Before You Buy Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova is the latest iteration of a three-decade-long series of 4X strategy games. More than a year after its initial launch as an Epic exclusive, covered here and on this podcast, it has finally been released onto Steam as a standalone expansion (and as a DLC to the base game over on Epic Games Store), with some revised gameplay and a novel approach to creating custom civilizations, namely the integration of ChatGPT.

#1: A Traditional 4X

Supernova is a turn-based strategy game of galactic conquest, with multiple options to achieve victory allowing for a myriad of playstyles. Featuring layered game mechanics, ship and faction customization, funky aliens and a fairly well balanced game loop, the game starts with exploration and follows the formula qualifying it, for a lack of a better term, as a traditional 4X. The game opens in simple fashion: the player starts with one planet, a colony ship, some probes for exploration, and a flagship that must be manned by a leader. 

Players might find the sheer number of decisions to be made during their first game daunting, and even though Supernova’s team has attempted to streamline some aspects of the game, as well as created a progressive UI, where menus are unlocked through technological advancement as the game progresses so as to not overwhelm first-time players, the sheer amount of detail that ties the different game systems together still presents a steep learning curve.

But where the last game had one galactic map, and the placement of a space station or colonization of one planet over another could have effects even in the late game, by optionally separating the map into smaller Sectors, the pressure on and severity of the early game has been somewhat alleviated. I will touch more on Sectors later.

The early game is focused on exploration and peaceful expansion. The flagship is the first important starship that takes the role of a galactic Swiss-army knife during the early game, from studying anomalies, fighting off pirates and defending your colony ships, to fighting at the forefront of your first wars. Its value, coupled with the fact that it is unique and cannot be rebuilt, helps form a bond with it and introduces a role-playing element much more naturally than in similar space 4X, so choosing an appropriate name is a must, for immersion’s sake.

Developing the economy and building space stations in strategic positions, narrowly grabbing a resource or shooting down an enemy colony ship over that incredible planet in the middle of the sector is fun, and all of these have implications further on into your campaign.

On the other hand, players that do not like colony spamming might find the early game quite irksome, as even when the option for habitable planets is set to the lowest setting, the first hour still ends up being a run for territory that always ends in bad feelings with the neighbors, and this can become repetitive from one game to the next.

Once the “colonization era” has ended, the board is set. That’s when a different kind of game is played. Optimizing planet improvements, expanding one’s influence and fighting avoidable wars is in many ways a staple of the genre, and Supernova doesn’t add anything new here.

But it is important to mention that with the way that the game is designed, the complexity opens up like a flower, one menu after the other, one resource after another, until all of the tools are on the table for the player to use.

#2: The New, the Old, and the Familiar

Combat… combat never changes. Or does it? The system that was emblematic for the series until now, the rock-paper-scissors, has been changed. Gone are the days of designing unreasonably specialized gunships and rocket platforms for the purpose of outsmarting the AI’s frankly unsuccessful attempts at creating well balanced fleets.

There is a nuance to this combat system that allows most ships a fighting chance of beating opponents kitted out to directly counter their loadout, but these changes come at the cost of a loss of player agency: wars are easily won by simply outgunning the enemy and ship design feels redundant compared to previous Galactic Civilizations games, although perhaps more in line with other space 4X titles on the market.

Fans of other 4X strategy games might feel disappointed by the absence of planetary invasions, and ground combat in general. Never a strong side of the series, it seems this time the idea was abandoned and replaced with a simple siege mechanic, serviceable, but hardly fun.

The Galactic Civilizations series has always stood out from other space 4X in one key aspect: playing peacefully is entirely plausible, where a strong economic development and keeping an active diplomatic presence at the galactic table ensured a chance of victory. That is no less true in Supernova, even going a step further in allowing citizens to take an even more active role as ambassadors. Yet, at times it feels like the AI is too passive, even peaceful to a fault, allowing the game to progress without incident.

Where the Evil-Pragmatic-Good dynamic took the role of defining natural friends and enemies in past games, here they have been completely replaced with the Ideology system.

The new system, as mentioned in Rob’s review from last year, adds a great role-playing element to building your civilization, and that is the least that can be said of the many possibilities that allow the player to develop a unique vision of what a true galactic civilization’s values could be.

But at times, the system can feel one-dimensional: every choice made, arguably while removing other possible choices until more Ideology points have been accumulated, is simply a beneficial effect with no drawbacks. Having choices that have both positive and negative effects would have both made the system deeper and more immersive.

Arguably, many features in Supernova have been built with the idea of streamlining the game to avoid micromanagement. Returning players will notice a new concept for planet management as the most obvious feature. Most small planets were more bothersome than they were worth in past games, forcing the player to spend time managing them for a meager return. Their new system simplifies and reduces the busywork one has to do to simply build up the economy, and that is for the better. The smaller planets are also easy to conquer, flip, exchange, and in general function as peripheral worlds would and change hands often. 

On the other hand, the way it is decided which Core world benefits from  a subordinate planet is outside of the player’s hands. Frustrating and simplistic, it does not help the game express the idea that you are indeed the head of a star empire, and that is detrimental to immersion. 

A system where the governor of a Core world could control a certain number of other planets based on his political skill would have been much more interesting. Giving governors more agency would be great for the already great new system, namely the Citizens.

Citizens, introduced in the past games, have really come into their own in this one. Not just characters on the game’s periphery, they are now its central feature. When looking over a planet’s stats, often we can read Population, yet it works very differently from before. In a way, there is no more Population at all, only citizens, abstractly reflecting a virtual population theoretically needed for them to rise up from. 

In past iterations of Galactic Civilizations, the Population tied directly into the Raw production, yet here Raw production is derived from the planet’s quality, its subordinate worlds, mines, and planetary improvements. Population, or rather Citizens, add modifiers based on their personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as species and ideological synergies with the planet type and other Citizens they share the planet with. Even more importantly, they are required for manning  Flagships, Space Stations and Colonization, making them much more important in the role of governors, ship captains, and station managers.

Another new feature is Sectors, breaking up the map into smaller regions connected by wormholes, functioning in-game similarly to Constellations in Endless Space 2. Supernova’s version is more of a hybrid system than a straight forward change, allowing the game to be played on both a single large map, as large as in the previous games, or to string many such maps together into a whole, immersive looking galaxy. It will fall to personal preference, but for my part I appreciate both, and find that they play like two different games, both fun in their own way. 

The main benefit of the new system is performance, and it is very impressive. Players of other 4X games would not find it surprising to have dozens of alien civilizations in the galaxy, but the best that past iterations of Galactic Civilizations could do was a dozen and then some, when running on an average PC. Now larger maps are able to hold six times that, and even more on faster machines. Such large maps require a lot of alien factions, and that’s where the aptly named ALIENGPT comes in.

#3: The Alien in the Room

The series has always been concentrated on humans and our possible future among the stars. The first game in the series only had humans as a playable faction, and the game’s events and cinematics reflected that. So it is not surprising that most players chose humans more than other factions even when other options were available. Still, there was a roster of aliens to choose from, expanded with every game, not to mention the custom factions produced by the community, both original and based on established science fiction franchises. 

In Supernova, the number of original factions that come with the game has once again been expanded, now to twenty-six, incorporating some rather interesting aliens with unique play styles and populating the galaxy with as many as thirty-one(at the moment of writing) unique alien species that can live in your empire.

That said, Stardock has gone one step further, and decided to incorporate ChatGPT into its game, allowing anyone who owns the game to create custom civilizations almost at a click of a button. 

Rather than wait and hope that the community will once again band to create custom content to expand the game as they have done in the past, they have made it easy to do so from right inside their game, a feature they already introduced in the last game in the form of a civilization creator. But now what could potentially take hours in the past, can be automated and done in seconds.

Before getting overly excited, there are some caveats which I will mention after going over the process. When opening the custom faction’s screen, there are a few things to note. When creating the civilization, the chat-bot will take into consideration your chosen Biology, Cultural Affinity, Behaviors, as well as the Abilities chosen. Finally, a textual prompt can be provided to further customize the faction. 

If no description is typed in, it will still create a civilization that has the traits and behaviors associated with the choices above, as they translate in-game, both in gameplay style as well as during diplomatic interactions. It is much more revolutionary than it seems at first glance, to design a civilization that will behave according to the spirit it was conceived in, and still have a reasonable chance to win the game. 

A sore point for me is that the actual alien species, named Citizens, are still just limited to the ones provided with the base game. That means that even though you might choose to play with a civilization of giant mind-blasting space slugs, the closest you can have as your population is a lowly Tywoom, as they appeared in Star Control. On top of that, ship designs still need to be crafted by hand, so not much novelty there.

A fun feature is that every civilization gets an AI-generated image for its leader used during diplomatic interactions: well done and varied, yet rarely reflecting the descriptions provided outside of the ballpark: Is it a robot, a girl or space hot-dog? Is it evil, cute, or both? Even though somewhat limited, the variations follow the general aesthetic of the game, and will probably only improve as the game grows.

Finally, every faction must be created beforehand, and then added to a new game, so the dream of a perfectly unique galaxy with a hundred aliens generated just once for that one game, to be discovered and then lost in time, is still far from possible.

#4: Sound and Vision

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova is a finely crafted game that is somewhat rough around the edges. The art style works to immerse the player in a far future setting that is far beyond the present, and can be described as much more utopian than the dark and gritty setting of other games, sometimes even too much so. 

The faction leaders are fully animated and beautifully designed, though still mute. They are a pleasure to see and interact with nonetheless. It is a shame then that the UI is sometimes cluttered, especially when zooming out on the strategic map. The rest of the game follows in a similar vein, with some elements being very well done, and others not so much. 

The music in the game is also good, with every faction having a theme that helps set the tone. A strong influence can be felt from Star Control, with some more upbeat tunes breaking through the otherwise serious tone inherited from the older iterations of Galactic Civilizations. Not too much can be said about the rest of the sound design as it is very minimalist. 

On the other hand, the battles’ soundscape still needs some work, as it is cluttered with ear-wrecking sounds of particle beams and out-of-place metal crashes. Even so, the battles are worth watching. Though they cannot be controlled directly, they are much improved over the past versions, with the ships respecting distances when firing and moving much more realistically around the battlefield. On top of that, they are rendered with the local planets and other features around them, rather than just in empty space, again helping with immersion.

There are some odd inconsistencies, like health-bars that show erroneous information, animations that are out of place, weapons that don’t face where they are firing and other small details. For the spectacle of battle, both Stellaris and Endless Space 2 are still much better and more exciting to watch. The saving grace is the ship creator, as it allows the player to use his own designs inside the game, adding that small but important touch of creativity and uniqueness, both on the battle and strategic maps.

Conclusion

Is Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova worth it? Still in Steam Early Access until August, there are some features that are yet to be implemented as well as minor bugs, glitches, and balance issues. I personally believe that Galactic Civilizations III is a much more complete and better balanced game, in a way the best version of what the Galactic Civilizations franchise was. But this one is a bold new step in a new direction. The shift to Sectors has given a noticeable improvement to performance, and the other changes, such as the Citizens and Ideologies offer a fresh way to play a familiar game. Finally, it is not clear exactly how much of an impact AI technology will have on gaming, but seeing its first steps is exciting.