Galactic Civilizations IV on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Take command of a civilization that has just achieved faster-than-light travel in Galactic Civilizations IV, the newest entry in the award-winning space 4X strategy game series. Explore the galaxy, colonize worlds, shape cultures, make alliances, fight wars and pioneer new technologies.
Galactic Civilizations IV is a space, grand strategy and simulation game
developed and published by Stardock Entertainment.
Released on October 19th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 12 languages: English, German, French, Russian, Spanish - Spain, Polish, Spanish - Latin America, Portuguese - Brazil, Portuguese - Portugal, Italian, Simplified Chinese and Korean.
It has received 1,887 reviews of which 1,378 were positive and 509 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.1 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 14.59€ on Steam with a 60% discount.
The Steam community has classified Galactic Civilizations IV into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Quad-Core Processor (Intel Core i5 / AMD Ryzen 2x00)
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1GB VRAM Video Card
- DirectX: Version 11
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 22 GB available space
- Sound Card: Any
- Additional Notes: 720p Minimum Screen Resolution Required
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Disclosure up front: This is my first Gal Civ game. A lot of the negative reviews I've seen seem to be centered on the experience returning/veteran players are having with this game. The consensus seems to generally follow that GC4 is not enough of an advancement on GC3 to justify paying for it if you already have previous entries in the series. I'd like to acknowledge the existence of this consensus opinion and concede that it is not mutually exclusive with anything I've written here. So, with that caveat, I will no longer bury the lede: I have immensely enjoyed my time with this game. As an avowed fan of the turn based 4X genre, Gal Civ presents a deep, satisfying mesh of interlocking systems that will largely be familiar to genre vets: you start small, you claim planets (our sci fi re skin of cities) the planets get you more stuff so you can more easily build fleets to get more resources etc Some of the more unique mechanics to this particular 4x iteration took me a game to wrap my head around. Anecdotal Example: building mining starbases early and often is crucial for securing an income of strategic resources. I built absolutely none of these until fairly late in the game, instead leveraging my civilization's advanced science to trade of technologies I'd researched to other civilizations in exchange for the resources, and since I was on an easy difficulty for my first game (with a lot of civilizations on the map) this actually worked out. I've included the full anecdote because I think it also exemplifies some of the fun ways systems can overlap in this game! My main critique is the battle layer. I feel like the 4X genre has progressed past the simple days of old where you just make the two armies smash against each other until one is gone. So many other entries in this genre have found ways to make the battle layer more interesting. For Example: Proxy studios games like Zephon or 40k Gladius have heavy combat focus and do not separate units fighting into another layer and keep one unit per tile, so that the movement layer is also simultaneously a tactical positioning layer. This can get very VERY convoluted in the late game when there are tons of units out, but it is generally engaging. But a LOOOOOOOOOT of games have a separate tactical layer for battles, like Endless Legends, Humankind, and at least one other game in my library at this very moment have similar but distinct ways of transitioning the player into a tactical positioning layer when a battle starts to add more depth to combat strategy than just "make fleet have big number smash into other fleet" And with a game with so much depth to its mechanics nearly everywhere else I find myself disappointed by the simplicity of the combat system, especially given how much emphasis is put on the ability to design your own ships. What's the point of designing my ships if it just means that when I choose to watch the generated battle video, the attack animations look slightly different? Overall though, definitely recommend for players new to the series. Vets should seek out reviews by returning players to view the aformentioned negative-leaning consensus from that group
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Good game. Big tech tree. Combat is automated but the customization is insane. The ship designers is deep. Sectors and hyperlanes fixes the major issue with Gal Civ 3 and created choke points. There are a dizzying amount of civilizations that are very different from each other, different themes, tech trees, fluff and lore, etc. I'm cheap so I recommend buying on sale and only playing it when you can dedicate your neurons to it, this is not a "grab and casually try to play it" at the beginning.
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It's good for the nostalgia factor, if you played the old games, this one is pretty much exactly the same. It's easy to jump back into, but not very deep and satisfying overall. After 100 hours it just made me want to play Stellaris. The best feature by far is the AI assisted faction creation. You just type a quick sentence describing your made up civilization, and the AI picks the traits, comes up with a play style, and writes a script to role play when you interact with them.
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I like this game, it reminds me some of Master of Orion, mostly MOO 2. Of course its much more modern and has stuff beyond MOO 2. I have played a few full games, I'm currently playing a large map and have 6 or 7 other civilizations left that I'm competing with, a couple civs got conquered. The graphics are good, the stars and planets on the map are vivid with colors and there are nebulas, black holes, etc where some of the resources can be harvested. The game has had a few updates since I bought it. It mostly runs well and smoothly. But occasionally some glitches happen. The sound effects cut out sometimes I noticed once you have a game going with a lot of ships / colonies, etc. I think the game could be improved some too. One of my biggest complaints right now is that once you have a large empire going, I have probably 15-20 core worlds and many colonies / starbases, the management can became tedious. For instance, there is no way I know to put the shipyards on "Idle", so a shipyard has to be building something or it will keep bringing you back to the idle shipyards. I wish there was a way to "shutdown" or put shipyards into an "idle" status and then bring them back online when you need them to build ships. If you have 15-20 shipyards, this becames a real task every turn if you don't need to build much currently. The other issue I see sometimes once I have a large empire is that as you get the focus moved from one idle fleet to another to give it orders, sometimes after moving a fleet or ship the turn will just end, not giving you a chance to do anything else. Normally you get an "end turn" icon when nothing is left to focus on. Then you can end the turn if you want to or active another ship, check out a core planet, etc. But sometimes the end turn just "happens" after telling a ship to move and this is annoying if you wanted to do something else before the end of the turn. I still recommend the game, its fun and I enjoy playing it.
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Ok, normally I'm mad when a game asks me to review it, and most of the time when I write a review, I'm quite critical. Mixed Reviews on a 2 year old game. I imagine they feel attacked and want me to defend them. I agree with a lot of the bad reviews: Game feels like it could've been made in 2007, and still has absolutely insane GPU requirements (Why are you surprised, 4x requires a game world to be loaded all at once, the bigger the game world, the more you'll need. - 7800XT here), reviews that have a breakdown of weird issues like ship ordering, and just as funnily event ordering during your turn, and the weird thing it does where when you load, sometimes diplomatic events occur that did not occur before. But I've put some hours into this, and I'll doubtlessly quadruple those hours, if not 10x them. I'd like many UX/UI tweaks, I'd love to make my management automated controls smarter, so it runs more in line with the backstory of the civilization you're playing as, and the playstyle I've been emblematic of. And I'd love if the AI wouldn't ask for a ceasefire after 2 turns with minor concessions, then again at 10 turns with no concessions, and then resign themselves to their fate, I think there should be more options. And so many things need more tooltips to give an actually helpful amount of information, so you aren't still figuring out what techs do on your third game. So let's talk about what this game is getting right. Civilization depth. I love it. It'll generate aliens based on your input, there are workshop civilizations, and includes customizing ships and other cosmetic frivolity. Battle Balance: the one point ships have three types, allowing them to easily form their own balance tree. the second size ship specializes in killing the first, the third size ship specializes in fighting the second, the fourth, now weaker to swarms of small ships, would love to aim at the enemy backline, finally the huge size ships are once again split in two, with carriers and dreadnoughts. This gives you a variety of strategies to divide your damage in tanking and in offense, and rewards you for diversity against your foes, as well as specializing against what your opponent is specializing in. Finite resources: In your struggle to grow and pursue whatever cumulative events you're going to use to find a victory screen, the methods will be a balance of your choosing. Can you afford enough leaders to Baron your worlds? Will you need to fill all the ministers in your cabinet, or can you forgo the minister of defense to appoint that leader captain of one of your specialized flag ships. (IMO, I think that should scale with your civilization better, rather than being fixed to early, early-mid, and mid-game always the same number of flag ships. Where is the Policy unlock to unlock more flag ship funding???)
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Frequently Asked Questions
Galactic Civilizations IV is currently priced at 14.59€ on Steam.
Galactic Civilizations IV is currently available at a 60% discount. You can purchase it for 14.59€ on Steam.
Galactic Civilizations IV received 1,378 positive votes out of a total of 1,887 achieving a rating of 7.06.
😊
Galactic Civilizations IV was developed and published by Stardock Entertainment.
Galactic Civilizations IV is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Galactic Civilizations IV is not playable on MacOS.
Galactic Civilizations IV is not playable on Linux.
Galactic Civilizations IV offers both single-player and multi-player modes.
Galactic Civilizations IV offers both Co-op and PvP modes.
There are 13 DLCs available for Galactic Civilizations IV. Explore additional content available for Galactic Civilizations IV on Steam.
Galactic Civilizations IV is fully integrated with Steam Workshop. Visit Steam Workshop.
Galactic Civilizations IV does not support Steam Remote Play.
Galactic Civilizations IV is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Galactic Civilizations IV.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 12 March 2026 00:36 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 11 March 2026 15:00 |
| Steam price | 15 March 2026 20:48 |
| Steam reviews | 14 March 2026 22:02 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Galactic Civilizations IV, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Galactic Civilizations IV
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Galactic Civilizations IV concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Galactic Civilizations IV compatibility
Game modes
Multiplayer
Features
Online players
385
Developer
Stardock Entertainment
Publisher
Stardock Entertainment
Release
19 Oct 2023
Platforms