Recent Articles In GalCiv IV Dev Journals
You might’ve noticed we had a serious outage that took down our website, forums—everything. Some people have speculated on what could be so catastrophic as to take us down for WEEKS?  For legal reasons, I can't get into the details other than to say it wasn't ransomware but it was a total data loss. This catastrophe wiped out everything at our data center, including the on-site backups, so we lost over three decades of data in one hit. Fortunately, we run nightly offsite bac...
At long last, Galactic Civilizations IV v2.95 is here and it's a big one. I'd like to think it addresses most of the high priority feedback we've gotten on the game since launch, especially in terms of map generation. But well beyond that, v2.95 is a major improvement in everything from performance, balance, multiplayer stability, late game stability, AI, and more. Seriously, this is a big update. Assuming there's no issues with it, the next big update will be version 3.0, which is one tha...
My office has a lot of printouts in binders regarding the history of the universe (The Mithrilar Cycle) that both Galactic Civilizations and Elemental come from.   I once had the opportunity to write a book, Destiny's Embers  and that was quite an adventure.  My original story was 300 pages but my publisher, Del Rey, wanted it fleshed out and had an editor greatly expand the exposition of it.  One of these days, I hope to publish the original manuscript which, I should ...
With the benefit of hindsight, Tales of the Arnor should have been handled as a full expansion pack. It just has such a massive scope of changes in it.    For me, personally, it's the first GalCiv IV DLC I've got to work on since Tales of Centauron which I thoroughly enjoyed.  But this one...this one is just so much bigger. This will probably not be the last post I make on Tales of the Arnor so I will probably miss some things here. Of the Nyx So as some of you kno...
So I'm working on the upcoming DLC called  Tales of the Arnor and it's going to go pretty hard into the background on the Yor. To do that, I really need to explain a bit about the background of this game which, since it's a 30 year old series there's a lot of bits involved. No pun intended. In the beginning... So at the start there were the Mithrilar.  These were beings that we would consider to exist outside our universe.  One of them, called Draginol (which is where ...
I've been saying this a lot to design teams lately: There is no subsitute for playing the game and then playing the game some more and then playing it still more. And Warlords really shows that. Now, those of you who get it right away are in for a particular treat that you should take advantage of as much as you can while you can:  There are a lot of absolutely crazy ship components in this that we have balanced as best we can but I can tell you right now, I there are going to be some...
v2.5 and the Warlords Expansion is now available, and we're excited to share the ins and outs. Check out my guided tour below: v2.5 and the Warlords Expansion is now available, and we're excited to share the ins and outs. Check out my guided tour below: [confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1791918081/Guided+Tour+of+GalCiv+IV+v2.5+Warlords[/confluence]
[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1737392193/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+-+v2.4+Populi+Tour[/confluence]
[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1635549196/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+37+-+The+New+Biomes+in+the+v2.2+Ethnology+Update[/confluence]   ______________________________________________________ [confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUP/pages/1471414278/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+Links[/confluence]   ______________________________________________________ [confluence title=""]https://sta...
[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1634729996/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+36+-+v2.2[/confluence]   ______________________________________________________ [confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUP/pages/1471414278/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+Links[/confluence]   ______________________________________________________ [confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/p...
We are currently working on the base game of the Epic edition.  This will come out at GalCiv IV 2.2 next month. To make it easy for future updates to it, we are going to be bringing the code-base up to the Supernova edition. So in essence, GalCiv IV 2.2 base game on Epic will be the same as Supernova except for the new content (and things like AlienGPT).
October 17, 2023 by redskittlesonly on JoeUser Forums
In the vast and intricate realm of 4X gaming, empire management takes center stage. Traditionally in this genre, the cardinal rule was simple: the bigger the empire, the better your chances of victory. Resources were tightly intertwined with territory, making rapid expansion a key strategy for acquiring as much land and resource production as possible.    But recent times have ushered in a shift, with 4X games offering players the possibility of success with smaller, more focuse...
One of Stardock's big challenges has been localizing our games.   GalCiv IV has over 180,000 words in it.  That's a lot to translate.  But that's not really the biggest issue.  The biggest issue is that we are constantly adding new text to the game which makes it hard for our linguistics team to keep up.   We typically use Trados for this sort of thing.  It's very powerful but it is not fast.  So I decided to write my own app called GC4TranslatorUI.  ...
September 25, 2023 by Frogboy on Brad Wardell - Skinning the frog
When utilizing Stardock's AlienGPT, one might naturally ponder the question: which animals are the most sought-after choices for building a civilization around? Well, here's the answer.     Nearly 40% of users opt for cats, followed by foxes, fish, dogs, snakes, and more. Animal Number of Mentions Percentage (%) cat 1445 30.90 fox 331 7.08 fish 320 6.84 dog 319 6.82 snake 258 5.52 bird 251 5.37 tiger 219 4.68 wolf 190 4.0...
September 14, 2023 by Frogboy on Brad Wardell - Skinning the frog
Greetings! We are coming to the finish line for GalCiv IV: Supernova! Our once reasonable scope has, of course, exploded over the Summer as we got our hands into making this the best space 4X game we've ever made! The next major BETA update, 1.90 will be focusing on making the game more appealing to a much wider group of people. Galactapedia   This feature is expected to expand significantly in the coming weeks. We're excited about its potential and...