I’ll be blunt: if I were to rank prominent space 4X games of the past decade, Galactic Civilizations IV would come in near the bottom of the list, even behind Galactic Civilizations III. It’s not a disaster – like the previous three Galactic Civilizations games, this is a decent, functional 4X space game – but its predecessors were good for at least a round or two before they wore thin due to the lack of an “X factor” to really keep me hooked. None of them stacked up to Endless Space 2, Stellaris, or even 1996’s Master of Orion 2, which each deliver more substantial variety, flair, polish and creative identity than any GalCiv game managed for me.
I had hoped that GalCiv’s fourth iteration would finally find and deliver the spark that the series has been searching for. Instead, it’s had the opposite effect on me: After completing several playthroughs, its glaring design problems and balance issues are painfully clear, to an extent that I worry that Stardock won’t be able to pull it out of this tailspin and salvage its handful of smart ideas anytime soon. If the stars align I can see playing Galactic Civilizations IV and not having an unpleasant time, but it’s done so disappointingly little to keep up with the heights the rest of the genre has reached since 2015 that I’m usually wishing I was playing one of those instead.
Upon hitting the new game button, you’ll be greeted with a generous selection of nicely animated space empires both familiar and original to the franchise. There’s a decent array of colorful and bizarre alien species amidst the human and humanoid, with the terrifying Festron bugs or literal giant mantis shrimp standing out the most at first glance. Each race comes with a selected set of traits that (supposedly) dictate the style of play they lend themselves to, but you can customize a number of these bonuses to your liking. It’s also possible to make your own empire entirely from scratch.
You’ll continue the customization spree right into your game details, where you’ll set up the size and qualities of the galaxy. There’s a respectable selection of options in all these areas, and Stardock is kind enough to give you a system specs suggestion when you start scaling up the settings to insane degrees (my measly 16GB of RAM and four CPU cores were half of what a “Galactic” size map suggests).
Beyond the alien/empire selection, the most important cornerstone to this setup process are Sectors. By default, I was just playing with a couple of average-sized regions, but you can scale it up to your CPU-melting desires. By breaking the map up, Stardock’s stated intention is to dial down the amount of dead space and empty tiles we see between systems in previous GalCivs. It’s also meant to keep empires relatively contained to a smaller playing field in the early game, until a few technologies have been researched. Unfortunately, with the way things are currently balanced it completely fails at both of these goals, and it doesn’t take too many turns into a fresh campaign to see why.
Arrayed before you is a grid of your starting sector, which contains your homeworld, shipyard, and a couple of starter starships. It can be hard to tell just what you have at a glance, as planetary icons and names tend to blot out the ships beneath them. Zooming out a little will shift objects to icons, but zooming out a little further than that will hide smaller ones. I was constantly having to shift my perspective just to glean basic information and get all my commands through. Just about every time I wanted to deploy survey ships I’d have to zoom in to click the ship underneath a planet banner, then zoom out to get a feel for the map layout, only to zoom back in a little for the anomaly icons to actually show.
Even once you’re familiar with what the icons and tiles all represent and how to find them, it still proves to be an unclear and ugly mess to try and sift through. There are a lot of systems at play and information to keep track of in any 4X game of this scale, sure, but in Galactic Civilizations IV I frankly struggled to uncover the essential information I needed to manage them. Plenty of times I was having to mouse over a dozen or so tooltips to figure out the specifics of how some resources and statistics interacted. I’m still not convinced everything is there either, such as the exact impacts of citizen skills, and even after playing multiple games I still felt like I was winging it.
To be fair, the rest of the initial experience was much smoother. Galactic Civilizations IV is a turn-based strategy game, so you have all the time you need to consider your moves and come to grips with things. This includes deploying the many fleets of starships you’ll be building. Combat is simply a matter of moving fleets onto the same tile as another fleet and then seeing the results. While you are given the option to see a cinematic view of the battle play out – which looks cool, but is prone to all sorts of camera issues and display bugs – there’s no influencing the outcome. All you can do is build your fleets and move them across the map, hoping that your fleet is bigger and more powerful when conflict happens. That’s fine, as this is a strategy game rather than a tactical one, but considering the impressive ship editor it feels like a missed opportunity.
The colored blob that represents your empire’s sphere of influence will form through a combination of building starbases and colonizing planets. Starbases can be built anywhere, though they gather minerals and trigger the effects of precursor relics in their field of influence, making tactical placement important. Planets, on the other hand, can have colonies built on them. But most colonies aren’t going to be all that impressive, as many planets lack the resources and space to be worth developing in full.
In previous Galactic Civilizations games, you’d have to manage each of those worlds individually regardless of their quality, and that got tedious as your empire grew. So one of GalCiv IV’s new features that I’m fond of is the Core World system, which aims to mitigate all that micromanagement. Rather than force you to hand-craft each of them, unimportant colonies will instead transfer their resources and stats to the closest Core world (with increasing decay over distance). If a colony world becomes lucrative or of strategic importance, you can opt to install a governor and promote it to a Core world. This streamlines the process for when your empire gets massive and spreads across multiple sectors.
Still, this means the early game narrows into a galactic land grab – which is true of most 4X games to some extent, but especially so here. If there are loose resources, floating relics, or even the most inhospitable rock with a mineral count on it, you’d best be setting up shop on it. Because if you don’t, then one of your AI opponents absolutely will.
My first game (playing as the Terran Resistance) was going decently enough, but I quickly realized just how outclassed I was getting in terms of production and territory relative to the neighboring Yor or Drengin empires. It turned out that I was being too selective with my colony ships, mostly focusing on claiming worlds and regions that I’d want to later convert to core worlds and fully build up. Merely a few turns later, I’d find all the other planets in that solar system sporting new colonies from the Drengin, who cared naught for anything except that they had claimed the territory.