Looking forward to seeing the story-based missions and lore being worked into the main game.  I think it'll help a lot to "enliven" the galaxy. 

I'm also curious to see the new planet/colony system in action, along with the implementation of "star sectors".  If they do even half as well as advertised/hoped, it could truly be a game-changer. 

Very excited.

I noticed a typo on the Gameplay page: "micro manage too m any planets"

Not gonna lie, this is some of the best news I've heard in recent days. 

I'll just highlight some of the things I've seen from the Gameplay and FAQs page on the GCIV site.

When will the final release be?

It says the Alpha will be available before Summer 2021; that's end of June, right? Any details on how I can get in on it?

True Colonies/Why wouldn't I just have every world feed into Earth and not manage any worlds?

Introducing CGP Grey's Keys to Power concept as a gameplay mechanic? I like! Same goes for the concept of colonies feeding core worlds.

You may want to edit the response a bit though, because it doesn't read like a direct answer to the question posed.

Hell, while I was reading it, I was wondering "does this apply to Earth, or whatever my homeworld is, as well? Does this mean I can rebel against myself?"

Might want to clarify things a tad here.

Deeper Research/What is new with technology research?

I know the plan is for players to start each new game with 5 semi-randomly chosen technologies. However, will there be a game option where the player can pick and choose the 5 techs they start with instead?

A New Combat System/How is combat and war changing?

I'm highly looking forward to seeing how this aspect of the game in particular is going to change. I'm a simple man, I like my fleet battles.

Besides, I'm the asshole who's been bitching about carriers for the last little while. Any feedback I'll give is likely to be focused around ship combat more often than not.   

Anyhow, I like what little I've seen from the trailer. I'd hope there's still an option to "zoom out" the view though, so that I can watch the battle from a bird's eye view at any angle other than "directly above", like in GCIII.

Will the Bazaar and mercenary ships return?

Just wondering... any chance there's a mechanic by which we can build up a Leader with their own custom ship, with custom abilities... and then sell their services to the GCIV version of the Bazaar? That could be another way to earn credits each turn, assuming another civilization hires them.

I have over 2,000 hours in Galactic Civ 3.  The ship builder and civilization creator provided endless variety to that game.  Being able to run a game that emulated popular science fiction stories or write my own drastically improved the replayability of the game and set it apart from other 4x space games.  I'm most excited to see how these improve.  Although it's an under used option, I would still like to be able to export the object file of a ship. I am a 3D printing hobbyist and have been able to print many of my designs from Gal Civ 3.  

The next thing I'm excited for is the improvements to combat.  While I enjoy managing my civilizations, participating in large fleet battles has been one of the highlights for me.  I would like to see allies be able to participate in battles that go for more than one turn.  The mobile game Starbase Orion did a great job in this regard.   

I'm excited to see the multiplayer aspect.  If it works well, I have a couple friends who I think I could introduce to this game. 

Really excited to see what you come up with!  I'm hoping to be able to participate in the alpha when it comes out.

that is brilliant!

Ah, but getting back to this question.  I suspect that most of the things that I'm excited about are going to be pushed pretty hard by others also, so I probably don't need to mention them.  With one exception...

MULTIPLAYER!  I'm looking forward to a solid multiplayer experience.  MP in GC3 is a blast, but usually requires a bug-induced restart every hour or two - and loading up the game takes a long time, depending upon your cpu build. 

It always felt to me like GC3 was designed for SP, with MP kind of a bolt-on experience, and since a lot of the underlying systems were designed for SP they ended up being unstable or inducing bugs with MP, which makes me sad.

So... what I would like to see, personally, would be GC4 built from the ground-up as a MP game - where all of the various game systems and kernel are designed for MP; giving a rock-solid MP experience (and also figuring out which player's proc has the bandwidth to run any specific AI thread).  And then taking this MP game and allowing it to be played SP.   I realize that the vast majority of game hours will be SP, but it's just a lot easier to make a MP game SP, than the other way around (at least from my layman's non-CSci perspective)..

cheers,

-tid242

Wait, hold up.

By "custom ship designs", do you mean player-created ship hulls built in the Ship Designer? If so, it's a shame we'll never see all these custom ships fighting each other in the multiplayer arena... but if it can't be helped, it can't be helped.

Or, do you mean player-created ship component loadouts? Meaning we can't customise which components, weapons and defenses we use on our ships in response to what an opponent is packing on theirs, and we'll have to rely on the default blueprint-generated ships?

If it's the latter, well. I think that's going to be a problem. A big part of GalCiv ship combat is designing ships as needed in response to circumstances, after all.

Will we be able to take custom civilizations that utilize custom hull designs?  Part of the fun of multiplayer is seeing custom designs of another player, although I can see how that would quickly slow a game down.  If we could use custom civs or have a feature that turned custom ships on/off that may be an alternative to removing the feature entirely. 

Apple's software ecosystem sucks worse.     It is a closed system under Apple's control in such a way that makes it very hard and expensive for developers to port things into their ecosystem.   Most likely the game engine is built on something that is explicitly not supported by Apple's draconian software policies so the game simply can't or won't work on iOS even if it works fine in linux. (which is also unix based and should allow porting to Apple but should and does are never ever the same)

I work for a development company...  Blame Apple for the things not found on Apple.

The return of great AI in the 4x strategy space.  Crafting starships.  Decisions that mean something.

I am pretty sure Stardock nows how I feel about this. If I cant be a real employee at least I am dedicated, die hard fan who will shout across multiple media platforms how awesome their games are.

Oh and I am looking forward to seeing it all. I am excited for Paul, I am excited for Cari (CARI!!!), I am excited for Derek, and of course I am super-excited that Brad's hand is on the tiller so to speak.

Ship Designer, All the old school races and most of all > > sassy, snarky responses from aliens. On this the crew above never fails.

Great News. I'm already very excited. 

I love playing on the largest maps available, and learning that the maps in GalCivIV will be even larger than in GalCivIII is the best news ever. If you could manage to somehow make it possible to extend the colony rush, that would be even better.

Yeah, something like that would be fantastic, but, it's really hard to get the AI to use the tactical features with anything like the skill and nuances a human player will. Which can turn it into a cheesy exploit, instead of a cool feature.