Recent reviews by Tynendir

I wrote a 25 pages, 8000 words, review of this game but the website I was about to publish it on thought it was a bit too harsh. Here's the link if you wish to read it: https://1drv.ms/w/c/941bf63634e1fbca/ET8c0uosAe9Gh0YfVPIoBGUBFf8tN5ez5xRuuFiFNdm4qA?e=5OLHUb

I leave you with the conclusion:

As a conclusion, my review of Galactic Civilizations 4 is one of mixed feelings.



On one hand, the game has everything that a 4X gamer could wish for in terms of experience. It has some interesting and novel mechanics. It proposes a compelling sandbox with a true sense of progression within the game.



On the other hand, most of these mechanics feels like bloated afterthoughts. Some lack depth, others are too complex for the sake of obscurantism.



Moreover, despite the game best efforts to fix the micromanagement issues that plague a lot of 4X games, it is still ubiquitous and impactful on the enjoyability of the game.



It is such a shame because Galactic Civilizations 4 is not a bad game, no matter how badly I’m portraying it. It’s just not a great game that you will want to immerse yourself in. Yet.



As a silver lining, I want to say, that the developers are pushing hard to provide new updates and expansions that may help the game achieve greatness. A lot of the early bugs and instabilities have been fixed and I must say that the game is quite stable and playable. It lacks polish on certain mechanics for sure, but, without a doubt, you, as a 4X player, will have a relatively enjoyable experience playing the game. Despite all its flaws, I did spend more than a hundred hours playing the game and testing its mechanics.



Ultimately, my review will end with these words: Galactic Civilizations 4 may not be the next best thing in the 4X genre. It combines all the flaws of the genre with everything that also makes it great. Thus, you will probably enjoy the game for a short while, maybe all summer long but it probably won’t stand the test of time.

The game runs smoothly for me (3080). Just deactivate Depth of field and everything is fine.

Currently the game feels a bit barebone in some department.
Here's a rundown of the pros and the cons of the game in my honest opinion:

Pros:
- The goods and avantages provided by them are a fun mechanic.
-Province building and city building is quite interesting. Though the randommness of the type of villages spawning may hinder or help the player a lot. It's impossible to change the type of a village (cf: Cons: Game is limiting/Game is too random).
- The Knights (read advisors) system is interesting bug it may lack some depth (cf: Cons: Game is limiting/Game is too random).

Cons:
- Tactical battles lack a lot of polish:
Troup movement are very clanky.
AI is pretty bad and will try to kill your ram before anything else and rams are super tanky. It makes battle trivial.
Units do not have a lot of options to aid you battles.
Morale mechanics are very janky and low level units, especially early game, almost instantly flee when they come into contact with enemies.
- Game is very repetitive.
It's mostly a waiting game. I wait to have more gold, more books and more manpower. Every other ressources (especially faith) is useless. Gold and Manpower are what's needed almost 90% of the time and it's just a matter of waiting for more.
- No tech tree. Though some people will say that the Advantages and building upgrades mechanics are the tech tree; I disagree. The game would benefit a lot from having a proper tech tree with small benefits. It's not as if the medieval era was completely stale in terms of technological advancement. It would be nice to have a way to sink your books and faith points in something else.
- Lack of some options when starting the game. You can start as 1 Province if you wish but there's no way to force everyone to start on 1 Province. Give me a true sandbox experience.
- Game is limiting:
You can only have 1k Manpower, Faith or Books in the bank. Extra is converted to gold. No way to increase this limit (that I found so far).
You can only have X Knights (read councillors). That X (8 people I think?) is impossible to upgrade notwithstanding with the size of your kingdom.
- Game is too random:
It's impossible to change the type of a village of one's province. If you're swimming in Faith and Books you would want to remove some monasteries from your other provinces but you can't.
Some Knights missions are random. Sometimes they will ask you to pay them to perform certain missions and you can accept or refuse. These missions are usually quite expensive for what they do with low benefits (such as bribing enemy Knights). Sometimes you really need a mission in particular to pop but you will need to wait and it might never come. When it does you might not have enough gold to do it...
- Game is sometimes too obscure:
How does culture work? What are the benefits of having high influence? What does this or that stat do? Sometimes information is not as readily avalaible as it should.
Some mechanics are obscure for no reason in particular. Sure you can look at how one mechanic works in the Royal Library (read the Game Manual) but having mechanics be explained through a manual is lazy game design for a 2022 game.

TLDR: Game can be fun but lacks a lot of polish. It's not a complex grand strategy game and whatever complexity it has is because of obscure and soulless (read unfun) game mechanics.

This review has been written after 47 minutes of playtesting through the campaign (5 missions done). Take my insight with the knowledge that I didn't play the game for long.

Buyers beware:
The game does not support many features that some may think essential in games released in 2021:
- No ultra-wide support, only two resolutions options available with the highest being 1080p.
- No hotkey remapping. Quite unacceptable for a RTS game. If you have an AZERTY keyboard you have to use the numberpad for grouping units which makes it quite unwieldly.
- No options for graphics.

Other complaints that I have with the game in no particular order:
- The voice acting is quite horrendous with very shallow voices. The only believable character in the way they deliver their lines was AIDA, an AI...
- The micromanagement of the economy seemed fun at first (having to have both collectors going from an asteroid to a building and then a transporter going from the building to your HQ). After a while you notice that asteroids run out of resources very quickly and that you have way too many collectors assigned to an asteroid (limit of 2 collectors per asteroid) and the rest is idle.
- Box selecting units select both military and eco units which make it a pain in the ass to separate the two. Adding to the point above it's extremely unwieldy to reassign your eco units to a new mining location.
- The eco is slow with asteroids running out of ressources very quickly and having to reassign eco units very often. It might be due to the particular missions that I played that are very early in the campaign.
- No shift queuing buildings. Pain to micromanage.
- It might be a personal preference but the game looks ugly. It tries too hard to look like Starcraft without achieving a sleek look and with poorer gameplay. I know that I'm comparing a small company with the Blizzard behemoth but oh well.

Here are a few pros:
- It does have an old school vibe to it. Unfortunately when I get that itch I prefer playing Starcraft 1 or Age of Empires 2 which are far superior in design and execution.
- The campaign seems to be quite long (small missions though but more than 50 of them).
- It's cheap.

Good difficulty and good replayability value. For the amateurs of hard RTS games and amateurs of the zombie genre.

1000 hours review: The game obviously lacks replay value. I definitely didn't finish the game on all 20 ascension levels, with all 4 characters nor did I get all achievements. The game hasn't even established itself as the reference of the genre (rogue-like card based dungeon crawler) and no way in hell do I play almost every day for 20ish minutes doing the daily challenge.
All in all I'd give it a 5/7.

I do recommend this game for many reasons and that despite the fact that I myself do not enjoy much playing it. In this review I will dwell into that dichotomy and give you my thoughts on this game and its expansion: Natural Law.

Why do I recommend the game?

The game is a true successor to the apex predator of the 4X strategy games: Master of Orion. When playing Interstellar Space: Genesis I had the same feelings as when I was playing MoO I and II. This one more turn feel as well as many other intuitive features reminiscent to games I've played in the past. Thus if you've liked the games I've mentionned, no doubt you will enjoy playing this game.
Despite its similarities, it's not a clone of MoO and the game does bring fresh mechanics such as an exploration system that lasts much longer than in other 4X games, as well as Heroes units (both for ships and colonies) and many others. It also as unique and distinct races that are refreshing and enjoyable to encounter, changing the pace from the regular Space Orks Pirates and Goody Goody Space Elves that are good at spying.
The game features many deep mechanics that are sometimes overlooked in 4X games such as spying and diplomacy. Moreover it has an interesting arborescent tech tree with many strategic choices to be found.
The combat system is nice with a robust customization system to build your ships and interesting tactical mechanics.
All in all, the game is and feels like a love project from the developers and considering the price (less than 40 euros for both the base game and the extension) it is well worth it for the amateurs of the genre.

Why didn't I enjoy this game as much as I should?

To be fair, I do think the game is amazing and has many details but after 50 turns or so I get bored. I don't know if other games of the genre such as Stellaris have spoiled me or if I can't get into games as much as I used to.
I do enjoy the beginning of the game, though sometimes it feels slow. The exploration mechanics are fresh and neat, there are many strategic choices to be had, etc. Yet after a while, after having encountered all the other races and developed in my immediate vicinity, I feel bored.
I think I do not like the outpost ship mechanic. I sometimes feel like sharing my systems with the AI that spams outpost ships and send them everywhere. When they don't, then I don't feel like controlling those far away systems.
Other pet peeves include: the leader mechanic where I feel like they are a bit overpowered across the board. Very strong early on because of some flat production or science and even stronger late game as they boost all pop on one system (sometimes tripling or quadrupling your production in one system).
The research system is intense but I often neglect to develop new weapon systems as refitting all the ships are a chore. I wish it would be a bit more streamlined such as it is the case with Shields. In the case of the shields, once you research a new class of shields it is automatically applied to all your ships. I wish it were the case for weapons with different types of weapons (kinetic, beam and missiles as it is already the case in game) and automatically upgrading them as you research them to avoid this micromanagement. Often times I either delay building new ships (as I'm researching a weapon tech that I want to equip on my ships) or delay researching weapon techs (as I've just built ships and don't want to go through the hassle of refitting them so soon).
To conclude, perhaps those inconveniences that I experience are only due to my particular way of playing, perhaps not. Despite these, I do recognize the potential of the game and I heartily recommend it to people who like the genre.

The graphics look incredibly old. I'm usually not one to judge a book by its cover but I was expecting better in terms of overall quality. The gameplay seems fine and I'm sure fans of Master of Orion 2 will enjoy yet I can't bear myself playing a 2020 game looking like a game from 1998. Hopefully the devs will update the graphics so as to be fitting our technological era. I'll unfortunately ask for a refund until then.

Game received through Humble Bundle Monthly January 2018:

The game keeps minimizing and refuses to go fullscreen. My comp is buffy (1070X, 16Go RAM, SSD) and yet the game lags and the voice are distorded. It seems the game is badly optimized when I see the plethora of posts online of people having the same issues and Square Enix telling them that it's not their fault if their comp can't handle the game (cf my comp).

Considering the sate of affairs I cannot recommend this game.

Great DLC. Zero really delivered.
This DLC adds two new major mechanics with Sectors and Deep Space Construction while revamping the existing features (Tree Tech, Buildings, etc) to accomodate the change. This DLC also translated into an update for the core game which fixed most the bugs that still existed. Don't mind negative reviews, people are pissed that this DLC isn't free. But it is worth the mere 10 bucks it costs.