We are busy on our next update which includes mod updates, improvements to the tutorial, lots of new events, more music, and major improvements to the War AI. Please read below for more details.
To enable the patch, please do the following:
Steam
Select Galactic Civilizations IV from your Steam Library list.
Right-click and select "Properties."
Select the BETAS tab.
From the dropdown, select "Insider" and click Close. If you don't see this option, restart Steam.
Steam should pull down the changed files; if you ever want to return, do the same as above but select "default."
Epic
Epic does not currently support old version downloads.
Please note: The opt-in (Insider Build) is an early preview of the next update, and you might experience bugs or other issues.
Important
Mac/Parallel users: We are aware that folks running GalCiv4 on Macs are having issues starting the game. We have added an option that may address this. If you are having trouble starting, open your prefs.ini and set "DisplayResolutionCheckEnabled" to 0. We want your feedback if this addresses your startup crash issue.
11/15/23 | v2.1 INSIDER BUILD Changelog
Translation/Text
Galaxy
Map sizes won't be reduced if you choose map sizes that are beyond the recommended for your system if you have more than 10GB of RAM.
Gameplay
Precursor Elevator decay mod changed from multiplier to flat.
Duranitum cost for Space Elevator orbital increased from 1 to 2.
Space Elevator orbital now has a Maintenance cost of 1.
Asteroid Mining Factory benefit increased from +0.1 manufacturing to +0.2
Anti-Matter bombs -- fixed Hull Mass Scale typo that made them much too heavy.
AI is more nuanced about attacking enemies with smaller fleets if they are certain to win and they are close.
Workshop
11/14/23 | v2.1 INSIDER BUILD Changelog
Art
AlienGPT
Audio
The game gets 22 minutes of new music spread through the course of the game.
Midgame music changed from 100 turns to 60 turns (5 years) so that the next batch of music could be heard sooner.
New events get voiceovers (English).
Core
Mac/Parallel users: We added an option to turn off the startup resolution check. To enable, open your prefs.ini and set "DisplayResolutionCheckEnabled "to 0. We want your feedback if this addresses your startup crash issue.
Fixed a stuck turn caused by the game saving while a ship was moving.
Fixed a memory leak in the Ship Designer.
Battle Viewer
The general animation of battles on the map is faster.
Disabling text of 0 values in the battle log.
Adding Overkill display, so if a ship is shot at that is already dead, it doesn't show up as incorrectly defended damage.
Added a new Accuracy column next to the weapon range.
Added should be three new percentage columns next to each damage mitigation strategy, with the statuses of those defenses.
Fixed a bug that caused the battle predictions sometimes to be wildly different than the actual results.
Gameplay
AI
Major AI update: Military commander AI and Political leader AI now talk to each other to ensure their military is ready to go to war before declaring war (no more declaring war while they're still assembling fleets).
AI is better at determining whether a given civ is within range of the other for diplomatic calculations.
AI doesn't consider being at war with a civ that hates being a real team-up.
AI begging you to declare war on someone else is much less frequent.
Aggressive civs don't use siege ships but, instead, go right to Transports.
AI can classify planets as wealth-generating focused planets.
AI is better at building approval districts when necessary.
An AI that is supposed to be murdering everyone will not ask for peace.
AI is much better at avoiding war with civs they can't easily reach unless they've been paid off or have no other alternative.
Snathi will no longer defend their planets from invasion. Neither will the Xendar. It's all attack attack attack.
Fixed a bug that caused AI to send individual ships to attack invaders near Core World.
Siege fleets are much braver about attacking worlds that have defenders.
Space monsters and pirates are more intelligent in who and how they attack.
AI bonuses for high levels are reduced due to AI getting smarter. Changes include:
Bright:
Genius:
AI logistics bonus reduced from 3 to 2.
AI is no longer given extra money at the start of the game.
AI population cap bonus reduced from 3 to 2.
Incredible:
AI Sensor range bonus decreased from 24 to 16.
AI starting money bonus reduced from 50,000 credits to 5,000.
AI much less willing to give money each turn to player for stuff.
AI much less willing to go to war with their friends for stuff.
Artifacts
New Artifact: Genius bomb. Slowly increases the intelligence of a target core world to 20 over time.
New Artifact: Magnify Influence. Increases influence generation by 3X on a target planet for 24 turns.
Citizens
Worker specialists no longer provide Influence Growth for their colonies due to being busy...you know, working.
Influence per turn from Workers reduced from 20% per social skill to 5% to social skill.
Entertainer Influence generation reduced from 50% of their social stat to 10% of their social stat.
Celebrity influence generation reduced from being 100% of their social stat to 50%.
Culture (Influence) related techs are somewhat more expensive to research.
Reduced the Influence of scientists.
Criminals LIKE crime.
Executive Orders
Events
Spawned events Civs (Thalan, Snathi, etc.) are now the result of someone making a choice in an event (doesn't have to be the player) and it will spawn near the civ that made the choice and rolled those dice.
Lots of new leader events added.
Updated Tutorial with new steps and objectives, better flow, and newer player-friendly pop-ups.
Improved VO's provided by BattleMode.
New events are now hooked up for voice acting.
The "Terrible Weapon" event's negative effect duration was reduced to 24 months, but its permanent beam attack benefit also decreased to 4.
Event-based diplomatic effects edited to be more succinct.
Galaxy
"Rare Stars" galaxy start option makes stars rarer for hermit players.
The gigantic sector size increased from 100,000 tiles to 130,000 tiles. For reference, a medium sized map on its own is 10,000 tiles.
Improvements
Fixed Bug that allowed non-homeworld improvements to be built on your homeworld by removing your capital city.
Hyperion Shrinker is now a civ achievement so everyone can potentially build it, but the cost increased from 200 to 600.
Starport Maintenance reduced from 2 to 1.
New improvement: Orbital Farm. Unlocked with Xeno Agriculture (early food upgrade).
Industrial Center buffed. Manufacturing increased from 3% to 10%.
"Beacon of Babylon's" Harmony Crystal cost reduced from 5 to 3, faction-wide influence buff reduced from 10% to 5%.
Cultural Beacon Influence per turn benefit was reduced from 20% to 10%, and Manufacturing Cost was reduced from 1400 to 600.
"Manufacture Life" always produces a Yor instead of whatever citizen type the player has chosen (i.e., won't create cats anymore).
"Orbital Farm" Durantium cost increased from 1 to 5.
Misc
Added many new Leader Traits.
Fixed (reduced) an exploit where players could easily get players to go to war with each other with some trinkets and tech.
Mountainous Worlds can now have up to 2 fertility (instead of always 0).
Xeloxi tolerance to pollution increased.
The "Asteroid Mining Module" cost was reduced from 40 to 10.
"Military Starbases" will automatically attack enemies that come into their zone of control.
Balance pass on the planet's default cultural relevance.
Pirates are allowed to build ships into the late game.
The "Natural Enemy" penalty increased from -3 to -8 (i.e., Drengin and Torians will never be friends).
Diplomatic bonuses and penalties edited to be more succinct.
Tech
Ships
"Gravity's Heart" Commander ship nerfed, losses a Plasma Weapon.
T'lass's Flagship nerfed. Loses 2 Plasma weapons.
Tiny and Small Hulls were made slightly visually bigger on map to be easier to see.
AI is better at researching larger hulls.
Tiny Ship hull cost increased from 12 to 20.
Tiny Ship Base Moves increased from 3 to 4.
Small Ship (Frigates) Base Cost increased from 30 to 75.
Small Ship Base Moves increased from 3 to 4.
Small Ship Base HP increased from 5 to 8.
Small Ship Base Mass increased from 10 to 15.
Small Ship Base logistics increased from 3 to 4.
Medium Ship (Cruiser) base HP increased from 32 to 50.
Medium Ship Base Moves increased from 3 to 4.
Large Ship (Battleships) Base HP increased from 128 to 150.
Large Ship Base Moves increased from 3 to 4.
The Huge Ship (Dreadnoughts) base HP increased from 200 to 300.
Huge ship Base moves increased from 3 to 4.
Carrier Module fighter capacity increased from 4 to 16.
Carrier Module cost increased from 150 to 550.
Carrier Module Mass increased from 15 to 20 Mass + 20% of the Total Mass to 50% of the Total Mass.
Ships with the "Escape Battle" ability (such as the Xeloxi Command ship "Ladgerda") are no longer almost indestructible.
AI ship designs emphasize defensive modules more than before.
Anti-matter bomb damage reduced from 12 to 8 HP.
Starbase on weapon volleys changed so that they can fire every turn. Whoahahaha!
Anti-Matter bomb requires a ton of space.
Missions
Restored missing trigger set references for missions.
Disabled the Korath mission, as its not ready.
Restored deleted scenario conversations for the missions.
Restored missing trigger sets for other missions.
Tutorial
Updated Tutorial Screens to Blur English Text.
Updated Tutorial VO.
AI players are literally blocked from attacking the pirate shipyard on the Tutorial mission. We tried to be nice.
Disabled the redundant tutorial pop-up windows for research, shipyards, etc. We already have pop-up windows for those, and having a duplicate that then spawns another similar window breaks flow.
The tutorial map can have nebula and precursor relics.
Nebulas are now rare.
Tutorial techs are made quite a bit more expensive in general to prevent players from quickly going through them.
Additional techs added to the tutorial, including Planetology (for food).
Minor text edits for flow/clarity per playtesting feedback.
The player no longer has a step for researching Colonization. Instead, they'll get directed straight to 'Build a Colony Ship' if they haven't already.
Fixed issue where the "Colonize a Class 10+ Planet Objective "objective wouldn't complete when appropriate.
The 'On Selected' trigger doesn't work if the entity became selected through the end-turn tab.
Fixed a problem where the select entity (e.g., a probe) selection event wasn't getting triggered if the game selected the entity as part of the End Turn process.
Patched other cases that caused the selection events to get missed.
The "Executive Order" trigger is no longer triggered by using an Artifact.
MP
Text/Localization
Updated text for refits to explain that movement bonus is only for friendly territory.
The AI is humbler in its speech when it's losing a war.
Text updated so explain that ORGANIC population won't grow without food. Food doesn't help robots.
Added Multiple New Lore Lines for the GNN Events
More human-gendered names.
Fixed empty string issues and text sizes.
Replaced references of Survey ships with Flag Ships (They are Flagships)
General move to changing "The Alliance" to "The Terran Alliance."
MEGA translation update. It should be of much higher quality. Fingers crossed.
Big Spanish update with community help in improving it. Shout outs to Charlemagne and Shekerd.
Polish font sizes increased on QHD UI.
Russian font size increased to be more readable.
Spanish font sizes were adjusted to be easier on the eyes.
Slight tweaks to Chinese so that inline icon better match the text size.
Updated Chinese fonts to remove weights and increased 4K point sizes from user feedback.
UI
You can no longer place multiple one-per-ship components on a ship design when in Advanced Edit mode.
Fixed issue where the game would not warn about invalid UI sizes if the resolution had not been set manually in prefs or options screen.
Fix several problems where the UI scale wasn't set correctly both in the UI and on startup.
Update Diplomat slots, to support up to 4 lines for longer race names.
The Civ name lists in the End game summary screens no longer overflowed the bottom of the screen if there were too many.
Narrowed the width of the Civ summary tooltip.
Fix the turn distance calculations for the tooltip when pressing CTRL on the galactic map.
Tiles outside of your fleet range no longer incorrectly state that the "Subspace Streaming" tech is required.
Escape Battle Module now has cooldown information in the tooltip.
Removed blank spaces appearing on the bottom of citizen tooltips.
Steam Workshop: The Workshop Button in the Title Screen pops up Steam Overlay (only in Steam, not epic).
Updated Artifact card to a wider format to better fix text.
Ship path numbers now correctly show when a selected ship moves off.
Updated the Databank Civ overview screen to use more consistent terminology.
Updated the tooltip for the Main Menu icon should read just "Workshop."
Added icons to Cultural Focus dropdown so that all the Ideologies have an icon displayed in front of them.
Civilization Abilities "Raiders" now has the correct Income tooltip.
On the databank screen, added an explanation that citizens may come from any race.
Workshop / Mods
Enable Steam Workshop on Steam build. This replaces the current workshop hosted on internal servers.
We have added an external mod manager that can be opened from the game’s Launcher. This tool allows you to install, enable, and disable mods.
