I love the idea of core and secondary worlds, especially coming from Stellaris and trying to micro dozens of them.

GalCiv was the benchmark for space 4x games, even early versions of Stellaris were heavily based on it. I really wish they update Endless Space 2, my love/hate game.

I really hate that they have flagships as the research ships. The only place that had that was Star Trek (and it was solely for the Federation) and they are pretty unique as they were multi-roll because they were barred from making full on warships.

I'm in a similar boat to you, I got GalCiv 3 for free on Epic Games a couple of years ago, and it was my first strategy game. I would spend at least 8 hours a day on that game for a few weeks, but I was hungry for something better, something more. I spent days searching for the best out there, but there was one that kept showing up and really catching my interest. Stellaris. That was in 2020 and now I have 3,108 hours in the game.

The biggest thing about the GalCiv series is the insane level of customization. I can spend hours creating my favorite Sci-Fi civs and ships.

Back when I played GalCiv III. I'd spend the lions share of my time designing ships.

Increasing from 6 to 8 is not a 25% bonus. It's actually a bonus of 1/3 or approximately 33.33%, because as you add 2 you can calculate 2/6 = 1/3.

The AI-generated flavor text and portrait for custom civs is a pretty cool concept. I wonder if this will cause issues with Steam's "No AI" policy. Personally I think it's a neat feature and I look forward to more high profile games taking advantage of the opportunities that AI content generation can offer.

keep up the dope content Montu!

My first GalCiv was actually the first installment that appeared on PC, somewhere in 2003(?). I remember ordering the CD and it being held by the customs office. I didn't care really to go there, since Stardock was one of the first companies that actually offered digital download and maintenance of their products.

I rewrote the asset pipeline and shaders for this game :)

In previous versions of GalCiv I always disabled "Alliance Victories" because it was way too easy for your game to surprise end early because of it.

I’ve had GalCiv 3 for over a year now. Started playing it last week and after seeing this review I’ll be picking up GalCiv4 in a heart beat. Stellaris meets Civ… a match made in heaven!

i was a little bit disappointed that you couldnt use your own created races in multiplayer... will this change ?

i played a lot of gal civ 3, with all the dlc.. the best things i thought were how much you could craft your species, by making them bad at one thing to get more points to be really good at something else.. but also the traits, or abilities. i also really liked that you could download ships that others designed, so you could have you ships all look like Romulan (or klingon, or federation or star wars) ships without having to design them yourself. not sure if that is in GC4 yet, i haven't played it, i'm waiting on a good deal.

I've yet to see Gal Civ II topped, but I'm hopeful IV will at least get close. I like III but, there's something about it that doesn't always sit right with me, and I can never really put my finger on it. I could play it for a day and enjoy it, but next day can't be arsed.

One thing I like is... You can block enemy or friendly ships with your own ships from enter planet or slipstream connection 😅

Thank you for the review! Hopefully by the time it goes on Xmas sale their will be an update or three.

It's crazy to me that diplomacy peaked in the 90s with GalCiv2

Hehe my first was Haegemony, oh my god I loved it, the research tree was huge, you could steal unique tech via spy ships, even story was very cool. Going on your first mars mission, finding aliens, and then it just expands!

I prefer turn-based like Civ compared to the RTS of Stellaris (I own both). I will have to pick this up!

Will you cover other space 4x like Distant World ?

How does this compare to GalCiv 3?

Doesn't look much different than GalCiv IIIl

How does the enemy AI generally behave? That seems to be the biggest pain point in the steam reviews. What have you noticed?

I've run into few issues in customizing the racial descriptions, like being unable to put in line breaks, and sometimes having spacebar arbitrarily not work, so they hopefully fix that. I'd also like to make custom citizen pops, though maybe I just don't know how to do that yet. That said, I do love that the weapons are no longer just different things doing the same thing. Missiles have the longest range, so they fire first, lasers are middle, and kinetics have the shortest range, but kinetics fire the fastest, so ships that can close in for kinetics, if they can survive, can do extremely high damage in the latter half of an engagement. It's a real interesting step up from from the previous Galciv games.

Yeah man, galactic civ and Masters of Orion consumed a lot of my free hours 🤣 looking forward to trying it, thanks for the review!

Great breakdown! Thanks! 👍 I'm assuming there are downloadable ships and races?

From Master of Orion 2 until Stellaris 2.0, Gal Civ was the Space Opera series for me. Don't know why 3 didn't work as well for me. It looked better, but lost some of the charm. What I do think GalCiv did well was internal politics. Managing your empire was as important, and as difficult, as expanding it. But it accomplished that without the level of micro Stellaris has. Definitely believe there's enough room for both games. If they can hook me again.

Brilliant overview ❤

i rember getting galciv 2 saw it in target and got it. was some fo the most fun i had played civ3 was fun and i been holding off on 4 cause i heard there was alot of problems with it but once they are fixed atleast the major ones ill pick it up to

This may seem incredibly minor to some but are weapons on ships in better spots? - my main nitpick with Stellaris is how all the weapons are on top.

I was pretty disappointed by the AI generated portraits. I wasn't able to get it to actually create anything related to what I'd written... I even just typed "space dwarves" or "frog robots" and both times it gave me similar random assortment of unrelated portraits. I think they might be having technical issues or there might have been some severe user error going on.

i could not get into gal civ 3 but there were almost no guides on it so hopefully i can get into this one

Thank you, Montu, for playing attention to this game. I think that it is well worth the money. I think it's better tha. Star Trek Infinite, which is set too late in the Star Trek timeline. I think that there should be feature like in MOO2 where you can determine development levels. That would allow for more replayablity in these kinds of games.

I hope I will like the game. I really wanted to like the 3rd installment, but the late game was very hectic. I will for give this a try!

A nice review. Some unique aspects. Would be a nice change of pace for playthrough other than Stellaris.

i guess it depends if the ai is a cheaty as it used to be in part 3, but if i learned one thing over the last years it is not to buy new games when they come out

Great review!!

~14 years ago I bought a game called Space Empires 5 published in 2006 for about 1,50 euro. It was ridiciously detailed, you could literally do anything in this game. This game shares so much with it, I am halfway convinced it's made by the same guy.

That initial view of planets gave me Stellaris 1.0 Vietnam flashbacks lol

I liked it, I don't know about the replayability of the game, but it's fun enough. The UI REALLY frustrated me, especially late game (some of the repetitive stuff like sending out piglrims / etc. would result in 30 pop ups at the beginning of each turn that could easily have just been a summary somewhere). There's also a fair bit that the tutorial could probably go over a little better, including the citizen and planet management. I will say that so far as I could tell leaving the planet automation on actually did pretty well, and the AI seemed to do fine with that aspect. The ship customization was a bit... wonky, I think that's just the UI though.But yeah overall I think the game itself is fine, it just could use for a lot more UI polish. I also expect things will probably get better when it has a dedicated wiki to cover a lot of the features that the game just sort of brushes over in terms of "hey what does this mean?". Like there's a late game tech "interceptors" that allows the deployment of fights (i assume) but that doesn't modify the military score of a ship? Also that military score is a bit weird too... I had fleets that were easily hundreds of times more powerful but their military score was still 50 or 60 compared to the AI's 20 or 30. Now they won flat out, but that score didn't really do a great job explaining strength. Some other minor nit picks. There are stations that you can put on minor planets that don't do anything, but the game never mentions they don't do anything. You just have to figure it out (all the growth modules / etc). Though honestly I think part of my problem is that it's been so so long since I've played Gal Civ II (never picked up 3) and I've been playing basically nothing but stellaris, that all of my sort of comparisons are between those two and I'm not sure if that's entirely fair comparison wise to Gal Civ VI It reminds me of the recent Master of Orions game... which felt a LITTLE too simple? idk. Fun not sure if super replyable.

Played all of them and I have to say part 4 became my favourite. Just that feature with the officers gives it more depth than the prequels.

0:24 Same here. Maybe even GC1 but I can't remember back that far.

I'm inclined to purchase it. There are 2 aspects that haunt me though (stellaris syndrome) - how good\interesting is endgame (compared to, let's say, stellaris) and how good is performance late into the game ? Also, does AI simply cheat on higher difficulties or plays smarter ?

Loving it.. my fixes. Fleet names... when i name a fleet, i want to keep it, but every time a fleet lands on a planet, starbase, ect it changes the name. Ship swaping - its clunky. Population pictures- after you load them up, it does not show them on the lobby screen, it shows them in game, its an annoying bug. Etherium & own fleets are hard to see when zoomed out. Its a fun game, needs another dimension.

Do they let you build new flag ships from game start? I know that was one of my biggest gripes in GalCiv II; exploration ships couldn't be replaced until mid game, so if you hit an anomaly early that destroyed (or more often, launched it across the known universe, requiring a 75 turn trip home in sleep mode) you're entire play through was basically screwed.

I love these types of games. Stellaris is my favorite of the bunch. I tried Galactic Civ 3 once, but It just made me play regular Civ 5. Combat is really underwhelming in these games. Stellaris does the best job IMO, but even then, let's face it, you are more or less stuck in the observer role. For Paradox titles these automatic combats are standard - so it's in line with their other games. But for GalCiv 4 my biggest wish was better combat - this would IMO make this game stand out. At least to the point of Civ 6 - so that the player actually gets some control in the outcome of the battle. Or similar than AoW 4 does. That would be the best case scenario.

I think I will be getting this next time it is time for game browsing.

I never heard of the game, but watched some playthroughs in the past few days and I realy like the game.

I too have been part of this series since GalCiv II, but I think in many ways 3 was a step down rather than an improvement. That said, I still play it though not as much as say, Stellaris. I discovered GalCiv almost by accident, when I went looking for a successor to my early favorite, Ascendancy (which is begging for a remake/remaster). Eventually I discovered Galciv and Sins of a Solar Empire, both by Stardock, and the rest, as they say, was history. I'll likely pick up GC IV at some point, but I think the core world/minor world is unnecessary simplification. I wish it was an option rather than a 'feature' for those of us who actually like slogging through a list full of planets and choosing exactly what each one will build, and where. Another issue I had with the earlier games was how the difficulty seemed to be a on a very slippery slope. The lower levels are too easy at times, but the higher levels, especially if you throw in the Dread Lords, can quickly snowball and steamroll you if you don't find them early enough. That huge disparity made high level games stressful races against time rather than a rolling challenge, and low level games were like seal clubbing. There didn't seem to be a happy middle.

Only thing that I was a touch disappointed about was having to choose an additional race that all the actual leaders are pulled from for the ai race to rule over. Feels like a slight let down to what overall is a great feature. Pulls you out of the immersion a bit to run an elven empire run by humans.

Will you be doing any Gal Civ 4 playthroughs/guides?

I have never played this franchise before. I will try it out.

Been playing GalCiv since the first game. But once Stellaris came out, especially together with its DLCs, i fully migrated to Stellaris. GalCiv has some nifty micro level systems & encompassing empire mgmt mechanics as well as the ship designer that i wish were in Stellaris. Stellaris still triumphs the 4x & Grand strategy genre though. Stellaris combines 4x, grand strategy & RPG all in one. Its next level. Though i wish it had the combat, ships & ship customization like Sword of the Stars 2. The detail, sense of scale & epicness of the ships & the battles there is phenomenal.

Quick ask, can u save the ships for later playthroughs? or do you need to remake them every new game

Whats your thoughts on Space Empires 5?

This game is good, but very inconsistent, i get auto resolves that say no casualities (My side) vs total loss (enemy side) and still i lose 2-3 ships. Trade routes and montly payments dont give the full amount (ex if you get 150 credits from trade routes you get aboth 20 actual credits per turn). When loading a save custom ships change costs, stats and sometimes even models...

Muito obrigado, já estou convencido :D

Why would I pick this up now, and not when they start working on GalCiv5 ?

Are custom ships you design available for consecutive playthroughs?

Ok you sold me 😁. Thankyou

You know when ai was mentioned here I was worried a bunch of people would go nuts and recreate the Salem witch trials in the comment section. Glad to see that that’s not the case, ai is a wonderful tool capable of many things-but at the same time is so primitive to what conspiracy theorists say it is that the idea they could replace humanity at this point is laughable.

Was arguing if I should buy this, and you convinced me to do it.

Paradox: It's treason, then...

Just bought the core game when it went on sale, and I have to say, I LOVE IT! The AI generated backstory was amazing! I made a race called Decedents of Godzilla, it gave me a backstory about Godzilla stomping around the earth then leaving for unexplored corners of the galaxy. Went right into it without even playing the tutorial or watching video's...DONT DO THAT...lmao. I was able to get most of it, but there were parts of the worldbuilding and governance that watching vids like this will help a ton. Enjoy!

I've been enjoying this game a lot but man does the fleet management suck. You have to organize each ship manually 1 by 1 to put them in or out of a fleet, and end game when you can easily have like 200+ ships it can take an hour just to get your individual ships into the fleets you want them to be in. I wish it had even Stellaris' fleet management and I think that's saying something. That's my only real complaint about the game besides influence/culture being overpewered and the artifacts being boring (both mentioned in the video). It's really fun otherwise.

I would love to play it, but with any combat feature that's its more than watching a video.

Had another game, bigger map, easy difficulty, planets more common etc, 1st save, the north ai war'd me, my ships werent advanced enough nor had rushed logistics. 2nd save scumming (i think the game knew i did that), the south ai decced me (reminds me of stellaris dog piling proxy wars) this time the ai got more war econ and spammed out more ships then i could output and even beat me in a defensive tug of war. I knew the errors I made, I didnt buff my planets quick enough with tile upgrades. A couple of fleet fights I forgot about the strategic fleet weapons, then logi and econ war. Its very samey samey to GalCiv 3. Comfy but very frustrating, i'll likely give up on it after a couple more plays.

Are you certain it will receive support, what they did with base gal civ 4 kinda lost my trust a bit

07:45 - This are not all the moons that orbit Jupiter irl. There are like 80+ moons around Jupiter, showing off all of them would be smw insane^^

I saw the ai empire generator and I was hyped. I wanted to try some aquatic sea turtles, maybe with some greek vibes..... and then i try to say him turtle or tortoise or sea turtle and it always gives me the same ugly frog .... just for testing I put woodelves and it gives me everything except of anything close to elves .... tried something with atlantis , nothing ....... maybe I made a mistake but it put me hard back to ground. Next to the fact that the citizens cannot be changed , so why is my leader a "turtle" and the citizens cannot be ? I'm sorry but without this feature it's just galactic civ 3 with a little optic polishing.

I’ll probably check it when it goes on sale. I’ve played galactic civ 2 and 3, and stellaris. None of which game me the same enjoyment as Spaceward Ho! From waaaaay back in the day.

My first space based 4X game was Master of Orion, or MOO...

I buy this game and it's awese big game imersive, 10/10 i don't know why this franchise is not even more popular

I did like GalCiv3, but intelligence/espionage wasn't that engaging. Is it better, the same, or worse in this?

I could buy this. Had 100s of hours in GalCiv 2, but 3 felt too micro-managy in a bad sense. It just wasn't fun for me. 4 looks like what I wanted 3 to be, but 'mostly positive' on Steam doesn't convince me yet.

The battles are what lets the game down for me, i prefer DW2 or Stellaris.

It’s a shame the Stardock owner is absolute trash who I refuse to support, game looks pretty cool.

We all played GalCiv, but then Stellaris happened. Now it would be like going back to Virginia Slims after Lucky Strikes, or heroin .

My issue was that the genetic civilisation setting doesn't do anything in some cases (synthetic/silicon) unless you also pick the only silicion/synthetic civiilian type along with them. So your genetics choice is restrained by civilian choices (which have pretty much no info in their selection tool tips)

I might be giving this one a try. I am burnt out on Stellaris. Been playing some endless space 2, it's a great game, altough lacks some polish I think.

I really loved that fact about Supernova. I mean it's not a shameless money grab on Stardock's part for releasing an upgraded version and charging the early backers more to get the upgrade.

It's on my list.

I've always liked this franchise and the Distant Worlds franchise.

I’d love to play this game, but there’s sadly no mac version of it

A real user played Galactic Civilizations on IBM OS/2 Warp.

Ai stuff is new. And helps me alot

Is there ship design? I may of mist it

Remember the "Gamer's Bill Of Rights" idea from a while ago? That was these guys.

Can you do a video on district worlds 🤞

GC actually goes back to the mid-1990s, with the first iteration being released for OS/2 (which I played as an alternative to the DOS MOO, but which it never replaced). GC2 was a major upgrade to the first Windows version, GC3 less of an upgrade and more of an overall refinement of the existing systems (and the 64 bit architecture made it fly performance-wise). I give GC3 high marks for the amount of work and care that went into crafting the game, but when Stellaris and Endless Space came out, I abandoned it entirely (Steam says I played c. 123 hours). I have always had two issues that have prevented me from enjoying GC (I can set aside irreconcilable philosophical differences I have with the designer in the interest of not allowing the person to taint their otherwise good works). Issue 1 is the combat system. It has always been rock-scissors-paper and overly simplistic compared to the rest of the game systems and other games. You can spend decades in the ship designer, but the depth of the combat is about that of a Libyan mud puddle. It's boring. Issue 2 is the starbase system. The game has always required an incredible investment of time and energy into building and upgrading starbases, so much so that I began deriding it as a Starbase Construction Simulator. The starbases can be more important that colonies, which always struck me as backwards. Did GC4 address either of those two issues in a meaningful way? If so, I'd be inclined to give it a try.

just amazing

GalCiv 3 was a mess after a while (the fact the needed RAM jumped from 4 to 32 for some reason was insane and made it unplayable for me for a while.) Hope this one is not that cray XD

Just gonna give me everything I could ask for, eh? Fine! I'll buy it!

Custom races multiplaywr?

Galactic Civ 3 Was a race to occupy as many worlds as possible right at the start that was the path to winning no matter what else happened. Is Galactic Civ 4 more of the same?

I don't think there is enough improvement to justify bying GC4 unless you don't have a copy of the previous games. The game is only so so to begin with, mostly because of the archaic interface. On the plus side the ship creator has always been kind of fun. I disagree with your assessment of land combat. There should be a more detailed system like in the old Star General game, where you had fleets and armies to contend with. I would much prefer that style of game with a little less micro management of which buildings you place where. I would say if you have never played a GC game before then yes it's worth the buy, but if you already have a previous version you aren't missing much by not picking this dog up.

Can you make more galciv 4 videos

Thanks.