Custom Civs
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Getting Started
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Biology Tab
Using AlienGPT
Visuals and Descriptions
Species for Species Pack DLC owners
Culture Focus
Discounts
Personality
Playing against the civ later
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Abilities tab
Traits
Trait Points
Combos in default civs
Abilities
Combos in default civs
Visuals + Music
Commander Ships
Mapped to default civs plus
Homeworld
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Fleets Tab
Colors and Textures
See Ship Designer Journals
Visuals: Templates and Classes
Get more from Workshop
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Hello everyone! For this week's dev journal, I wanted to walk through creating a Custom Civilization in GalCiv IV.
Creating a custom civilization is an excellent way to experiment with different playstyles and unique Ability combinations. Whether it's a mashup of your two favorite civs, a faction from your favorite sci-fi media, or something wholly original, Custom Civilizations has you covered.
To get the ball rolling, you can hit New Game from the main menu. There you will find Custom Civilization as an option in the list of available civilizations. Clicking it will then bring you to the civilization creation screen.
Civilization creation starts in the Biology tab. Here you can write and adjust details important to the flavor of your Civilization such as its name, the portrait of its leader, and the species of its citizens. Each of these entries can be changed to your liking and new images can be added by dropping them in the appropriate folder. To accelerate this process, GalCiv IV has a special feature called AlienGPT which will automatically populate every entry based on a short description. Any text or settings changed by AlienGPT can be tweaked with little effort.
Cultural Focus, Species, and Personality are the options with the most gameplay impact within the Biology tab. Cultural Focus raises Cultural Awareness of the chosen ideology which grants discounts for Traits within that ideology's tree (see journal ##), different species have different strengths and weaknesses that can drastically affect a civilization's playstyle, and a civilization's Personality determines its behavior when controlled by AI.
With the Biology tab filled out, you can then move to the Abilities tab. Here you will have the most control over your civilization's strengths and weaknesses starting with Traits.
Each civilization has a Trait Point "budget" to spend on traits both positive and negative. Most Traits exist on a scale from Very Good to Very Bad. Taking a good trait will cost points whereas taking a bad trait will give you more points to spend. This allows you to carve out niches where your civilization excels and make adjustments to match your playstyle.
All civs have the same trait budget with unique combinations. For example, the Corporate Sector is all about economics and thus has the X and Y traits but is bad at Z.
Similar to Traits are Civilization Abilities. Each civ gets two and abilities are particularly important/consequential.
How do you want your game to look and sound while playing as this civ?
Commander Ships are powerful ships that you assign leaders to and unlock over time.
Hello everyone! For this week's dev journal, I wanted to walk through the process of creating a Custom Civilization.
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