v2.5 and the Warlords Expansion is now available, and we're excited to share the ins and outs. Check out my guided tour below:
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I've been saying this a lot to design teams lately:
There is no subsitute for playing the game and then playing the game some more and then playing it still more. And Warlords really shows that.
Now, those of you who get it right away are in for a particular treat that you should take advantage of as much as you can while you can: There are a lot of absolutely crazy ship components in this that we have balanced as best we can but I can tell you right now, I there are going to be some crazy combos that will come from "the meta" so enjoy the crazy while you can.
We are going to be watching very closely how people use the new ship components and use that to train the AI to use them as well.
For instance, boarding parties are extremely strong. Too strong? I'm not sure yet. Cloaking is very powerful too. So is weapon reflection. And ion beams.
I've done some combos that I am not going to discuss here that I've already had to adjust. But it's a fine line between "balancing it" and what is fun.
Case in point: I really, really enjoyed making some barely armed ships that were stuffed with defensive gadgery that were flanked by lots of cloaked ships that took out much larger fleets. Is that fair? Is that balanced? I am not sure. But I do know I enjoyed it a lot.
The other thing I have come away from playing Warlords: We're going to have to do a bunch of free updates to it because there's a ton of interesting new things we can add to it. Cloaking detectors. Mirage components. Teleporting. Etc. I don't want to create additional war themed DLC or whatever and so it makes sense (to me anyway) to put this into a future update to Warlords.
This is true with the invasion tactics too. After playing with the invasion tactics I already know there are a bunch of invasion tactics I'd like to see added. For example, I want some invasion tactics that let you have a chance at absolutely failing in your invasion in exchange for much more rapid conquest.
Anyway, I hope you guys like what we've done. We've never overhauled the combat in a GalCiv game this much...ever. Not even the OS/2 versions from the 90s had this big of a change. I know I like the changes but obviously, we're nervous and hoping you like it too.
Cheers!
-brad
Without getting too much into spoilers, here are some of the new technologies players with the upcoming Warlords expansion pack will be able to research (hint they all give you something cool)
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2023 was a great year for 4X gamers and especially fans of Galactic Civilizations!
But 2024 is going to be even better.
I've been "back" on GalCiv for just over 6 months now and it's been a blast. I loved working on GalCiv II back in the day but the hardware now is so much better. I can do so much evil with the AI and the tech in this engine is just crazy.
Another amazing thing that's changed is that game releases aren't "the end" anymore. That was always so frustrating. Just as we were getting into the zone we'd have to "ship".
Even tonight, on New Year's Eve, I had my laptop with Remote Desktop able to do just a few little..you know, changes. You'll get to see them soon.
This upcoming year is going to see more advances to GalCiv and arguably in the genre than we've seen in years if ever and it's all thanks to you guys!
Happy new year! I cannot wait to start getting some of this stuff out to you.
Hat tip to @Cephandrius for sending us his saved game. There was a case where you could get a stuck AI turn because it assumed it would always be able to build a designed ship. But in 2.2, we introduced the concept of the AI building the BEST ship even if it couldn't be built right then. So in rare cases, the AI wouldn't have any ships it could build. This update fixes it.
And since we were fixing that bug, we decided to include something many of you have asked for: Better map generation. This update has a new map generation algorithm for placing other players. Rather than weighting the dice on nudging players further from the player based on settings, this one does some enforcement to ensure that other players don't end up on top of you if you've set further distances. This change is for AI in your own sector.
Cheers!
Greetings!
I wanted to give an update to our Galactic Civilizations IV (base game) customers on Epic. We are just about complete with the v2.2 update for the base (non-Supernova) game but ran out of time to put it through QA before the holiday break.
We anticipate putting out v2.2 for the base game on Epic in early January. It's a huuuuuge update. It's everything we did in Supernova (other than new content) plus everything up to 2.2. So it's a pretty massive update.
Just wanted to post that we haven't forgotten our fans that supported us by buying the base game. We love you!
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We are currently working on the base game of the Epic edition. This will come out at GalCiv IV 2.2 next month.
To make it easy for future updates to it, we are going to be bringing the code-base up to the Supernova edition. So in essence, GalCiv IV 2.2 base game on Epic will be the same as Supernova except for the new content (and things like AlienGPT).