“This is just GalCiv II but with better graphics,” was a comment some GalCiv fans made when GalCiv III was first released. That was no more true than saying Civilization V was just Civilization IV with better graphics, but we understood where they were coming from. There weren’t a lot of big bullet item changes from the previous version. That was because most of our time and budget was spent building a brand new space 4X game engine.
As good as GalCiv II was, it was built on the same engine as GalCiv I, which in turn was built on the same engine that The Corporate Machine was built on, which was from the same engine that Entrepreneur for OS/2 was built on.
GalCiv IV is so ground-breaking with what came before it, because this time we're starting with a state-of-the-art engine and moving on from there. Some of these features are obvious in hindsight like…Commanders.
Specific numerical populations of colonies is gone in GalCiv IV. Even in the OS/2 version, we had a hard time explaining how Earth - with its 9 billion people - somehow wasn’t massively better than colonies with a population of 1 million. We did some hand-waving to explain how colonies would eventually reach Earth-levels in just a handful of years. Now, we focus instead on Citizens who represent the population of your civilization.
Every citizen has 4 stats:
Different species tend to have different biases in these areas. For instance, Drengin tend to have terrible social skills but very high resolve.
Citizens have different jobs in your civilization such as Worker, Colonist, Scientist, Diplomat, Administrator, Engineer, Leader, etc.
Leaders are that rare citizen capable of helping you run your civilization. A leader can be recruited (or later promoted from the rank and file) and then assigned to a job like diplomat, governor, minister, and now, commander. The stats, intelligence, social skills, etc. determine how well a given leader will do a particular job. So, it's probably not a good idea to make a leader with poor social skills into a diplomat.
Each civilization has a handful of unique ships. These ships are unlocked through research or various other accomplishments and are only available to that civilization. A leader can be assigned to one of these ships and voila, you have a “free” ship (if you don’t count the cost/effort of getting the leader).
Each civilization’s flagships reflect the type of civilization they naturally are. The Drengin, for instance, tend to have ships that favor conquest, militarism and forced productivity. By contrast, the humans have ships that tend to focus on diplomacy, commerce, culture…with one surprising absolutely lethal ship later on…(what? The humans being secret masters of war? Unpossible!)
The abilities of the ship benefit from the skills of the leader:
Life isn’t fair - and Galactic Civilizations IV really goes out of its way to make sure that the civilizations aren’t symmetrical. There are simply some big differences in capability between the different species in different areas. The commanders provide us another tool in this area. For example, we can give a civilization that reproduces slowly some unique ships that lets them colonize worlds that no one else can. We don’t have the same number of special ships per civilization. It’s a game design tool we are able to use to really give more personality and strategic depth to either civilization.
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Galactic Civilizations IV Dev Journals
#1 - Welcome to GalCiv IV
#2 - Humanizing AI
#3 - Addressing Micromanagement
#4 - A Guided ALPHA Tour
#5 - The Ideology Compass
#6 - Those First 20 Turns
#7 - The Changing Face of Space Robots
#8 - Rise of the Commanders
#9 - Onboarding
#10 - Do we need a battle viewer?
#11 - Combat AAR
#12 - AAR Drengin Human Wars I Part 1
#13 - The Vault
#14 – Pacing Comparisons
#15 - Internal Factions
#16 - The Battle Viewer
#17 - Screenshot Time
#18 - The Dawn of the 24th Century
#19 - The Roadmap
#20 - Deals of the Xeloxi + v1.04 Preview
#21 - The Arcean War + 1.05 Preview
#22 - Save Me
#23 - Every Turn Counts
I love the commanders! So much possibility here! I also love that the game is asymmetrical and not everyone is equal. Looking forward to seeing more!
I've been playing around with the commanders in alpha and really digging them! Great concept, use of characters and a nice way to get some decent ships early without tying up your starport queue.
Commanders were one of my favorite parts of III this sounds like a great way to expand expand on them.
It's a nice idea, but in practice it's not that big a deal because there aren't that many and only the survey ones ever get better. 3 of them aren't very good to begin with, so they become obsolete very quickly.
I agree completely. I wish we could assign Commanders to a ship we design. Honestly I like my designs better than the games's. To limit abuse, they could make it so you could only assign them to medium or larger ships, or even large and huge only. And of course the special ships Stardock has.
Will we have the ability to create/add commanders to the game? I am thinking of adding names... stats... and so forth.
The devs have said they want the game to be highly moddable, and I'd think that adding commanders would be a very good thing to be able to do. So I agree it'd be very desirable.
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