Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Galactic Civilizations IV

Feedback on general gameplay

Published on Monday, November 8, 2021 By Coggy In GalCiv IV Early Access Feedback

I just got the Early Access and played two quick games.  Some general impressions and suggestions.

 

1) It's too late to affect the basic game design. I just want to say I have never liked the idea of games with "tramlines" or lanes for FTL travel. They usually just make a frustrating bottleneck during gameplay.  Waiting to see how GC4 turns out if I can get a longer game going.

2)  I went through two whole sectors without finding any Elerium.  Please make this resource a little more abundant.

3)  On Spheres of Influence.  The empire near me just ignored any and all spheres of influence and rolled over me making more and more colonies.  This was the Yor.  Looked like their homeworld was Giant.  Like, Size 77 Giant.  I don't remember if you could do that in GC1&2. You could in 3, but your colony was likely to flip really fast.  Not so here.  It shouldn't be so easy to just set up colonies in another empires sphere of influence.

4) Deals proposed by and acceptable to the Yor were ridiculously one-sided in their favor.  Even when they liked me.  Sometimes I couldn't even just get a simple Open Borders agreement.  Generally they wanted to give one minor tech for 2 or three (sometimes more) of mine, plus resources plus $1000.  I actually took 2 deals because they were so much stronger and more advanced than me, so this would convince them not to attack.  Get them to take more reasonable deals.

5) Let the minor races expand a little bit.  If only 2 or 3 solar systems, or 2 Core Worlds.  Just something other than cannon fodder. I didn't get a chance to try to trade with them so I can't comment on that.  I do hope that you CAN trade with them.  Maybe that could have helped my technology deficit.

6) Not being able to see the tech tree or direct tech development is really frustrating.  This is especially true about key techs, like Universal Translator or Armor or Trade.  UT is supposed to be a common tech, but it took me forever to get the option to research it.

7) When you find a goodie in an anomaly and need to decide if you want to use it or not, or maybe whether to tune it to beams/missiles/kineitic, give us a little picture of the ship or let us check the ship to see if we all ready have it on board.

8) Finally, that Prestige Victory is kind of broken.  I was just getting my game really going, hadn't even met a second player.  Just explored the second sector (not even placed a colony in it yet) and BAMM! game over man.  The cut scene didn't even say who won.  Maybe you can have slightly different cut scenes for the different empires.  And make it a little harder to get.  Both my games ended in prestige wins.

Can't remember anything else right now.  I'll try another game soon. Didn't run into anything that looked like a bug so far.