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, we hit New Game from the main menu where we will find "Custom Civilization" as an option in the list of available civilizations. Clicking it will then bring us to the civilization creation screen.
Civilization creation starts in the Biology tab. Here we can write and adjust details important to the flavor of our custom 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 written or settings changed by AlienGPT can be tweaked with little effort.
On the Biology tab Cultural Focus, Species, and Personality are the options with the most gameplay impact.
Cultural Focus: Raises Cultural Awareness of the chosen ideology which grants discounts for Traits within that ideology's tree.
(See Dev Journal #70)
Species: Different species have distinct strengths and weaknesses that can drastically affect a civilization's playstyle.
(See Dev Journal #__)
Personality: Determines its behavior when controlled by AI.
With the Biology tab filled out, we can move to the Abilities tab. Here we have the most control over our civilization's strengths and weaknesses.
Each civilization has a "budget" of three Trait Points to spend on Civilization Traits. These Traits can have positive or negative effects depending on where you allocate those points. Choosing a positive Trait will cost Trait Points while choosing a negative trait will provide you with more points to spend.
Next are Civilization Abilities which are similar to Traits but with broader, more powerful effects. Unlike Traits, Civilizations are limited to two Abilities. Choosing the right combination of Traits and Abilities is critical for creating a civilization that matches your playstyle.
For combination ideas, you can look to existing civilizations. For example, the Corporate Sector. The Corporate Sector is all about economics and trade and thus has maxed out the Rich Trait and has the Traders and Wealthy Abilities. This combination grants them bonus trade routes, a whole bunch of credits, as well as bonuses to gross income and ship range.
Map, Interface, and Music Themes are all customizable from this tab - helping you control your civilizations aesthetic.
Commander Ships are powerful ships with unique special abilities that can be extremely powerful at any stage of a game. Choose the group of ships that best matches your playstyle or choose one that can cover your weaknesses. Combat-oriented commander ships can help shore up defenses for pacifist civilizations that might otherwise make for good targets.
The final settings in the Abilities Tab revolve around your Civilizations Homeworld. When choosing your Homeworld, it's important to remember the Citizen's Species as different Species will prefer different planets. Aquatic or Mer Species, for example, will benefit from having an Oceanic Homeworld.
With that, we can move on to the final step of Civilization Creation in the Fleets tab!
On the left side of the Fleets tab, we can change the Style, Colors, Textures, and Materials of our civilization's fleets. For a full list of each default civilization and their color-texture-material settings check out my Journal on the Ship Designer.
On the right side of the Fleets tab, we can change which Ship Template is assigned to each Ship Class. The same can be done for your civilization's Starbases. This will let you mix and match Ship and Starbase Templates to your heart's content.
All that's left is to hit save and start playing!
However, before you do, consider uploading your Civilization to the Steam Workshop. Our community is full of talented civilization and ship designers whose work may make the perfect addition to your next game.
With each civ created, the bigger the roster of potential avatars and enemies. Soon you may find your games full of new unfamiliar faces.