In summary, AlienGPT will now generate the name and description for your Citizens to match the custom civilization details it produces for you. It’ll then select an appropriate Citizen portrait to give a face to your people, with the number of Citizen types expanded to feature species popular within the community. Well, more than one face, as each Citizen type has many new faces added to ensure your various Citizens can be told apart more easily.
Let’s get a quick disclaimer out of the way first: as with the original AlienGPT leader portrait selection system, the Citizen portraits are not generated by AI to a prompt, and are instead picked from our existing pool of pictures pre-made by our in-house artists, using our own extensive library of art created for our games at Stardock over the past thirty years.
First off, Citizens have been moved from the Abilities tab over to the Biology tab where they belong, and we’ve moved the Civ Colors and Planet over to Abilities to make room for them. You can manually select them yourself if you prefer, and you’ll see the list has been expanded to cover many of the most frequent requests we see from the community.
Here’s a list of the new types:
- Feline Fatales: the obligatory cat-girls everybody loves to play with.
- Cyborgs: now we’ve got a dedicated humanoid/mechanoid hybrid Citizen.
- Space Demons: they come with horns and everything, suitable for all interdimensional escapees.
- Space Dwarves: don’t worry, we won’t retcon these guys out of existence at a later date.
- Space Elves: no, they didn’t fade away and diminish. They built space ships instead!
- Star Frogs: very wise survival experts, remember to keep them well moist.
- Humanoids: a generic Citizen to fit your needs when the others don’t.
- Lizards: we had a fair number of lizard lookalikes in the Core species but now there’s a generic one for you.
- Sentient Plants: now the Baratak aren’t the only intelligent vegetables in the universe.
- Vampiric: another popular pick for those of you who want seductive bloodsuckers in your game.
All of the above can be manually selected after a standard AlienGPT generation, if you’re not happy with its pick. As usual, you can skip the prompt completely and just select all the info, including the Citizen name and description, yourself as a manual entry.
Frogboy posted some examples up last week but here are a few more for you to check out.
Here’s the Inferno Flora Collective with their unique Citizen type Infernia.
And here are some Infernian Citizens on their homeworld Lavara Prime. Note the Citizen’s name fits the theme of the Civilization.
And here’s one I generated on a livestream the other day. I really like this one, and feel it really shows off the power of AlienGPT. These are the Yor-Tech Exiles, humans who escaped persecution at the hands of the Terrain Alliance after illegally interfacing with Yor Cybernetic technology, forever tainting themselves in the eyes of their former brothers and sisters.
Their Citizens have a nice spread of portraits too.
And here’s how Commander Bradley greets these deviant escapees from his own territory and a reminder that AlienGPT not only generates the Civilization for you, but also many of the communications you’ll receive from the various Core Civilizations too.
If I may be permitted to put aside my Stardock staff-member cap and speak purely as a gamer for a moment, I find this technology incredibly exciting. As Frogboy stated last week, AlienGPT isn’t perfect yet and it can make mistakes, but this really does go a heck of a long way towards immersing the player into their game. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that immersion is the most critical component in keeping you playing long, complex strategy games like GalCiv once the campaign goes over several hundred turns and you’re moving many dozens of units around.
We’ve pulled out all the stops to present a set of interesting Core Civilizations for you to play as, but there’s no substitute for your own imagination, and AlienGPT can help bridge the gap between those of you who love to go all in on hand-crafting your own custom civs, and those who’d love to do that but don’t feel they can for whatever reason. This system can do nearly all of the job for you, some of it, or none at all.
As always, the choice is yours!
