 'zombie', 'zombies', 'werewolf', 'werewolves', 'demon', 'demons', 'witch', 'witches', 'fairy', 'fairies', 'unicorn', 'unicorns', 'goblin', 'goblins', 'troll', 'trolls']

Non-living Entities

['rock', 'rocks', 'stone', 'stones', 'metal', 'metals', 'iron', 'gold', 'silver', 'copper', 'bronze', 'steel', 'diamond', 'diamonds', 'gem', 'gems', 'jewel', 'jewels', 'crystal', 'crystals']

Custom Citizens

Now, what the AI doesn’t currently do is pick your citizens for you.

You would need a couple dozen images for citizens to work, otherwise, there’d be excessive repetition of the same face in game. So obviously it’s not currently possible to have dozens of citizens for each species as the generation time would go off the charts.

However, what we can do is start looking at the broader categories. While there are infinite possibilities when it comes to species, the number of general categories (human, robot, cat people, insect people, rocks, etc.) is quite finite and thus takes a massive issue and makes it much more manageable.

The top 10

You might be wondering, what are the top 10 most popular alien choices people put in? Wonder no longer, here they are:

  1. Humans

  2. Women

  3. Robots

  4. Female

  5. Cat

  6. Girls

  7. Elves

  8. Cats

  9. robot

  10. human

Now, if we get rid of the duplicate meanings it goes more like this:

That’s how the top 10 are distributed. People like women and cats. Which makes it unsurprising that the 11th entry was catgirls.

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

Galactic Troublemaking on Memorial Day

Published on Monday, May 29, 2023 By Brad Wardell In Galactic Civilizations IV

We're going to have a new Insider's Branch probably on Tuesday.  Thought I'd give you guys a sneak peek on some of the things in it that we did during the weekend (we're NOT addicted to the game, we swear!).

  • Visual display of ship hull sizes modified to make it easier to view them in battle

  • Renamed Explorers ability to Voyagers

  • Fixed the ability to acutlaly for realsies give a +2 moves, +2 sensors

  • HIvemind ability HP buff in territory decreased from 25 to 5

  • Several new anomaly events (tired of the "stealth fileld" yet?)

  • Grand festival length decreased from 25 turns to 12.

  • Major rework of technology tree

  • Full rebalance of the AI prioritization of techs to get it to better research weapons and better hulls.

  • New tech: Exotic World colonization replaces the myriad of specialty planet types techs

  • New tech: Interstellar cabinet replaces the myriad of "Ministry of X" techs

  • New tech: Space Weapons. Early game tech to give some additional weapons before specialization.

  • Point Defense tech tree removed (point defenses and other specific weapon counters will become part of a specialized defense branch later along with new evasion techs).

  • Beam weapon theory renamed Directed Energy Weapons

  • Space Lasers (sigh) renamed Photonic Alignment

  • Devastaor Missile System renamed to Phoenix Missile System to match the weapon it gives

  • Shrunk the size of the cruiser tech description

  • Removed drones as a resource / element of the game until we can do something more interesting with them.

  • Lots of new lines of text for the AI to speak to the player rather than "we want peace"

  • Self Determinism now grants 3 leaders.

  • Ministers unlocked mostly between Interstellar cabinet, political capital and colonial bureaucracy.

  • Various exotic world planet types (like radioactive worlds) are unlocked by a single tech: Exotic World Colonization.

  • Several new ship components for early game use.

  • General UI text update to fit better on screens (espeically for people in Germania) and clearer descriptions of stats.

  • Festron no longer take a penalty for not being on an aquatic world because they don't actually like watr. They're not water bugs. They're bug bugs and prefer jungle which they now get a huge morale boost of if they're on those worlds.

  • Invite leader cooldown reduced from 50 to 10, control cost increased from 10 to 20.

  • Trade route value multiplier increased from 15% to 33% to make trade routes more valuable

  • Number of Trade licenses greatly reduced

  • Tech Inflation multiplier reduced from 11% to 10%

  • Number of rounds in a battle increased from 40 to 100 so that battles have a better chance to play out.

  • YOU CAN MOVE THE CAPITAL. Players can destroy their capital and then place it on any tile they want.

  • Colony capitals can now be destroyed and relocated as well

  • Civ capital maintainence removed.

  • Durantium Processor level bonus increased from 1% to manufacturing to 3%

  • A new upgraded research project added

  • Garrison now increases PLanetary Defense instead of Resistance

  • More improvements moved to earlier in the tech tree

  • Low quality planets now rarely have any food output to make food more valuable.

  • Coerced colonization approval penalty increased from 5% to 15%.

  • Hull Reinforcing changed form providing 25 HP to every ship to 20% (percent) buff to a ship.

  • Major Prestige Victory balance pass. Should feel a lot better.

  • Explorer race trait fixed

  • Siege Ships are now Frigate class

  • Carriers are now Dreadnought sized

  • Tactical speed of ships altered to be better balanced

  • Cruiser hull Manufacturing cost increased from 40 to 100

  • Battleship hull manufacturing cost increased from 100 to 300

  • Dreadnought hull amnufacturing cost increased from 250 to 1000

  • Dreadnought hull usable space increased from 32 to 36

  • Banking Clan faction diplomacy penalty increased from 0.5% to 1%

  • Capitalist Society faction gross income buff changed from a flat 1 per intellgence of leader to a 1% buff to income per intelligence of leader wwhile increased the approval penalty from 0.1% to 0.5% per social.

  • Empporium faction Bazaar discount changed from 0.005 flat to 0.5% per intelligence of leader added wile Crime is now increased by 0.01% per diligence of that leader.

  • Minister of Finance provided a 1% buff per colony income per intelligence.

  • Minister of Defense now provides a Planetary Defense buff instead of resistance.

  • AI ships will no longer bother with marginal colonies unless it can take them in less than 2 turns.

  • Improvements to AI tax rate handling

  • Fixed some issues with the way the AI was choosing techs to research

  • Planets will rebel much faster than before from foreign influence.

  • Fix to canusegalactic market changed to simply see if they have the universal translator. No fancy stuff.

  • Economic Power no longer takes the treasury into account.

  • Much bigger approval penalty from high crime.

  • HP buff to ships based on # of colonies is now the square root of the # of colonies rather than linear.

  • Raw fleet weapon rating greatly reduced for determining the siege rating of a fleet.

We hope to have this out for insiders Tuesday, May 30, in the afternoon.

 

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

Published on Wednesday, May 24, 2023 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #19 - Culture is your Civilization's Character

The feedback we got from Beta 1 of GalCiv IV: Supernova was that the Cultural Progression tree was too big and too “soft”. Soft meaning the choices didn’t have meaningful consequences. We read all the feedback and used it to rethink the concept of culture in a 4X game. Here’s what we’ve come up with.

Culture vs. Influence

Influence affects how far your borders go from your planet. Culture is the input that comes in that is transformed into influence.

So in this example, Mars has a cultural significance of 1 which goes to its core world Earth.

Then influence takes that Cultural Input and turns it into influence growth per month which then goes to the planet’s bank of influence which becomes the radius (in tiles) that influence flows from the planet.

Now, what we want to have happen is that this culture coming int goes towards how many culture points in you generate per turn. In the current build, you just get 1 per turn. So it’s still way too convoluted and messy for our liking.

So to recap:

  • Culture is the raw resource.

  • Influence is one of the byproducts of culture.

  • We want “Culture points” to also be derived by how much culture you have coming in.

Feel free to leave comments on how you think this should be improved. We have our ideas but I’d like to hear yours.

Cultural Progression

So then your culture should also feed into your cultural progression where the cost of a given cultural trait will increase the further in you go (as well as overall).

If this were an RPG, I’d say your Cultural Progression would be like your character and the traits unlocking new powers. That’s essentially the goal we have anyway.

So the idea then would be to have a Cultural Level for your civilization which would use this formula:

Where N and B are “magic numbers” and X is the next level and Y is the total number of points you need to go up a level. If you’re a game designer, save that formula, it’s what we all use for leveling up costs.

In our case, it would be the base cost of another unlock with each category having discounts based on how much awareness you have generated in that category based on your decisions in the game.

The long-term plan is for players to have a “Level” for each category that we can key new events off of.

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals

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