GalCiv IV Dev Journal #119: Spring Status Report

It has been a busy Spring.

The Galactic Civilizations community has posted vast amounts of suggestions, requests and just generally amazing feedback. There really should be a study on why 4X game communities are just, well, they really are just the best.

The new expansion, Federations & Empires is pretty closely tied with version 4.0. That’s because version 4 supports the new government system and the base government, Colonial Charter, comes with the game. This will be good news to players of the base game, but creates a wrinkle for us in that we can’t release the expansion pack until version 4 is done.

Version 4

So let’s talk about version 4.

First off, the Colonial Character government replaces the old Policies and Leaders screens with a single unified screen for managing your interstellar government. The Colonial Charter government is the concept that you have a home world and your core and colony worlds but there is no question about who is in charge – the home world.

And this concept – having core worlds and colonies that are in service to your homeworld has been the cornerstone of Galactic Civilizations IV since launch. The idea with the expansion pack is that there should be other ways of playing the game and so each government represents a different set of game mechanics for building your civilization. But like I said, it does require we nail version 4.

Now in these screenshots, you (hopefully) have noticed that we have cleaned up the UI. This is something we’re doing as much as possible across the entire game. Consistent UI. We are also adding a mini map. I find it difficult to deal with multiple sectors with the current UI and it has been high on the list. We are also revisiting the trade screen. There’s a lot of information that we think we can (and should) display on there that will make trading more enjoyable and more understandable. And then there’s balance. So many opportunities there.

Works in progress

And that is what brings me to the heart of this entry. There’s a lot of WIP (work in progress). Take the screenshot below. What do you notice?

There’s a new option: Map Type (custom map). Version 4.0 is going to include custom maps in addition to the random maps. Now for this we are working on a map editor. I don’t know when/if the map editor will be “good enough” to make available, but we are pretty confident we can create some custom maps for people to play.

If you want to see our first pass at a map editor you can look here: Galaxy Forge Map Editor UX Prototype

But the UI is not done and it’s just buggy. And that’s the case with a bunch of stuff. Even piddly stuff. For instance:

I’m waiting on getting new icons for the toolbar (top left of the mini map) and for the bottom area. I have to wait for the art team to finish the new senate screen. You get the idea.

Scope

This expansion pack is vast. Four new governments. Hundreds of new events, senate bills, new ships, new systems, new AI, etc. It’s a lot. Luckily, that part is almost done. It’s version 4.0 that we still have quite a bit of work to do and the expansion pack relies on it. We’re burning the midnight oil (please feel free to join us on Discord: Join the Galactic Civilizations Discord Server! Keep us company on the weekend as we work on this!

Timelines

We are pretty confident that we will have version 4.0 done by early July. But that means that we have to delay the expansion pack until then too. Apologies in advance. We had expected to have the expansion done before end of May (and indeed, the expansion itself is in pretty solid shape), but version 4.0 is going to take more time to get it right.

So the plan is: Release 4.0 and the expansion together sometime in July. Please let us know what you think in the comments.