Caltrops - Galactic Civilizations - GC4 Supernova impressions, part one

Forum Overview :: Galactic Civilizations

by laudablepuss 05/23/2023, 10:30am PDT

First, be aware that this is basically an early access game right now. The wiki says that there's a lot that has yet to be implemented. So maybe it would be better to just wait another year, honestly.

But I'm not that smart, so here's what I've found so far.

Interface
It's teeny tiny and clearly designed to look like Stellaris. The dropdown menus at the beginning don't disappear when you click away, and actually draw over each other. The interface to fire a governor (see below) is so terrible, I had no idea it was even there until I googled it. It literally draws on top of the neighboring citizen card and I never saw it when I was clicking around. No fleet manager! Why? If you want to take a ship out of a fleet it's in, you select the ship, then move it and it leaves. This is a serious step backward from GC3. But don't look high and low for a ship eject button, it doesn't exist currently.

Ship design
As I mentioned, this is sharply constrained by the new "ship type" concept. Each type consists of a hull -- tiny, small, medium, large, huge, or cargo -- and the ship parts you're allowed to put on it. You can't pick a hull type and add stuff like before. BUT it appears that you can create custom ship types by editing the xml files in the GC4 install folder. I haven't actually gotten it to work yet, but I'm hopeful that I'll figure it out or someone like Gauntlet (a GC modder) will post something about it on the forums.

The ship parts are largely just copy pasta from GC3, with some modifications and a few additions. The sphere ship part is straight up the front end of 2001's Discovery, with three pod bay doors and everything. I haven't done a lot with this yet, but overall it's pretty similar to GC3's interface.

Space combat
Your little guys shoot each other on the map, and then you get a link to the battleviewer if you want to review it. One option there is just to read the battle log, which is great. I haven't pored over this much yet, so I don't know if the goofy math that GC4's combat system had is still a problem. I'll update these question mark areas in part 2.
Also it looks like you can shootitize spaces ahead of you with all weapon types, not just missiles like in GC4.
The evasion advantage of small fighters is *significant*. I recall someone saying that all you had to do in GC4 was make fighters and ignore all the other ship types to win. I wonder if that's still the case here. But I had a hell of a time murdering a fighter with my medium-sized survey ship.

Colonies
Planets have a class designation as before, but it's wildly different from GC3. Lots of class 1-3 planets all over, and then you find a class 36! If you played GC3 you might think "HOLY SHIT" but actually there are a ton of these 20+ class planets. So here's the deal: when you colonize any of these, the planet turns into a "colony". It's unmanaged (by you) and basically sends its resources to the nearest "core world", which at first will be your starting planet. If you put a governor on it, it turns into a core world and you can manage it directly, and nearby colonies will support it.

So far so good. What I've read is that it may not make a lot of sense to make anything under class 20 a core world, that several colonies pointed at a core world is helpful, BUT that lots of colonies puts a strain on the core world governor who is likely a hilarious dipshit (see below).

Leaders (citizens)
These guys have ability scores that I don't understand. But I do understand their loyalty stat, and when that goes low, crazy shit happens. One of my governors started spouting lies about a rival civ and was on the verge of creating a diplomatic incident, so I had to tell her to shut the hell up. (The other option was to stand by her and let relations with that civ deteriorate.) She created all kinds of problems, so I looked into whether I could fire her and you CAN. It's a great feeling, but sadly you can't space her out an airlock (feature request stardock?) Anyway, here's where I found that the interface for this was so bad. I'll upload some pics.

You gotta put a citizen on any colony ship you send out, but then that guy doesn't become the governor. I dunno what happens to that person. You also have to put one on any *constructor* you make. And I guess they're then in charge of the space station? Or are they just expended, so to speak?

Research
You get a research bonus on three chosen techs, and it's often a good idea to just go with one of those. But you can view the entire tech tree and if there's something you need right now, you can select it. Also you can view the new tech trees to get a feel for where this all goes . . . it's a bit different from GC3. I may have more to say about this later.

Executive actions
This is like rushing buildings and magically forcing completion of a research project. It's a new point system (control points) and a sorta new mechanic.

Ideology? Culture progression? Whatever
You don't have good/EVEN BETTER/evil (benevolent, pragmatic, evil -- and Brad loves "pragmatic" soooo much), you instead have Liberty, Authority, Compassion, Pragmatism is still there, and several others. Anyway, you get culture points but I have no idea where you can view how many you have. To be fair, this was hidden (afaik) in GC3 too.

Map sizes
Itty bitty. Brad still believes that putting more shit on a small map will make it FEEL bigger. Also you can select how many sectors you want, including no sectors. So the map doesn't have to be subdivided like in GC4. One thing I'll test out later: if I make a supposedly large map with several sectors, will I get an overall larger map?

Bugs
Editing my colonizer, I couldn't save it because "warships are required to have at least one weapon". Uh, it's a "colony ship" type. I had to create a new design as a work-around. Sometimes I can edit ships, sometimes I can't.
I think this is a bug -- I somehow got a major discount on malevolent ideology perks, despite going primarily down the Liberty path. Really odd

Anyway, this is amusing at least. I don't know if I'll play it to death as it stands now, and I still like GC3. But this game has some good stuff in it, and they're adding more crap so we'll see how it goes.