Galactic Civilizations 4is the latest entry in the longest-running sci-fi strategy game on the market, one that had remarkably humble beginnings. The originalGalactic Civilizationswas developed for IBM’s OS/2 in the early ’90s as a project Stardock CEO Brad Wardell worked on in his college dorm room, and the series has since grown to be a staple franchise in the4X strategy genre.
Now,Galactic Civilizations 4is gearing up to release a significant update that aims to reshape the game’s strategic landscape. As one might guess, “The Hyperlane Update” introduces hyperlanes, which allow units to travel swiftly along them on predictable paths. Naturally, these hyperlanes will serve as hotbets fortactical gameplay, with players shoring up defenses around key routes. The game’s AI —which has also enjoyed some upgrades in this update — is fully capable of considering these hyperlanes in its own strategies, as well. Of course, there’s tons more to cover in this update, and Game Rant sat down with Brad Wardell to discuss everythingGalCiv 43.0, along with his insights after 30 years in the industry.This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Everything Coming In GalCiv 4 Version 3.0
Q: What’s the core idea behind Version 3.0 ofGalactic Civilizations IV, and how does it reflect your own direction for the game?
A:So the basic idea is—I didn’t designGalCiv IVoriginally. I didn’t design 1.0. I designedGalCiv II,GalCiv I, and the OS/2 versions back in the ’90s. For III and IV, we had other designers.
Once IV came out, I stepped in and said, “Okay, I want to take this in a different direction.” So that’s what you’re seeing here in Version 3. It’s basically a year’s worth of going through feedback. I’m like a stalker on Steam, Reddit, Discord—everywhere—just seeing what people don’t like, what they do like, and what they want more of.
One of the big things ismap generation. In our genre, the map makes the game. And it’s amazing how many strategy games don’t realize that. Like, if I’m playing a game and I realize 30 turns in that I never had a chance because I’m stuck on an island or in some dead end, that’s really frustrating.
So the map generation is completely redone. Stars are now properly clustered. We brought back constellations fromGalCiv II, and we added hyperlanes—something we couldn’t do before because of performance constraints. But now, you may add hyperlanes between star systems to connect them, and it changes everything. It makes travel five times faster on those lanes, so pacing is way better.
You don’t get hyperlanes right away—you have to research them—but when you do, it’s a game-changer. And it’s not just cosmetic. If you put two star clusters next to each other and don’t have a way to move quickly between them, your fleet might take 15 turns to get there, and that’s not fun in 2025.
Q: Does the AI do things like shore up defences around hyperlanes?
A:Yeah, the AI recognizes them and builds military starbases around them. Pathfinding will always prefer the faster lanes. You don’t have to think about it—it just works. And from a design perspective, it’s not even that hard anymore. We could’ve done this back inGalCiv IIif the computers had been fast enough. Now it’s trivial.
Q: You mentioned fleet supply—what’s the goal behind that change?
A:Fleet supply is something that we added because people were winning just by spamming ships. Like, imagineStarCraftwith no supply cap—you just pump out infinite zerglings and win by brute force.
That was happening inGalCiv IV. So now we have a fleet supply system. It’s not super tight—we’re not trying to limit players too harshly—but once you hit that cap, you can’t just win with numbers. Quality starts to matter. It’s more likeTotal Annihilation, where you need to build better units to get an edge.
Q: What are some of the other big changes in Version 3.0?
A:Oh, tons. For me personally, I care a lot about AI, so I’ve been improving that a lot. But UI was a big deal too. That’s been a recurring complaint, and it’s tricky because you’re dealing with two very different types of players.
You have the old-school 4X players who expect a certain kind of interface—you click a ship, and you get a sidebarlike inStarCraft. Then you have newer players who expect things to be context-sensitive, with buttons and actions right where your mouse is.
We’ve tried to strike a balance. So now we have both: you get the classic sidebar stuff, but also contextual windows that pop up near your cursor. It’s like modernizing the interface without alienating long-time fans.
Q: What about performance? Late-game slowdown has been an issue in 4X games for years.
A:Yeah, absolutely. That’s not a sexy thing to put in a press release, but performance improvements have been a big focus for us. We’ve spent a lot of time optimizing late-game turns, background processing, all of it.
It’s boring work, but it matters. Because if you’re 200 turns in and each turn takes 15 seconds, that adds up fast.
Q: Did the additions from the Warlords expansion get touched by this update?
A:Yeah, Warlords has been heavily updated. The war aims system has been reworked from the ground up. And honestly, there’s a lot of stuff we didn’t even bother listing in the changelog—it would be too long.
Another thing we did was get rid of the approval system. It used to be that you had to keep your citizens happy, like inCiv. But it wasn’t fun. Now it’s all about crime. If you let crime get too high, bad things start happening. But you don’t have to micromanage happiness anymore. Just watch out for the mob bosses.
Q: You’ve mentioned usability a few times. Did the ship designer get any updates to help with that?
A:Yeah. The ship designer was one of those things where the tools were already there—it’s just that people didn’t know how to use them.
You’ve got people who want torecreate theEnterpriseand put missiles under the wings or make all kinds of crazy builds. And that’s great—we want that level of creativity. But most players had no idea how to even get started.
So I spent weeks going through it, trying to figure out what the stumbling blocks were. And it turned out it was, like, three UI changes. That was all it took. Just three tweaks, and suddenly people who had never touched it before were like, “Oh, I get it now.”
Q: Sometimes I’m not in the mood to design a ship, and I just want the AI to generate one for me.
A:Actually, the AI is now better than most players at ship design. That’s been one of the big improvements.
InGalCiv II, the AI was okay, but it wasn’t going to beat a good player. Now, with modern hardware, it can optimize performance in ways most humans don’t. And I think we’re at a point now where there’s no excuse for badAI in a 4X game. It just takes time and effort.
Q: It sounds like Version 3.0 is trying to appeal to everyone. Was that the intention?
A:That was absolutely the goal. In the past, with 1.0 or even 2.0, we’d make changes, and we’d know—okay, some people are going to like this, and some people aren’t. That’s just how it goes.
But with 3.0, the goal was, “Can we make something that everybody likes?” So we basically just did all the stuff people have been asking for. We went through the forums and community feedback and said, “All right, let’s just do it all. Let’s make the version that people actually want.”
Q: Does this include changes to the expansions, too, or just the base game?
A:Oh yeah, the expansions got a lot of updates too. EspeciallyWarlords. Like I mentioned, the war system got a full rework.
And a lot of little stuff got cleaned up too. Things that maybe weren’t broken but weren’t very fun. You just look at it and go, “Okay, no one enjoys this part. Let’s fix it.”
Q: Going back to the beginning, what made you want to makeGalactic Civilizationsin the first place?
A:That goes way back. It wasCiv. I was in college, playingCivilization, and when I launched the spaceship at the end, I thought, “Now I want to play that part.”
But there wasn’t anything like that. So I bought a book calledTeach Yourself C in 21 Daysand started writing my own version. That becameGalactic Civilizations.
Q: And you just called it that? Were you ever worried about it being too close toCivilization?
A:Oh, yeah. I called itGalactic Civilizationsbecause I thought it wasCivilizationin space. I was just a college kid—I didn’t know anything about trademark law.
But we got lucky. We got the rights to the name, and Sid [Meier] and those guys never had a problem with it. If I tried that today, I’d probably get sued into oblivion.
The History of Galactic Civilizations and Stardock
Q: Has tech changed how you approach things now compared to the early days?
A:Yeah, massively.GalCivwas actually the first commercial game to be multithreaded. Because I was always into AI, and AI is expensive. So we needed a way for the AI to run in the background.
Now, with SSDs, 64-bit memory, and all that, we can do things we couldn’t even dream of back then. Stuff that would’ve brought your machine to its knees in 2002 is no problem now.
Q: Do you get players comparingGalCivto newer games likeStellaris?
A:Oh yeah, all the time. AndI loveStellaris—it’s one of my favorite games. But it’s funny when people sayGalCivis kind of likeStellaris. I’m like, “Guys, we had science vessels, anomalies, planet setup stuff… decades ago.”
I’m not trying to be “that guy,” but it’s just interesting.Stellarisis basically a real-time version ofGalCiv II, in a lot of ways.
Q: Stardock isn’t a massive company. How do you keep the series going for so long on a smaller budget?
A:Well,GalCiv II made in my dorm room, so it’s been around forever. AndGalCiv IVtoday probably has one-tenth the budget of a game likeStellaris, but that’s okay.
I spend a lot of time in our Discord and forums just talking to fans. That’s honestly my favorite part of game development—just hanging out with the people who play our stuff. That’s what keeps it going.
Q: How much has the community shaped the direction ofGalCivover the years?
A:A ton. I mean, starbases didn’t even exist in the OS/2 version. That came directly from people saying, “Hey, I want to claim this part of space without having to colonize it.” So we were like, “Okay, how do we do that? Oh, here’s a starbase.”
Same thing with the lore. A lot of the lore came from players asking questions we hadn’t thought about. Like, “Why do the Drengin do this?” And we’d go, “Well, maybe it’s because of that.” And then that becomes canon.
Q: With so much lore, how do you keep track of it all?
A:ChatGPT. No joke. Like, sometimes I’ll go, “Did I ever say this about the Drengin?” and it’ll pull up a quote fromAltarian Prophecyin 2002 that I totally forgot about. It’s kind of scary, actually.
The Drengin, in particular, have a crazy amount of lore. I think we’re at over a hundred thousand words now, just on them.
Q: What makesGalCiv IVstand out from other 4X games today?
A:A few things. One is our free-form movement.Most 4X gameshave fixed movement—phase lanes or node connections. We don’t. It’s open. You can go anywhere. That’s harder to program, but it gives the player more freedom. It also means your map generation has to be better, because there aren’t chokepoints built in by default.
Another thing is custom civilizations. A lot of people now play with entirely custom civs. You can make full rosters that interact with each other—like, “Oh, we hate this other custom civ because they betrayed us during the war of the twin suns,” or whatever. It’s all dynamic, and it gives people a sense of ownership.
Q: Do you see players creating their own personal universes with those custom civs?
A:Oh, totally. Some players only play with custom civs. They create their own settings, their own lore, and build whole interconnected universes. It’s incredible.
Because of how the game is built, it feels handcrafted, even though it’s all procedural. They’re not scripting it line by line—it’s just the systems interacting in a really compelling way.
Q: You’ve touched a lot on UI design. Are there specific directions you want to push UI in for future strategy games?
A:Yeah, so one thingwe’re doing inAra: History Untold, which I’m working on with Oxide, is interactive tooltips.
Like, in most strategy games, if you hover over your gold, it’ll say, “You’re making five credits a turn.” That’s fine. But then if you want to change taxes, you’ve got to dig through like three menus.
InAra, we’re making it so you can hover over that tooltip, and it shows you why you’re getting five credits—and then you can change the tax rate right there. That kind of interactivity is the future.
Q: Are consoles or devices like Steam Deck changing how you think about UI, too?
A:Oh yeah, 100%. Steam Deck is a big one. But really, what I think is going to happen is you’ll start seeing people hook up SteamOS consoles to their TVs, like they do with Xbox or PlayStation.
And that means if yourgame needs a keyboard and mouse, you’re kind of screwed. So yeah, we’re already thinking about how to make UIs that work well with controllers. And if you can make a strategy game work with a controller, it’s probably just easier to use all around.
Q: Stardock is known for both software and games. Do the two sides of the company help each other?
A:Absolutely. A lot of our tech comes from our software side—things like WindowBlinds or Start11.
Even our crash reporter is built using the same low-level tech we use to hook into Windows. So when a game crashes, we get incredibly detailed reports—like, down to the line of code it failed on. Even if they’re using mods or pirated versions, we still get good data.
That’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to respond to bugs and optimize stuff as quickly as we have.
Q: What’s one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned the hard way in your career?
A:Elemental. 2010. That game was the most ambitious thing we’d ever done. You could design your own cities, your own units—everything was customizable.
But it crashed constantly. And the thing was, we didn’t understand memory fragmentation on 32-bit systems. It wasn’t that the game ran out of RAM—it was that there wasn’t a big enough contiguous block to load something.
There were no tools to figure that out back then. And so it just crashed. It was devastating.
But design-wise?Elementalis still the best game we ever made. We just couldn’t make it work technically. If we had released it today, with modern systems, it would’ve been a hit.
Q: Do you think you’ll ever revisitElementalnow that the tech has caught up?
A:Yeah, for sure. We’re talking about it internally already. These days, nobody blinks if a game uses 10 gigs of memory. You’ve got SSDs, smarter memory handling—it’s a totally different world.
We’ve been bringing back parts ofElementalgradually in other games. Like, the strategic zoom inGalCiv IV—that came straight fromElemental. Eventually, I think we’ll be able to bring the whole thing back and actually do it justice.
Q: Are there any recent indie games that have impressed you with their mechanics or ideas?
A:Yeah! There’s this little game—I think it’s calledNine Kings? It’s like ten bucks on Steam.
What I loved about it is how it handles army placement. You place armies in your territory, and then you build structures around them that give bonuses based on adjacency. So you’re constantly making this decision: do I send this army out to fight, or do I keep them here where they’re getting all these buffs?
It’s clever. I hope that game does well—it deserves to.
Q: What’s next for Stardock? And for you personally?
A:Right now, I’mworking onAra: History Untoldwith Oxide and Microsoft. That’s been a lot of fun—it’s very different fromGalCiv, but similar in spirit.
Stardock itself has three other games in development that we haven’t announced yet. They’re all very different—visually, mechanically, even philosophically.
And then there’s the broader ecosystem. We helped co-found Oxide and Mohawk. We’re still tight with the guys working onOld World,Ara, and so on. Even the Amplitude guys—we’ve got one of their producers working out of our office. It’s a small community. We’re all cheering each other on.
Q: Earlier, you mentioned taking art more seriously in recent years. What changed?
A:It started withStar Control: Origins. That was the first game where we said, “Let’s stop winging it with the visuals.” We hired real art directors, concept artists—we started building proper visual bibles.
I used to be one of those guys who didn’t take art seriously enough. Like, “Whatever, it looks fine.” But now, the stuff we’re making… people are gonna be like, “Wait,this is a Stardock game?” Yeah. Because we finally stopped treating art like an afterthought.
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