General FeedBack-v1.6

QOL Suggestions/Other Minor Suggestions

from GalCiv4 Forums

This post is just some random feedback on some general items I've noticed while playing the current version of 1.6.

I think the move to districts from the past system of individual buildings for everything in Gal 3 or older has been a massive improvement. It makes it seem like you are in control of an entire world instead of a city. Also, the way it has been set up makes it super easy to upgrade everything as time goes on in the game. The only districts I currently have a problem with are the agriculture and financial districts. I love the agricultural districts and their rate of output, the issue is that citizens do not require that much upkeep food-wise in the current version of the game. I often end up fairly early in a game with 300-500 points extra in food that just goes to waste especially since I can't seem to trade it away. This is with me only dedicating one or two of my core worlds early in the game to agriculture production. My suggestion to solve this would be to increase the rate of food needed per citizen per additional citizen added. So, for example, every additional citizen would increase by .1 or .2 food consumption for every other citizen on a world or something similar. So, a 10-citizen world would require food upkeep of 20 or more, depending on the rate increase decided, making the chance of starvation higher and requiring more thought into how to dedicate your worlds. Could at the same time have your entire civilization population also increasing the food requirement rate once a certain pop number/tier is reached. Maybe to offset the higher food cost, make every additional citizen on a planet also increase the growth rate as well on a world or some other benefit. I know that there is a faction that kind of does this already but it doesn't use up enough food and it costs you leaders to do so. I just know that something regarding agriculture/food consumption should change and I rather like the current agriculture districts. Making food a tradable resource would also help and add to gameplay. The problem with financial districts is that they are not able to be upgraded right now. Seems that the tech to upgrade them is missing from the tech tree.

I do not have a problem with research districts but I do have a problem with the rather poor research inputs of most available core worlds. With the current state of the game making research rather easy this is not a large problem but I would like to see more variety in inputs among high-quality planets. They shouldn't all have high wealth or agriculture inputs while being low in the research type input. The overall tiles should also match the inputs a little better, it's kind of a waste/discouraging to have lots of floodplains or other ag tiles on the few worlds with high research input or vice versa. I mean you can and probably will just ignore the benefits those tiles bring but that kind of wastes having the tiles bring extra benefits in the first place. On the discussion of more variety, I think there is more need for the variety of the quality of planets right now. At the current version, most planets are either high quality at 17+ or low quality at 1-3. I don't know what effect having more worlds between 3-17 quality would bring but this is the stage of development to answer such a question.

Tourism in the current version is a little broken. I don't remember what tech it was or maybe it was adding some citizens to a faction or maybe it was adding the one tourist building to my civilization but every world in my current game started to acquire high tourism. This isn't bad in of itself but the sheer amount of it kind of is. I think the game needs more tourist focus buildings or maybe create a new district type for it but at the same time make it much harder for worlds to otherwise start getting tourism. Right now I'm getting free money and not having had to do anything to get it.

The ideologies are cool but at the moment it's a little too hard to either gain points or branch into more ideology trees. By 2-300 turns in I should ideally be able to have fully acquired 2-3 ideology trees but instead, I'm lucky to have acquired just one fully and that might have been completed 100 to 200 turns back with no further acquiring of more ideologies. This is a complete 360 from the last version so it is a very clear decision on developers' part to do so but I feel that it's gone a little too far in making them more difficult to get.  

My last suggestion is a QOL improvement for the custom civ builder. I love the alienGPT for its descriptions but the naming of worlds/civilizations/species kind of sucks, to be honest. I think having separate random name generators might be a better option. This is actually what I ended up doing for most of the custom civs I've done, using random name generators from the internet. The current version of alienGPT seems to refuse to include words like republic, empire, hegemony, kingdom, or federation in the creation of civ names. It also a lot of the time refuses to include proper names like France, just an example, Narnia or Rohan and instead, we get something like blood court or raptor pack. Those are not names of civilizations but just random descriptive terms so including random name generators would be helpful I feel. I've usually included a species name in my description of the race I want to create but having a species name generator as well would be good. If the alienGPT gets good enough to start doing this on its own, random name generators are not needed but at the moment it's not. Honestly, the only thing it seems good at is the civ and race descriptions which it does do a really good job at.

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1,719 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Awesome feedback!

Couple points to add:

1. Food. Can we get a differentiation between the races for growing food and have enough granularity for citizens of those races to actually make a difference and bring their skills to the planets they show up on? Consider playing synthetics. They do not have access to the food tree or agricultural improvements, even when they capture entire planets of biologicals they still lack access to food techs. Did the conquered suddenly forget how to grow food? If I migrate a citizen from a food growing species, that planet should acquire the ability to build food buildings and grow food. I need to feed my conquered mixed races based on their requirements or growth of those species just stops

2. The same should apply to other species. Torians have awesome science stats? Awesome, attract some to planet X and gain the ability to build their science buildings. Migration treaties and exchanges of specialists in the trading window perhaps? How long would it take my scientist to be able to decipher a completely alien tech not even knowing the basic theoretical science behind it?  Import/kidnap a couple of the other species scientist and put them to work in special science institutions that we now can build and voila! New stuff from that species coming out periodically to supplement my tech tree. Instead of immediately trading major tech once the universal translator is available, we could just exchange scientists initially and then earn the right to trade techs with that species, once the basics are understood then trading of the subsequent techs themselves can start but you only earned the right to research them not instantaneously use them. This would slow down the darn brokering the AI does that after a while everyone turns off.

3. Custom Civilizations. We need much more granularity in creating those. We need to be able to easily design our own citizens with the stats we want, build our own stellar systems, and customize our tech tree. Current games available in the 4x space and role playing space now offer this in abundance, Gal Civ is behind the curve with this and needs to catch up. Generative AI is great and a catchy use of current technology but as it stands it is a bit limited, more a promise of things to come than a full realization of that potential.

Reply #2 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

You've made some excellent points.

I agree that adding granularity to the game in the form of far more customization would be great to make it more replayable. There are four main aspects I think make a good strategy game: actual gameplay, user interface features, quality of life features and replayability. I think the actual gameplay and user interface features of the game are fairly strong, though like several posts have previously stated the game tends to lag far more than it should towards the end of late games, especially the larger maps. The annoying thing there is the game's system when I set up a game stating that I should have no trouble and that everything is good to go. I think that lagging is a problem that most of these types of games have nowadays and that the developers will probably try hard to fix it especially since they probably want to try for larger maps so at this time I don't think it's a big concern. The area of most concern I think the developers need to focus on once they get the most pressing gameplay issues solved is replayability which means addressing some of the customization issues we've brought up. To that end here are some more items I think mentioning might help the developers.

1. The current game, at least the ones I've played, have had all the AI opponents in one big section of the galaxy instead of more evenly spread throughout multiple sectors. While I do pick the not close by option that doesn't mean I want my AI opponents to all be in one giant section of the galaxy. If I don't pick that option and sometimes even when I do I end up in that giant section with the AI. Clearly the placement formula that the developers are using is somewhat broken. This needs to be fixed because the whole stated purpose of making multiple sections of the galaxy is to decrease memory load which isn't happening if everyone ends up in one giant section of space anyways. This also makes for somewhat poorer enjoyment as well.

2. There is a need to bring back some features of Gal 3 that were enjoyable for players. For example, things like normal space gates that just sped up your ships is definitely something that needs to come back. I quite enjoyed making large gate networks and it makes even more sense to have them in this game. 

3. Need to make more fantastical abilities/traits for custom races. For example I've made a few custom space wizard civilizations but without some type of ability/trait that can be called magic they're kind of hollow. I think the developers have most of the basics and even some cool ones like spores but adding some abilities associated with things like esper powers, magic, fantasy martial arts, shapeshifting or others like being super good at certain technology branches would greatly improve the customization feeling. I mean they have locked some technologies behind traits or abilities but I'm talking about abilities/traits that give research bonuses or add attack power to things like beams, missile tech or kinetic weapons. Adding some more items to traits would also be good, like bonus to terraforming technologies or gaining access to more tiles. Basically, they have a very good set of basics but they should try to increase the number of abilities/traits and think hard about not so much the benefits of new abilities/traits but more about people picking them to make civilizations more unique/increase roleplaying. 

4. Looking at the abilities/traits has made me realize that a lot of technologies seem to be locked behind having certain abilities/traits. If these are above and beyond technologies then I think that's okay. If however they are fairly general techs then I don't think that makes much sense. I think it might be especially confusing to everyone if some general technologies that are kind of needed are locked behind having a certain ability. For example, the missing financial district upgrade tech, if that's locked behind an ability choice then I feel like that's a mistake.

5. More non-weapons technologies. The other research trees when compared to the weapons tree are kind of empty. I feel like the developers should add some more civilian tech so that players who want to can build tall instead of wide. 

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Reply #3 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Wanted to thank you for this well thought out and detailed feedback, every bit helps us improve