Brad Wardell's Blog


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

[confluence]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1503035393/GalCiv+IV+Dev+Journal+-+A+new+Culture+Progression[/confluence]

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[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUP/pages/1471414278/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+Links[/confluence]

GalCiv IV: Supernova - Experiments we're trying

Published on Monday, May 8, 2023 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

Greetings!

In recent years, "Early Access" has meant "Game is basically done but with bugs". And while it's true that the engine for this game is pretty "done" we are trying to take advantage of early access to try out a lot of crazy new things to get your ideas and feedback on.

GalCiv IV: Supernova is being developed by the GalCiv II team and so some of the changes the team wants to make are things that come from the things we really liked in GalCiv II but in a GalCiv IV game.

Some of the things we want to try may not work out. But we want to see what you guys think.

Coming up:
* Making range matter again. We're going to reduce range back to how we used to do it. This will mean the AI doesn't get into your business as much but it also means that expansion requires building starbases and researching new tech.

* Influence is going to mean a lot more. No colonizing in someone else's area of influence. And planets will fall to foreign influence much faster than currently. It'll be a viable soft conquest mechanism.

* Emergent colonies. Worlds that are in your area of influence that aren't colonized will start to colonize on their own on your behalf. How often this happens will depend on your species.

* More galactic outlook. We want to give players a lot more mechanisms to automate their civilizations as well as mechanics to deal with their galactic civilization at the large scale. Some of our attempts at this will likely fail.

Stay tuned.

Frogboy Weekend: May 2023

Published on Friday, May 5, 2023 By Brad Wardell In Galactic Civilizations IV

Hey guys, so every weekend I'll be taking the team's work and then integrating ideas and feedback from you guys so that we can can get a new beta build going in the following week.

I'll be reporting my progress here but feel free to add your own notes.

I'll also be on Discord here: https://discord.gg/galciv so feel free to join the GC4 Commons area.

 

GalCiv IV: Supernova - First 10 Turns, May 2023

Published on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

[confluence]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1487372346/GC4+The+first+10+turns[/confluence]

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[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUP/pages/1489338369/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+First+10+Turns+Series[/confluence]

GalCiv IV: POST YOUR SAVES!

Published on Tuesday, May 2, 2023 By Brad Wardell In Galactic Civilizations IV

The fastest way to improve balance and make changes is when we can directly play with your saved games.  That's because you guys do things we'd never think to do.

Please post your late game saves in this thread.  Tell us what is happening along with what you think should be happening.

Thanks!

Okay you monsters! Listen up!

Published on Friday, April 28, 2023 By Brad Wardell In Galactic Civilizations IV

So in case you didn't know, the images you choose from aren't part of AlienGPT.  Those get queued up and made later because otherwise it would take 10 minutes to pick your pictures.

So I want to preface this that you're all monsters.  All of you. Especially YOU! Yea you know who you are!

Here are the top new images currently in the queue.  BTW, if you wonder why there's already so many poop images in the cache, that's...well that's me. Stop judging me you monsters!  

Here we go:

 

  1. zombies
  2. cat
  3. elves
  4. plant
  5. sith
  6. jedi
  7. tomato
  8. rocks
  9. insectoids
  10. foxes

Ok, that wasn't quite as filthy as I thought.

Carry on.

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