GalCiv IV: Video Dev Blog #5 - AlienGPT

Greetings, fellow gamers and intergalactic strategists! Today, we delve into the fascinating world of Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova, where we explore the cutting-edge addition to the game, AlienGPT. This groundbreaking feature, developed by Stardock, leverages the power of GPT technology to redefine the way we create custom civilizations in this iconic space 4X gaming series.

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In this blog post, we'll take you on a journey through the exciting universe of Galactic Civilizations, highlighting the evolution of custom civilization creation and the game-changing impact of AlienGPT.

Custom Civilization Creation: A Diverse Universe of Playstyles

The Galactic Civilizations series has always been known for its ability to cater to a wide spectrum of gamers. Whether you're a meticulous min-maxer or a laid-back sandbox enthusiast, this game series has something for everyone. Since Galactic Civilizations II, players have had the opportunity to craft their unique civilizations to bring their gaming fantasies to life.

Core factions like the Terran Alliance, the formidable Drengin, and the iconic Yor have always adhered to the same set of game mechanics available to players when designing custom civilizations. This seamless integration between core and custom civilizations has been a hallmark of the series. However, crafting custom civilizations traditionally involved manual efforts, from writing background stories to selecting pre-generated images that match your vision.

This approach also had its drawbacks, as creating new core civilizations required significant resources in terms of writing, art assets, and game balancing. Stardock recognized the need for innovation.

AlienGPT: A Glimpse into the Future

Enter AlienGPT, a revolutionary addition to Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova. GPT, short for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," is a remarkable language model developed by OpenAI. It's capable of generating natural language text based on user prompts and can provide responses that are remarkably human-like.

Stardock saw an opportunity to harness this technology to enhance their games. AlienGPT was born, and it brings with it the potential to transform the gaming landscape. This technology can generate text content for various elements of gameplay, including civilization overviews, lore, in-game events, and diplomatic conversations. It's a game-changer, offering unprecedented levels of creativity and uniqueness in gameplay.

What AlienGPT Adds to the Game

AlienGPT seamlessly integrates into Stardock's cloud-based metagaming technology, Tachyon. With a single prompt, the background and lore of a civilization can be generated. Pre-generated images of aliens are then presented to players to represent their newly created civilization. These images, crafted by Stardock's in-house artists, ensure a diverse range of visuals that align with the player's vision.

If AlienGPT encounters a prompt that it can't fulfill with existing images, it prompts Stardock's development team to create suitable assets for future use. This dynamic collaboration between AI and human creativity ensures a continually evolving gaming experience.

Let's Make a Custom Civilization

To illustrate how AlienGPT works, let's dive into creating a custom civilization. Imagine you're in the mood for a war-focused gameplay experience with a touch of wild fun. You enter a prompt like "ancient dinosaurs that found advanced alien technology, fused with it, and became a race of war-hungry, cybernetic feudal lizard-knights." You also select various attributes like Biology, Cultural Affinity, and Behaviors, which not only influence civilization generation but also have in-game effects.

The result is a rich and detailed Startup Screen for your civilization, complete with a slogan, description, strengths, and weaknesses. Of course, you can edit these details to fine-tune your creation. AlienGPT then helps you choose a leader portrait, giving life to your new civilization.

From there, you can further customize your civilization's logo, map theme, theme tune, abilities, citizens, commander ships, and traits. With a touch of imagination and the power of AlienGPT, you've created a unique race of spacefaring dino-knights ready to conquer the galaxy.

Enhancing the Gaming Experience

With AlienGPT and Tachyon, Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova introduces AI tools that significantly expand the volume of personalized, high-quality content. This translates into a more diverse range of gameplay options, deeper immersion in the game's universe, and enhanced replayability.

As we wrap up, we invite you to embark on this exciting journey of custom civilization creation with AlienGPT. Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova continues to push the boundaries of what's possible in the 4X strategy gaming genre. Thank you for joining us in exploring this remarkable advancement in gaming technology, and as always, happy gaming!

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Well that is cool, stardock needs to take this a step beyond AI assisted custom civs for humans. How about an option to add randomly created AI Factions into every new game. I never want to play against the same alien race twice. Every game is fresh, Every game is learning to fight against new enemies. With the click of a single button I want the AI to do this for me.

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First off, great job on Alien GPT and art so far. Well, imo you probably have enough artists by now so if you're looking for hiring I'd rather see people that improve the mechanics(Behavioural AI, responces, tactics, civ traits and stuff). Also maybe divert some artists to ship parts which we always need more of.

There is such an abundance on leaders and such art now(though still more women, but I've read the blog where people ask what and catwomen and women apparently are top choices which I don't mind, but so few male human portraits that'd pass for neutral to good aligned leaders exist).

I have personally assembled loads of art, mine or others' or(mostly) AI, I'd like if since there many leaders art now, and from what I understand come from a Stardock Dbase and will be more(depending on how requests received to cover new needs), how about to provide option to turn leaders to citizen art, by selecting some(say 20 at a time so we don't overdo it and still have to come up with others by our own means if we want more) of the fixed choices in your Dbase to crop accordingly? I noticed there are multiple similar ones available for various races while making custom ones.

Also haven't played the game enough with translation and art search for my races going on, but I'd like if citizens have more personality elements in the case they don't currently. E.g. select a citizen portrait, a "digital file" comes up. There it states name, age(maybe if turns add to that they eventually die and have to be replaced), current medical condition(health - could work in tandem with age), Field of Expertise(bonus percentage points for that field, essentually their education and probably working experience too), actual working position or status currently(space travelling agent, resort/vacation consultant, engineer, chemist, physicist, pilot, beggar if that empire allows for it{could be outlawed or cared for by government so it doesn't}, farmer, politician, artist, assistant, party goer, student, bon viveur, courtesan, go-go boy/girl, mayor of capital city, clerk, cleaner, syndicate/union official etc. that kind of thing), mood, saying of the day/proverb they go by, complaining or praising the government, individual satisfaction status, fully editable by us(the wording for it, though AlienGPT might help too). And the selection of where to appoint one can be of various of these categories some not typical. Maybe a specific artist has the proper qualities to command a ship imo and according to their stats, or a specific clerk would make a great General and a specific farmer a very succesful politician or whatever(there have been such cases historically, e.g. Emperors who were farmers or by chance officials and army officers who one would think were born to fill those specific roles but had no other specific education on that field priorly).

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