Galactic Civilizations III: Intrigue
Stardock
With Stardock’s latest DLC, titled Galactic Civilizations III: Intrigue, the base game of GalCiv III really opens up to many new possibilities. Although the science fiction, turn-based 4X game has received numerous DLCs and substantive updates in the past, Intrigue is a huge leap forward in terms of content and will hopefully add lots of longevity to it.
One of the primary changes is the number of extreme planetary environments that you’ll now encounter during your typical games. Each of these welcome new additions can offer new ways to colonize these special types of worlds. This means that you can’t just send your colonizer ships to just any old planet, and just plop down on it anymore.
For instance, silicon lifeforms can live out great lives on bacterial worlds, while carbon-based beings can’t until the research the right technologies. There are many other considerations for other types of lifeforms, and how they match up with these new types of worlds. This adds an extra element of strategy into which race you pick or design in the beginning.
As the turns roll by, you’ll see that your growing civilization will have the opportunity to embrace new ways of governance. We now have everything from Interstellar Republics and Colonial-type government types. Later on down the line, these can lead to such advanced types as Information Oligarchies and Utopian societies. You can attain these more distinct types of governments by researching the required technologies. In doing so, you’ll accumulate a pool of Ideology Points which will open said government categories.
Each of these governmental types is drastically different, allowing players to choose ones that match their play-style. For instance, more passive players can form pacifistic civilizations that are limited in terms of offensive capabilities but receive massive bonuses in other areas. You can have democratic governments that hold regular elections, or more authoritarian ones that rule their peoples with irons fists.
GalCiv III introduced a Galactic Bazaar in one of its previous DLCs, and it was a great way to be able to purchase powerful ships, regardless of whether you had the requisite technology to construct them. With the new Intrigue DLC, these places have been transformed into hubs of commerce and trade.
Has your race accumulated a ton of credits and you didn’t have much to do with it in the past? Well now you can head off to your local Bazaar and spend away—buying up any resources that you please. The laws of supply and demand apply here, of course, so you always have to be weary of those all-important figures.
When your race attains a certain level of prominence and power, you can end up becoming too big for your britches. This is when you can transform into the new, semi-autonomous Commonwealth. This entails ceding colonies from within your empire in order to spontaneously create a new one.
This new empire will support you in times of war, and will also supply your with credits from time to time. They can even research techs independently from you, allowing you to later trade technologies with them.
Intrigue also comes with new Crisis events that can occur periodically. These can really shake things up, and range from revolts within one of your systems, gigantic space monsters attacking you from the depths of space, or some other existential threat. If you’re a turtler type strategy gamer who likes to quietly build your empires up in one of the corners of the universe, these can really throw you off your game.
Overall, Galactic Civilizations III: Intrigue is a worthy DLC that adds loads of new content to an already complex game. Any fans of strategy games, especially 4X science fiction ones, should give it a spin.
SCORE: 83%
Galactic Civilizations III: Intrigue features outstanding graphics that make its space 4X gameplay truly shine. However, you want to have a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. So, you may just want to invest in a decent gaming rig:
Visit CyberpowerPC’s website to check out all of the other great deals as well!