GalCiv IV Dev Journal #113: Upcoming Content in 2026

Another Year in the 24th Century

We have an exciting year coming up for Galactic Civilizations IV, probably the biggest year of updates and improvements yet. I’ll talk about the Expansions and DLCs we have in development first and then the free updates next.

Expansion Pass 2

We’re very happy about our plans for the next two years of GalCiv, and we wanted to make that concrete for players by laying out those plans; and making it easy for players to get on board with a single purchase. The issue isn’t the content, it’s the price: It’s $75 which is a good deal when you consider it’s what we’re making for the game going into 2028. However, users just see the price tag.

So we will make a big change to Expansion Pass 2 – we’re going to add content to address those concerns. We are adding onto the Pass with an entirely new DLC: Tales of the Snathi.

If you have already bought Expansion Pass 2, you need do nothing, and the Snathi will be added automatically when they are released. If you felt that the Pass was too expensive, hopefully you will see more value in it now.

As a reminder, the schedule for 2026 is:

1. Federations & Empires (Spring)

2. Ascension (Fall)

These DLC will also be purchasable separately if desired.

2026

Now we get into the free updates and there’s a lot on our plate! We’ve been reading this thread and taking notes.

A few big things on our list:

1. Combat: We really want to beef this up in interesting ways this year. Some of this will involve updating the Warlords DLC, but a lot of it will be in free updates.

2. Planet Depth: Even the OS/2 version of GalCiv back 30 years ago had things like planetary statistics and more world depth. This is something we want to introduce in the big v4.0 update later this year.

3. UI, UI, UI: There’s a lot of UI work we’ve been doing in some of our other games that we want to bring over to GalCiv this year.

Let us know in the comments what else you would like to see this year!