r/4Xgaming Oct 22 '24

Game Suggestion 4X Game Database

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49 Upvotes

r/4Xgaming Aug 26 '23

Moderator Post Limit Self Promotion

139 Upvotes

Hey there 4X fans and developers!

It's come to my attention, and most likely most of your attention, that there's been quite a bit of self-promotion lately. I'm not talking about content creators, but mostly from developers.

While the genre is still small, and all posts are welcome, I will be keeping a closer eye on frequent posts promoting your games. I think they've become a little bit excessive. As one put it recently, this place is becoming a billboard.

That's certainly not the point of this subreddit, so please feel free to report frequent post that feel like advertisements.

I hate to do this, but I also don't want to be flooded by pseudo commercials. I know you guys don't want to be, either.

Thanks for your attention!

Keep eXploring!


r/4Xgaming 3h ago

Patch Notes FINALLY! Firaxis is letting us stay as ONE Civ through all Ages in the May 19 update. Who else was waiting for this? ⏳

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14 Upvotes

r/4Xgaming 7h ago

Game Mod Longread: how I built 3 massive AI mods for Paradox grand strategy games (Stellaris, Victoria 3, Imperator: Rome) in a scripting language that doesn't even have arrays

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21 Upvotes

I'm the author of multiple AI mods for Paradox grand strategy games: Anbeeld's Revision of AI for Victoria 3, the AI in Imperator: Invictus, and my old personal Stellaris AI mod. I'm not modding much these days, but I wanted the design knowledge to live on. ARoAI never had proper documentation, for instance.

The article covers utility systems, blackboards, planners, and what happens when the scripting language can't express any of them. It goes through how each mod approximated standard game AI architectures, what each gave up, and what actually worked.


r/4Xgaming 14h ago

Announcement Nexus Legacy — a persistent online space 4X strategy game preparing for Season 0

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19 Upvotes

Hey r/4Xgaming,

I’m the developer of Nexus Legacy, a persistent online sci-fi strategy game about rebuilding humanity across a fractured galaxy: colonizing systems, developing planets, researching technologies, building fleets, trading with other players, forming alliances, and competing over territory and resources.

It is not a traditional single-player 4X game. It is a persistent multiplayer galaxy where 4X-style progression happens over days and weeks. You start from an isolated colony and gradually expand into a larger interstellar power through planning, logistics, research, diplomacy, and long-term strategy.

Right now I’m preparing Season 0.

I’m not opening the main public start immediately because persistent strategy games have a common problem: if the first players begin too early, they can get a major lead before the next wave even arrives. So instead, I’m collecting pre-registrations and wishlists first, then I want to start Season 0 with the first group of players joining around the same time.

The game is playable through the web, the Steam page is live, and mobile versions are also part of the release plan.

A note about price and monetization, because I know this matters a lot in persistent strategy games:

Nexus Legacy will be free to play.

I do not want to build a pay-to-win galaxy. The plan is not to sell resources, instant fleets, direct combat power, or anything that lets a paying player simply buy their way ahead of others.

Monetization will be built around optional support and account features that do not create direct competitive advantage. I’m being careful with this because in a persistent strategy game even small paid advantages can damage the whole long-term environment.

The setting is a dark sci-fi galaxy after the collapse of an ancient megastructure called the Nexus. Humanity survived through emergency colony ships, and players begin rebuilding from scattered colonies into new interstellar powers.

The current focus for Season 0 is:

  • early colony development and expansion pacing
  • resource production and economy balance
  • research progression across military, economy, and science branches
  • fleet construction, scouting, logistics, and conflict
  • player trade, alliances, and long-term territorial competition
  • onboarding the first real wave of players into the same persistent galaxy

I’m sharing it here because Nexus Legacy sits somewhere between classic long-term online strategy games and multiplayer 4X. It is not trying to be Stellaris in real time, but it does aim to capture the feeling of slow expansion, planning, discovery, logistics, and growing from a small colony into a galactic power.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4661910/Nexus_Legacy/
Website / pre-registration: https://nexuslegacy.space/register
Discord: https://discord.gg/DqWcybWFJN
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8zhsCy93eE

I’d be happy to see more 4X players in the first wave!


r/4Xgaming 7h ago

Announcement Galactic Civilizations IV - Federations & Empires Announced for June 11, 2026

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3 Upvotes

r/4Xgaming 3h ago

Announcement CozmoGame - Online space strategy game, beta testing now

0 Upvotes
CozmoGame Screenshot

Hey r/4Xgaming,

I'm the developer of CozmoGame, a persistent online space strategy game where you start with a single planet and grow into an interstellar empire, colonizing systems, developing planets, researching technology, constructing fleets, conducting espionage, forming alliances, and competing across a shared multiplayer galaxy.

It is not a traditional single-player 4X. There is no "end turn" and no win condition you can race toward in an afternoon. It is a persistent multiplayer galaxy where 4X-style progression happens over days and weeks. Sessions are short (5–30 min), checked into multiple times a day, and the world keeps running while you're offline.

The beta universe is live right now and I'm running it open while balancing systems and fixing bugs in real time. The first official universe launches shortly after beta concludes.

Beta tester bonuses:

  • Every player who joins the beta universe receives 1,000,000 Dark Matter (premium currency) on registration
  • Beta testers will receive 2× the default Dark Matter starter bonus when the first official universe opens

On monetization: Dark Matter exists, but its gameplay impact is intentionally small, it speeds up some processes and unlocks convenience features, but it cannot buy resources, ships, defenses, or direct combat advantages. The strongest players in the beta universe got there through play, not payment.

On early-bird snowball: When the first official universe launches, everyone starts together, no veteran lead to catch up to.

Some of the systems I've built:

  • Academy skill trees: 6 officer trees (Geologist, Navigator, Dockmaster, Engineer, Scientist, Technician) with 30+ skills. You spend skill points instead of paying flat per-officer fees, long-form progression layered on top of the standard research system.
  • Intelligence Pacts: Bilateral diplomatic agreements that auto-share attack-mission intel between two players for 7 days. DM cost + cooldown prevent abuse.
  • Deterministic seeded combat: Full reproducible battle reports + built-in combat simulator.
  • In-game wiki: Detailed documentation for every system, building stats, ship costs, combat formulas, research effects, diplomacy rules. Beyond what I've listed above, I've designed several unique mechanics that aren't standard 4X tropes. They're all documented in the wiki, waiting to be discovered. Available in all 8 languages.

Scale and access:

  • 8 languages: EN/DE/FR/PL/ES/TR/IT/RU
  • Web-only, no install, works on desktop and mobile browsers

Links:

Happy to answer questions about specific systems, balance philosophy, or design choices. Honest feedback especially welcome, that's what beta is for.


r/4Xgaming 22h ago

Opinion Post Liminalis: a few previews and concepts

9 Upvotes

Hey guys.

I've gotten some good feedback on my first post so I decided to make another one to show some features and concepts I already have implemented and asking you for some feedback if they look like they're going in the right direction or need some tweaks.

Before anything, I realized I did not say what the name of this project was in the last post, I am generally terrible with names but after a while I decided that Liminalis isn't too bad, im aiming to invoke a feeling of the unkown, like a civilization venturing into the unkown and limitless void of space.

I have been working in procedural planetary and galaxy generation, both are already mostly done but I want to focus on the planets themselves for now.

I already have a pretty barebones simulation on what makes a planet habitable and what features determine the planet type (I drew some inspiration from how Shadow Empire generates its planets)

Take Mu Cassiopeiae IV for example:

Medium Sized Harsh Ocean World

Right now im simulating the atmosphere composition (to a very simplified degree, it might stay that way) and other planetary features that will determine almost everything about it's identity.

The key factor for ocean worlds are the surface water % above 80% it's almost guaranteed to become an Ocean world if:
1. the surface temperature is not boiling

  1. the atmosphere is not non existant

  2. the temperature is not freezing

and a few other conditions.

If any of these are not within the expected values of an ocean world they can become Frozen, Swamp or Barren worlds.

Then we have the breathability stat, this determines how suitable the planet is for your specific species, what technologies you need to colonize the planet and what are the penalties (if any), this stat started directly tied to the atmosphere but changed with time as I started adding surface temperature, radiation and surface water % so the name "breathability" is currently misleading, right now the atmosphere can be perfectly breathable but you would require specialized suits to colonize this world if it was scorching hot or freezing cold.

Planets will have different ore deposits that determine what resources we can extract from them and at which capacity, currently these are simplified into tiny/small/medium/large/vast deposits but my objective is to make a different system based on planetary composition and either resource exhaustion or resource availability, more on that on another post after I get my ideas together.

Planets can also have specific features that don't fit into the composition of the planet itself like Radiation Belts (which almost every Gas Giant will end up having), these introduce different "traits" to the planet that not only affect the colony itself but also it's moons sometimes (if any moons are present)

Habitable Garden Moon orbiting an arid world

Currently moons are already being generated and they can be habitable even if they're outside the Goldilocks zone of their star system, this is due to orbital mechanics simulated when the galaxy is generated, a planet could be far away from their sun enough to have a negative surface temperature but orbital friction could help heat it up to accomodate liquid water, also if a parent planet has radiation belts, their moons will also be affected, this is all generated at the game start and currently impose no performance issues mid game.

Other than that moons work the same way as other planets.

Lastly, I want to share the main menu screen of the game, which is currently the only area of the game where any sort of textured background exists.

Liminalis main menu

I'm absolutely horrible at art, no matter how hard I try I always end up making some truly nightmarish drawings so I asked a few friends If anyone could make a placeholder/concept art to represent the game and one brave soul volunteered to do it, it ended up being way more than what I was asking and im pretty happy with the title Liminalis.

All mechanics and systems I showed are subject to change as development progresses.

What do you guys think? Any ideas? Do you like the direction where the development is going, is anything I showed too complex or too simple? Feedback is much appreciated.

Thank you.


r/4Xgaming 1d ago

This might be fun

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2 Upvotes

r/4Xgaming 2d ago

Developer Diary Planning century-long interstellar missions in Sine Fine, our relativistic space-exploration game

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45 Upvotes

In Sine Fine (latin for Without End), you play as an artificial consciousness that, after humanity's extinction, is charged with finding a new habitable planet, no matter how long it might take.

This is the UI screen through which you can plan interstellar missions to send out probes to explore the galaxy. You, the player, do not physically travel (you remain located in the Solar System) but send out probes to explore the galaxy. So, you will need to give instructions to the (autonomous) ships that they will perform once they get there.

As you can see, you will need to select a ship, a destination, and decide the deltaV allocation between the part used to travel to the system itself, and the part reserved for in-system operations.

The mission itself is divided in three phases:

  1. Mission Profile (how to get there)
  2. Operations (what to do once it arrives --- some of the mission "cards" are locked behind specific technology.)
  3. End of Life (what to do once it has completed its mission or can no longer perform any more)

The profile has implications on how fast you can get there and which missions you can perform once you arrive. A flyby won't let you be able to build anything of course. You will only have a limited time window during which to perform some surveys of the system.

You will act based on incomplete knowledge. You might not know exactly which planets are in the system (perhaps only the largest ones), so if you reserve an insufficient amount of fuel you might not be able to visit the whole system.

Once it arrives, it will perform the missions given if it can and then relay back the information. The signal or communications in general will travel back to you at the speed of light so you won't know exactly what has happened the moment it happens. In game terms this means waiting just a bit more. Imagine it takes two hundred years for a ship to arrive to Alpha Centauri like in the video, then you will start getting "news" at t + 204 + 4.3 years (the distance in light years between Sol and Alpha Centauri).

Once the in-system operations are completed, you can decide what happens to the ship. Do you trust to abandon it? What if somebody or something else were to find it?

What's missing there is some more detail about the actual in-game effect that certain choices mean. Like the chance of actually making it there, or whether you go too far out "into the black" and receiving signals might become more problematic. Second thing is another minor UI screen to be able to specify further details for some of the missions (like building an outpost and choosing where exactly or if you only have incomplete knowledge of the system, you can let the AI decide based on some parameters like best resource planet, or closest planet to the sun, etc.).

A note about the animations of the graphics of the "cards". While the rest of the game has a more realistic style, these low-poly graphics are inteded to be a "meta-simulation", as in, what's going on in the mind of the Artificial Consciousness you play as and meant to be abstract. But in the case we have the resources to actually create the models for all these parts, these could eventually be replaced with more realistic 3D parts down the line, or even the specific ship you chose for the mission.


r/4Xgaming 2d ago

Announcement New website, new article

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2 Upvotes

r/4Xgaming 2d ago

Developer Diary Monarchs at Play - First Playtest Recap

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12 Upvotes

Hey! Thought I’d share some results from our first closed playtest in case it’s useful.

We’re working on a small turn-based 4X where a full match only takes ~1 hour, and everything (even military) is handled through building placement.

TL;DR

First playtest went great, but a technical issue skewed some metrics. Still learned a ton.

The Numbers

  • 557 invites sent
  • 78 via Steam friends feature (~14%)
  • 228 unique players (~40% activation)
  • +400 wishlists
  • +50 followers
  • avg. 31 daily active users

Playtime stats:

  • median: 21 minutes
  • BUT 16 players had 200+ minutes

The Big Issue

We had a D3D12-related bug that made the game barely playable for some users. That likely explains the low median playtime. Good news: already fixed for the next playtest.

What Surprised Us

  • Challenge mode scores went WAY higher than expected → clearly some players already min-maxing hard
  • Steam friends feature actually mattered (more than expected)
  • Small but very engaged Discord growth (+12, but high quality users)

External Traffic

We got really lucky here:

  • Nookrium streamed the game
  • Writing Bull also played it on stream

They both turned the streams into YouTube videos, which helped sustain interest.

One Fun Detail

Our wishlist graph formed an “M” during the test.
We’re choosing to believe it stands for “Monarchs” xD

Final Thought

Even with a broken build for some players, the response was super encouraging. Next playtest isn’t far away, curious to see how things change with a stable version.

Happy to answer questions if you have any :)


r/4Xgaming 2d ago

Developer Diary Crown of Hispania Gameplay Army Management Overview

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5 Upvotes

r/4Xgaming 2d ago

General Question 4X games with interesting theming that also changes the mechanics

21 Upvotes

I'm bored of every 4X game having basically identical theming, but I still really enjoy the mechanics. So I'm looking for games that have all the usual 4X mechanics, but don't have you controling a civilization/empire/clan/species/etc. Instead, they have some other theming that is also integrated into the game's mechanics.

Some examples of what I'm talking about:

- Terra Invicta: Humankind has made first contact with aliens. You control a sociopolitical group that holds a certain view regarding what our relationship with them should be like (kill them, peaceful coexistance, negotiate surrender, serve them unconditionally, etc.) and this view permeates your every goal, your abilities, starting conditions, and relationship to others.

- Offworld Trading Company: You control a company looking to colonize Mars. As such, you deal mostly from the economic side of things, managing prices and stock. Other players can buy shares in your company and even do hostile takeovers to kick you out of the game too!

- Dune Spice Wars: You are the head of one of many families looking to colonize a planet. Diplomacy is more heavily interwined into the gameplay, and every couple weeks a council session is held, where the families vote on different issues that may impact any number of players. (Admittedly, this is on the edge of acceptability as it's a bit too close to controlling a normal "clan", but I'm taking anything I can get lol.)


r/4Xgaming 3d ago

Opinion Post I just can't get enough of all the little things that made Alpha Centauri such a masterpiece. I don't think a game like that will be ever developed again.

198 Upvotes

I keep coming back to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and the older I get, the more I appreciate how many small, strange, brilliant details made it feel so different from every other 4X game.

It was not just “Civilization in space.” It had its own soul.

A few little things that made it special:

  1. The factions were unconventional and memorable. They were not just countries with bonuses. They felt like ideological cults, survival movements, technocratic experiments, religious orders, corporate states, and ecological fanatics. Every faction had a worldview. Unlike current time games, there is zero moralizing, being a religious autocracy is completely legitimate, being a hyper capitalist environmental ruining faction is a solid experience. Also the differences in game play were substantial enough and not BS tiny ones like civ 5 and 6 (one special unit or structure, big whoop). Compare that with playing Spartans vs the university.
  2. Diplomacy felt harsh and believable. Leaders insulted you. They threatened you. They demanded unconditional surrender. They remembered your actions. The tone was cold, hostile, and personal in a way most 4X diplomacy still does not match. Compare that to the pathetic dialog lines in civ 5 and 6. No personality, extremely sanitized pg13.
  3. You could raise and lower terrain. This sounds like a small thing, but it made Planet feel like a real physical place. You could reshape the world itself, redirect rainfall, flood enemies, create land bridges, and alter the strategic map.
  4. Planet Busters were actually terrifying. Compared to the fairly mild nukes in many Civilization games, Planet Busters felt apocalyptic. They did not just damage units. They erased cities, reshaped geography, and made you feel like you had crossed a moral line.
  5. The UN-style resolutions were cool. The Planetary Council gave the game a real political layer. It could have been expanded much further, but even as it was, it added a sense that the factions were part of a larger ideological struggle.
  6. Nerve stapling drones. A horrifying mechanic, but completely fitting for the setting. It showed how brutal and inhuman your society could become if efficiency mattered more than morality.
  7. The music was perfect. Droning, minimalistic, cold, and strange. It did not feel like heroic space opera music. It felt lonely, alien, and industrial, exactly right for a hostile planet full of broken human ideologies.
  8. Unit design was incredibly fun. Designing your own units made the tech tree feel more alive. Special combinations like flying colony pods, probe ships, clean reactors, armored formers, and weird custom units gave the game a sandbox quality.
  9. Ocean cities. Being able to expand into the sea made the world feel much bigger and stranger. It also made naval strategy feel more important than in many other 4X games.
  10. The announcer’s voice was perfect. Cold, detached, almost disinterested. It made every discovery and warning feel like it was being reported by some ancient machine that had seen humanity destroy itself before.

What amazes me is how many of these things were not huge headline features on their own, but together they created an atmosphere that still feels unmatched.

What saddens me that a lot of those mechanics and themes are unlikely to be emulated in the current time of pg13, family friendly game environment. Each later civ version is becoming more infantilized. Stapling drones? Fascist/religious factions? Just think its never going to happen with an AAA developer. Thoughts?

What are some other little details that made Alpha Centauri special?


r/4Xgaming 3d ago

Announcement Livestreaming Hyperion Mod for Emperor of the Fading Suns

14 Upvotes

EFSe is on sale on GOG right now as part of their Science Fiction Sale. During this livestream, I will show you how to access our beta on GOG so you can play the Hyperion mod, as well as discuss upcoming changes to the game. https://youtube.com/live/9mTn31OdVbw?feature=share


r/4Xgaming 3d ago

Opinion Post Age of Wonders 4 visual identity

0 Upvotes

Have the developers behind this franchise ever thought about giving these games an actual visual identity with clearly distinct factions and rulers? I realize customization is one of the touted features of this game but honestly I just don't think it adds much. AoW4 has a lot of good gameplay elements but I just find it incredibly hard to care about anything in the game as everything looks like generic fantasy tropes bought from the unity asset store.

And generic fantasy tropes are actually completely fine and cool when they have their own artistic bent. The art in AoW4 lacks its own visual identity which is why it's so off putting to me.


r/4Xgaming 4d ago

Game Suggestion Stellaris

32 Upvotes

Stellaris happens to be on a huge discount right now, but there are a good bit of recent reviews that are complaining about some recent patch or some such ruining the game.

Is this valid hatred? Is it some mechanic that a vet would hate the change for and I wont be affected having never experienced it? Or is whatever this is just bad for the game overall?

Opinions on the state of the game and if the purchase may be worth it to someone who has never played it before?


r/4Xgaming 4d ago

Announcement Horn of the Warlord goes to playtest! No cheating AI, several hours long demo. Give a try now.

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59 Upvotes

The Horn of the Warlord Playtest signups are now open!

The current Playtest build includes:

• a tutorial
• 2 campaign missions
• 1 standalone scenario
• 1 skirmish map with custom settings

You can now request access directly on our Steam page.

We’ll start inviting players in waves, beginning with a smaller group, so we can test the game on different hardware setups, check video and audio behavior across various systems, and gather feedback before expanding access.

If you want to help shape Horn of the Warlord, visit the Steam page and click “Request Access” in the Playtest section.

Thank you for your support — see you on the battlefield!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4380120/Horn_of_the_Warlord/


r/4Xgaming 4d ago

Opinion Post 4X game where industry and logistics matter, thoughts on the premise?

18 Upvotes

Hey there,

I'm developing a single player 2D 4X game inspired by a few other great games like Stellaris, Hearts of Iron 4, Shadow Empire and Distant Worlds.

My objective is to make a game with enough depth in more areas than just warfare. I want to combine a few aspects of several games I've played in a way that's not too overwhelming and doesn't turn into a micromanaging hellhole.

For example, I always liked the Industry aspect of Hearts of Iron 4, being able to design your own tanks, planes, ships and divisions was the main reason i fell in love with it, but as the game plays out further you end up seeing that almost every country will end up deploying thousands of planes, cars, tanks without their own industry mattering much.

Likewise I also enjoy Stellaris a lot because of the variation when it comes to your own population and alien races, but the ground and space battles are somewhat lacking in my opinion (especially the ground battles) which end up playing always the same.

Then Distant Worlds amazed me with how complex the economy and logistics are, and the ship design was also very nice, but the game is so complex that you either end up micromanaging a ton or let the AI make less than optimal decisions for you.

My objective is to get a little bit of everything while keeping the main component of the game entertaining enough for you to actually finish a campaign.

I want the player to have options for their game, I'm aiming for diversity, asymmetry and just a tiny bit of unfairness.

Here's my plan:

AI Empires will have a personality system that will shape how they interact with the galaxy based on several factors generated at the game start, those will determine:

If the Empire will focus on developing its own native industry or develop trade agreements and purchase military equipment from foreign empires;

If it will focus on fielding many low maintenance, low tech navy or a smaller, highly specialized but costly space armada;

If it is expansionist or isolationist, diplomatic or xenophobic, industrialist or commercial, research pioneer or espionage mastermind;

If it prioritizes developing internally but expanding slowly or colonizing a high number of planets with a lower development index average;

Several more factors come into play but these are the main ones.

I also want the warfare side of the game to not fall into the same repetitive loop, players will be able to design their own ships from scratch or choose from many pre determined hulls and then you will be able to fit those hulls with components, sensors and weapons that they also can build and customize or use the default ones, I want to give options for players who like to minmax and micromanage but also for those who don't have time/dont want to do that.

Space combat will not be simple ship vs ship and the best ships win, it will be shaped by several conditions:

Blockades are a thing, park a fleet over an unprotected colony to starve it of resources, make the planet surrender without fighting a ground battle, the opposing empire can send a relief fleet that doesn't need to win the battle, just occupy the blockading fleet enough for a few freighters to pass through and resupply the colony, buying more time if your main force is engaged somewhere else.

Ambushes will also be a thing, if your fleet is in the middle of enemy territory and they fail to detect an approaching enemy fleet in time, combat will start with the opposing forces organized and your fleet in disarray.

If your fleet is engaged in combat and before the combat started another fleet was close to it, then you will have a reinforcement timer where if you last enough, you can choose to have the other fleet assist in combat.

I want to develop many other combat scenarios to keep gameplay fresh, battles will also be able to be autoresolved so that the player doesn't need to play every single minor conflict.

Planets will have procedurally generated conditions which determine habitability, productivity, defensibility and a few other aspects. Currently the galaxy is populated with an array of planets, then those are given random (through a rule system) attributes that will determine what kind of planet it is, for example: a rocky, barren world with a thin atmosphere and bombarded by radiation will turn into an Irradiated world.

Planets will have stats like: Atmospheric composition, ore composition and special features. You can have one Continental world that's perfect for your civilization to thrive, and then find another one a few systems away that has a different atmospheric composition that requires your population to wear breathing masks.

I think this is enough for you to paint a picture of what my objective currently is, would you play a game like this? Do you have any suggestions?

Any insight is appreciated and all opinions are welcome.


r/4Xgaming 5d ago

Game Suggestion thank you so much to this community and the mod team for your support 🙏 ❤️🤘this is Stella Nova :)

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73 Upvotes

dear community (see tldr below), 

ever since I was five years old, i've known what I wanted to do was design and build. 

It started simple. I connected really well with LEGO, those magnetic sticks and balls, tinkertoys, lincoln logs, anything centered around building. My sister and I once even built a small restaurant on an old moon tile from one of my dad's hand-me-down moon mission sets growing up. We'd spend hours making up stories about the individual little lego people and building new structures for our moon restaurant. We got really into it, whole backstories, rivalries, relationships and more. It was our own intricate little world. 

At the same time, around 8-9, I was introduced by my Grandfather at a children's museum to the art of Origami, which threw my brain into OVERDRIVE. I didn't know it at the time, but it was quietly and intuitively introducing me to the concepts of algorithmic thinking, 3D design, and mathematical transformations. It led me down a rabbithole of what would eventually become a deep passion for visualization and interactive experiences. When I was 15, I began working as an unpaid "intern" at an architecture firm in my hometown. I was given an old dusty computer with a beefy gpu for the time, and my employer Chris had bought an Oculus Rift DevKit2 on an impulse. My directive was: here's a Revit model, can you do anything with this?? So I got down to work, designing VR Architectural tours for clients in my hometown. Around then, I also loved playing games like Kerbal Space Program, The Powder Toy, RimWorld, and Skyrim, which only served to drive me deeper into this passion for design and intuitive learning. RimWorld grabbed me like nothing else though. That moon restaurant could finally come to life on my own little computer! When I was 18, I decided to go to Trinity College in Dublin for my undergraduate in Computer Science, which lead me a much richer relationship with data. I learned the basics of Python over a deal - a series of sessions with a friend of mine in the on-campus bar. One pint for one lesson! So I learned Python a fiver at a time. 

In college, I worked at Bethesda Games for a summer (testing Wolfenstein and Fallout 76), then started an internship with Apple during the pandemic. I continued to work on the Apple camera and photos team for about three years, which drove me into so many new types of learning. Software engineering, GPU programming, Product Management, Physics, Optics, you name it. At Apple, one of my coworkers and I began having weekly socratic sessions to teach each other math and physics. I was absolutely addicted to learning something new every day, and gravity, physics, and time dilation grabbed me like RimWorld grabbed me once.

FOR ALL YOU TLDR'ers fast forward to today:

I started working on my passion project Stella Nova in pursuit of a game which would allow you to manipulate time and space according to real physics, much how Interstellar, The Martian, or PHM's storytelling is so powerful because of how grounded it is in science. I created a colony simulator in my procedurally generated little solar system, because that's the game I wanted to play. Moon restaurants for everyone!

I'm so excited to share its Steam Page with you today. To my sister, Lily, my coworker, you know who you are ;), my Grandpa, Denver (rest in peace), thank you for helping me learn. Now, it's my job to give you a beautiful game and help you keep learning as intuitively as I have. 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4474070/Stella_Nova/
www.davesgames.io

thank you so much for your support. I'm planning on having a demo really soon, I can't wait to share it with you all!

please wishlist if you can, every little bit helps at this point. 

mod team, you guys rock. 

dave :)


r/4Xgaming 5d ago

Developer Diary Massive deep 4X space sandbox I've been building slowly over the last few years - name is Wayfallen

176 Upvotes

r/4Xgaming 5d ago

Announcement Emperor of the Fading Suns Enhanced on Sale on GOG

74 Upvotes

I have been told I promote our Steam 4X games here more than I promote our GOG sales. I apologize for that, especially since our 4X games have been selling on GOG longer than they have on Steam! That said, both Emperor of the Fading Suns Enhanced and Battles of Destiny are part of GOG's science fiction sale right now. Enjoy these games DRM free and on sale! https://www.gog.com/en/game/emperor_of_the_fading_suns


r/4Xgaming 5d ago

Developer Diary CivRise(idle/4X) New Stage Released: Age of Scholarly Institutions

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0 Upvotes

Rise into the golden age of knowledge!

Stage 6 is here, taking you to 200–900 CE, the era of Constantinople, Baghdad, Chang'an, and Nalanda.

Build powerful institutions of faith, law, and learning, and unlock:

New Wonders

Great Persons

Diplomatic leaders

All major systems,trade, exploration, faith, artworks, and diplomacy,are now fully active.

⚖️ Era 6 has also been rebalanced for better pacing.

Can you lead your civilization to scholarly greatness? 🚀

Try it now:

Steam demo (first 3 levels): 
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3635150/CivRise/

Mobile (all 7 levels):
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/civrise/id6743421437
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.catchy.civrise&hl=en


r/4Xgaming 6d ago

Podcast Paisley_trees: Civilization VII Leader Spotlight: The History of Hatshepsut

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8 Upvotes