Guided Tour of GalCiv IV 2.5 / Warlords Expansion

Updated Visuals

Maybe a small thing but we have adjusted lighting and added point light effects to things to get them to “pop”. The prettiness is more of a side effect of the desire to make teh galaxy more readable.

Expanded Technology Tree

We have greatly expanded the tech tree for both Warlords users who get new technologies like Cloaking Devices and Biological Targeting as well as 2.5 users looking for new ship components instead of merely a stat bump.

Improved Battle Viewer

You can now click on any ship and see how it’s performing in the battle. The log now clearly shows how different weapons and defenses work.

Resource Clumping

We have improved the map generation so that resources will tend to “clump” a bit together. This should result in some areas of space being particularly more valuable than others (relative to previous versions).

In this example, 3 Durantium nodes are found within a single alien system.

Specialized Defense Systems

GalCiv IV gets rid of the rock-paper-scissors way of weapons vs. defenses.

Instead, in GalCiv IV when an enemy attack reaches your ship, it first checks to see if its accuracy is better than your evasion in order to tell if it hits at all. Then, if it hits, the shields will see if they aborb the damage. And then any remaining damage goes to the armor which mitigates a % of it.

However, with v2.5 we have made it so specific ship components can do special things. Some weapons can ignore shields for instance. Some defenses can thwart missiles. And so on. This allows players to counter enemy strategies that have focused too much on a particular area of weaponry or defense.

We plan to do a lot more with this in the future. We also suspect modders will do a lot more in the future.

Invasion Tactics

New to the Warlords expansion are various invasion tactics.

Each tactic has its own pros and cons.