GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #80 - The Crystalline

In my previous developer blog #78, I gave a quick overview of the dreaded Cosmic Contaminant and their aggressive “all against the galaxy” playstyle. This week we’re going to examine a Core Civilization with a contrasting playstyle that can favour a defensive posture with the occasional military excursion to secure a needed Strategic Resource.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to introduce you to the Luxar Dominion!

The Luxar are a civilization made up of Citizens with the Crystalline Phenotype, who need no Food but will reproduce very slowly until significant amounts of Promethium are stockpiled. To make up for this, they have fairly high Statistics compared to your average humanoid, with high Diligence, Intelligence and Resolve ensuring you get more out of your Citizens than most other Civilizations.

These high performance Citizens, along with the Phenotype description above, implies one particular playstyle for the Luxar Dominion: accumulate as much Promethion as possible, avoiding spending it as much as possible to build your Growth rate, and then maximising Housing and Approval boosting assets onto your planets. Your Citizens will become a powerful economy in their own right towards the end of the game, ensuring your smaller empire remains competitive towards the end of the game: your low Growth rate means less colonisation, and you are likely to be quite small compared to your neighbours for a while.

One of the downsides to being the small fish in a pond full of sharks like the Drengin Empire, Korath Clan, Cosmic Contaminant and Yor Singularity, is that you’ll attract early wars, and you’ll be playing either very diplomatically, or very defensively as a consequence of that. This is where the Luxar’s Civilization Abilities can help.

The large combat bonuses granted by Paranoid only apply to fleet battles within the borders of your own Influence but when stacked with a well upgraded Military Starbase and a (hopefully) technologically advanced fleet of warships, the Luxar become extremely difficult to beat when defending their own territory.

The Luxar Dominion’s Civilization Traits further emphasise this defensive nature, with Courageous granting a large Planetary Defense bonus, with Gentle actually reducing their ability to counter-invade the worlds of other Civilizations.

This is their one trade-off, as they also get some pretty nice economic boosters with Rich, Clever and Militant boosting Credit production, Research and starting Control respectively.

Furthermore, to bolster their offensive and defensive strategic capabilities, the Telepathy ability grants access to two active use Executive Orders, both of which are really fun because they give you options in the form of an Event.

Pandemonium is a multi-purpose offensive play with several options when targeting an enemy planet: reducing Planetary Defense mean Invasions will resolve faster, perhaps supporting a lightning fast offensive to take a planet before enemy fleets can arrive to defend.

Reducing Influence and Approval supresses the Citizens on the planet and slows the growth of cultural borders, Manufacturing, Military and Research. Playing this on an important Core World, such as Earth as shown in the screenshot below, could have a dramatic effect on the enemy’s economic and cultural output.

The third option applies a more direct penalty to Manufacturing and Research: this may or may not end up being a more severe penalty than the Approval reduction, depending on who you’re targeting and their relative Planetary Outputs and Approval rate.

Serenity targets one of your own worlds, with the options to dramatically improve Growth, Approval or Influence and Tourism, depending on your needs at that time. This flexibility can cover a lot of potential issues you’ll come up with in the early game, with the last option to boost Influence generation and Tourism being particularly effective in the late game once you’re territory is a lot larger.

The Luxar’s unique Growth mechanic of requiring Promethium stockpiles is an interesting challenge to overcome. Promethium may or may not be in abundance on your game map, and if not, it’s likely to be one of the prime factors driving you to territorial expansion and war. Of course, you can trade for it, but this is expensive, and securing your own Promethium mining operations is going to be very important.

This isn’t to say that the Luxar cannot play a taller game, with less Core Worlds and Citizens, as they do get better performance out of the population (see screenshot above for a better than average Citizen) they do have working the assets on their Core Worlds.

However, increasing that Growth rate will usually be of prime interest to a Luxar Dominion player as the Statistic boost they get is not overwhelmingly strong. While your Citizens will be better than average, they’re not superhuman… or supercrystal, whatever.

The Luxar Dominion’s preferred Ideology is Collectivism, which grants access to some very useful supporting Ideological Traits.

Unification grants a decent Influence boost in the early game, helping expand their borders out a bit faster to counter their slower colonisation efforts. It can be tempting to grab both Shared Belief and Consensus to fully leverage the power of Citizens with the Collectivism Ideology and dramatically improve planetary outputs (through increased Approval) as a result. Unified Coordination and Mass Mobilization are war focused Traits and increase both wartime Manufacturing rates and the maximum size of your fleets.

Whatever Core Worlds attached to Colonies will be more productive with either Interdependence or Solidarity, while the capstone Trait Hive Mind will further improve your Citizens, and grant access to a powerful endgame Tech to help close the game with too.

So the Luxar’s game, if you decide to play to their strengths, is one of careful expansion to take the Promethium and other Strategic Resources they need, without over-extending, safe in the knowledge that what you do hold is very defensible and reasonably productive.

They’re not the Mimot or Torians, and cannot usually take huge amounts of territory in the early game, which means you’re naturally playing a somewhat “taller” game than many of your rivals, at least until a good quantity of Promethium is sat safely in your stockpiles.

But overall, this is a strong, stable civilization that can make a lot of space for themselves in the midgame by concentrating their forces onto prone neighbours weakened with their psychic abilities, and then manoeuvre themselves into a winning position as the game draws to a close through the power of their collective Citizen economy.

So, take the psychic crystal guys for a ride and see if you can win a race for galactic supremacy with them!