
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.

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.

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.
GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS 3 CONSOLE COMMANDS SPAWN SHIP HOW TO
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.Įven 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. I was constantly having to shift my perspective just to glean basic information and get all my commands through. Zooming out a little will shift objects to icons, but zooming out a little further than that will hide smaller ones. 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. 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.Īrrayed before you is a grid of your starting sector, which contains your homeworld, shipyard, and a couple of starter starships. 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. 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. By default, I was just playing with a couple of average-sized regions, but you can scale it up to your CPU-melting desires. 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).īeyond the alien/empire selection, the most important cornerstone to this setup process are Sectors. You’ll continue the customization spree right into your game details, where you’ll set up the size and qualities of the galaxy.

It’s also possible to make your own empire entirely from scratch. 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. 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. 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.
