It’s time for a quick teaser of our latest update v2.9, named “The Starview Update” is coming soon for Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova. Alongside a substantial list of the usual bugfixes and balance changes we’ve applied to address issues players have found and reported to us, we’ve continued to add content and improve the overall user experience of playing the game. I won’t cover everything here because the v2.9 update is pretty substantial, so I’m picking out some choice titbits to whet your appetites for its upcoming coming release. First up, we’ve got another redesigned roster of ships for our very own psychopathic Sentient Droids, the Yor! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/8429b75759357ef79bdc320a4e8b7d9ef8732f76.jpg[/img] The Yor Singularity are a favorite of many GalCiv players including, so I’ve been reliably informed, Frogboy himself, the lead designer behind the GalCiv series. Fans of this malevolent cybernetic monstrosity are in for a treat because their ship models have undergone a rather extensive visual upgrade! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/64f4649eaefbc25a448b53131cfcbae0942aca90.jpg[/img] Whenever we update ship models, the designs that are being replaced are still available as an alternative set for players to use alongside these replacements. As usual, the “Classic Yor” set is available for those of you who still love those older ships. This will also increase the range of Synthetic and Cybernetic themed models to include in your custom civilizations too. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/846867191ad7d3009310259705ee72b7f5306075.jpg[/img] What’s more, Starbase and Shipyard UIs have been beautified and tidied! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/b311548ed278b858ef4b45ce93b8946950ba41cd.jpg[/img] We’ve removed the graph guidelines lines from behind the Starbase, showing the galaxy behind in all its glory, and it really stands out a lot better now. The Starbase UI has had a redesign to make it cleaner and easier to parse too. These Starbases have never looked so good! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/dea1debbbf80fa601a7909b697e67e3e99b5760a.jpg[/img] The Shipyard screen has also been upgraded, again showing off your beautiful ship designs against the Starfield backdrop instead of those old grid lines. You’ll even see the occasional ship fly past too! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/ac4aaec8c35e944fe743512b538568f7b15cb3b9.jpg[/img] In line with this update’s theme of raising the overall quality of the game’s general user experience, there’s been a serious pass made over the in-game text and tooltips to replace outdated information and better clarify their meanings. GalCiv is a complex game series even for 4X, and Supernova is no exception to this rule, with many different interlocking game mechanics and systems to consider. As the game develops, your civilization grows and the amount of fleets you have to manage increases, the use of GalCiv 4’s automation tools and Rally Points can be a serious time and effort saver. Rally Points aren’t just for automating the process of flying newly built ships out to a distant location: veteran players have come up with many novel and ingenious uses for them. Before this update, accessing the UI for Rally Points required an actively selected Shipyard or ship (and often meant you had to search for one on the map to do so), but now they can be rapidly accessed through their own dedicated hotkey, defaulted to “P”. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/a07fcf056fa8a78c1017ae96733e7d7200fc0375.jpg[/img] Once your Rally Points are set up, you can use the automation tools to direct fleets to and from them. These controls were previously located in the Civilization Policies screen, but we felt it would be more consistent if these automation tools had their dedicated place on the main screen’s toolbar, as you can see below. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/a69b39b10a6600e5a94eb1203480f8d67698629c.png[/img] The Civilization Policy screen is a lot neater as a result, as you can see. And what’s this at the top left of the screen? [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/bf297f2d0c2c462ab49409cee136f96017b67fd4.jpg[/img] That’s right, the old tax brackets of Low, Medium, High etc has gone, replaced with a slider that allows a much finer gradation of taxation. This is a pretty significant change as it gives you more control over your economic, industrial and research output. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/f9353456c7c2a7c95626781f777caf470ca46e01.jpg[/img] The team have also removed deprecated and unused techs from the tech tree, so they’ll not turn up in your game anymore. Along with the larger changes made to better organize the tech tree over recent patches, we’re hoping that this smooths the process of picking your path through the research tree to get what you need from your civilization as the game develops. We recognize that it’s essential for players to have quick access to the information they need to make the right decisions, turn by turn, and so this effort should go some way towards ensuring there’s less confusion and more fun in your campaigns. As I stated previously, as you’d expect there’s a big batch of gameplay updates, including bugfixes, balance changes and general game polish bundled along with this patch. I’m going to pick just one of these, as it’s definitely one I see complaints about all the time on our various socials: the Festron no longer consume Citizens they shouldn’t be able to eat, like beings made out of rock or metal. Practically speaking, this means they can’t eat any Citizen that doesn’t itself consume Food. This kind of fix may seem like small fry, but immersion is really important in a strategy game, and little inconsistencies like that can really take you out of your game. Now your little Festron guys can chow down on those tasty Taurians, Xeloxi, Catgirls and all the rest without magically consuming Yor and Onyx along with them. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44022615/539dcffbc9311258ef47dc34f2607c3a7caed90c.jpg[/img] Finally, the v2.9 update brings another well requested feature to fix a potentially frustrating situation regarding downloadable content for GalCiv 4: if you own any of the DLC for Supernova, you’ll no longer need to be online to access that content. Not much more to say about this, but thank you for bearing with us as we got this one sorted. There’s a lot more to this update but that should be enough for now. We hope you enjoy v2.9 and the improvements to Galactic Civilizations IV’s overall user experience. Cheers!