Every Core Civilization in Galactic Civilizations IV plays quite differently and has Civilization Abilities, Traits and many more mechanics that are tuned towards a specific playstyle.
What’s great about this system is that you’re not generally hard-locked into that playstyle, which suits GalCiv as a sandbox style 4X and allows you to experiment with different ways to play with that one Civ. There aren’t very many Civilizations that outright lock you out of certain mechanics for this reasons, although the Navigators unable to form diplomatic treaties being one notable exception that provides a very specific game experience for players who want to go it alone in the Galaxy.Despite this, some of the Core Civilizations do have a very noticeable and strong core theme, such as the Mimot’s huge reproduction rate and ability to build twice as many ships with each production run as anybody else, and the Baratak Grove, examined in this dev journal, can be included in that set.The Baratak are sentient plant or tree-like creatures who exemplify an arboreal and agricultural lifestyle and have Abilities and Traits to perfectly suit this.Fundamental to their playstyle are the Baratak Citizens themselves. Let’s take a quick look at them, to see how they shape the way the Baratak Grove play.The Baratak have a high productivity with +3 Diligence and slightly lower research and approval and influence task weight too. They need this high productivity because they cannot abide Pollution, suffering three times the penalties for it as a Human would, and so heavy industry is usually a bad idea for them.You’ll see above, even with just 10% Pollution the Baratak get a 10% penalty to Approval, which unless offset in other ways, inflicting crippling damage to your Planetary Output and stunting your economy overall.The Baratak generally rely on a Citizen based industry instead of Manufacturing Districts, and if you’re not used to it, this is quite a shift from the way the other Civilizations tend to play.Let’s move on to their Civilization Abilities.
Intuitive ensure that the Baratak get a head start down the Ideology branch of your choice and grants them some useful Diplomatic options, with +5 Deception being useful in Events and access to the Xeno Anthropology Center to rapidly expand Influence borders and a whole host of useful Adjacency Level Bonuses too.
Baratak are one Civilization that will greatly benefit from rapid border expansion because their second Civilization Ability Spores rewards rapid exploration. Fortunately, they also get the Traits Explorers (+1) and Productive (+1), throwing Probes and Colony Ships out into the galaxy faster and father, while revealing more of the map as they go than their rivals.
They defend their world’s very well too. Once they’ve grown that beautiful garden world, they’ll fight to the death over it!And let’s take a look at Spores too:We’ll mostly ignore the “Blocks…” stuff for now beyond stating that it’s common for certain Civilizations to get exclusive access to various Techs and Improvements, and to be denied access to others in a thematic way, as fits their lore and playstyle. The Baratak are agrarian and fundamentally opposed to Pollution, both in real physical terms, and on a philosophical level too, and this means that the worst Pollution causing Improvements tend to be locked off.As you see, the Baratak can seed Dead Worlds and create a useful Colony from them. If you’re using this properly by maximising your Cultural Progression, the Baratak’s Core Worlds will usually have access to more feeder Colonies than usual. The extra resources these bring in help offset the huge penalties their Citizens suffer from even quite small levels of Pollution, which limits the number of Industrial Districts and other such Improvements you can lay down.The Baratak themselves gain a decent Approval bonus if they’re assigned as Farmers, and this means they’ll naturally support a large and thriving Citizen economy. In most games, unless you’re rather starved of good Agricultural worlds, you’ll usually have enough Food to sustain many Citizens and their high Diligence means you’ll not need quite so many polluting Manufacturing Districts as other Civilizations tend to need.If you do build Manufacturing Districts to get your economy going early, any Pollution reducing Techs and Improvements will be very valuable to you, and should be chased early. The Baratak can live with some Pollution, but you’ll have to find a way around the large Approval penalties it causes until you can reduce it directly.One strategy that I’ve discussed here before when discussing Pollution is to limit the number of heavily industrialized Core Worlds to just a few and fill them with Entertainment Districts to help offset the penalties from Pollution. The Growth on those worlds will be through the floor but you’ll have some nice Citizen hothousing planets instead. By rapidly growing Citizens on these high Growth planets, you can make use of the game’s Citizen Transport system to transfer them over to the Industrial worlds. In turn, those heavily polluted worlds can send the ever useful Supply Ship back over to the Citizen growing worlds to help create more infrastructure. This trick can work for any Civilization, and can be especially useful if you’ve got a heavily polluted world that is otherwise useful, but struggles with Growth for generating its own Citizens.The Baratak tend towards a larger territory, as they expand very well. However, with Spores, they can get more Colonies from their territory than usual and so if they are cornered or surrounded by faster growing neighbours and limited to a smaller portion of the map than they’d like, they’ve got a better than average chance of surviving and becoming an economic powerhouse nonetheless.To further help their Manufacturing efforts, the Baratak Grove have access to the Father Tree and the roots that it subsequently grows across the world it grows on.This unusual structure is actually a Manufacturing Improvement and works a little like a factory, with a nice adjacency bonus that’ll boost surrounding Manufacturing assets. It also dramatically increases your Population cap and increases Culture point production, which helps them shoot through the Ideological Trait system and gain more charges for Spores of Yggdrasil.The Father Tree also spawns a number of Father Root Improvements, which work much like free Research Districts with the small downside of not getting to choose where they are placed.The Father Tree and its Roots are crucial tools in the industrial development of Baratak worlds, and more than offset the downsides they have to live with when dealing with Pollution in the early game. The Core Worlds of the Baratak, if carefully planned, will become Industrial powerhouses filled with hard working Citizens, with the Father Roots somewhat offsetting their natural disinclination towards scientific pursuits too.If you work towards the terraforming Techs, the Baratak can build very large Core Worlds with huge Citizen populations. The Baratak are predisposed towards Collectivism as their preferred Ideological choice and this synergises nicely with large Citizen populations.It brings many useful benefits such as boosting the output of Minor Worlds, reducing Expectations and boosting Approval, extending the capacity of Housing Improvements and more. Aiming for the powerful capstone Ideological Trait Hive Mind can work very well with the large number of Citizens they can handle, and a large Baratak Grove Civilization will become incredibly powerful once this capstone is unlocked, with each Citizen becoming much more productive overall, especially with Post Sentience gradually improving Diligence over time, helping you bring your game to an end with a massive Manufacturing boost.Citizens not only generate you a powerful economy, particularly Manufacturing with their large Diligence output, but do not mistake these farm-loving flowers to be peaceful hippies, as they have the potential to play very aggressively too.With a lot of Citizens at your disposal, often eventually causing you housing issues, they can also be sent off to fight and conquer foreign worlds too, in potentially huge numbers and to great effect. That Manufacturing bonus translates to rapid warship construction, with many Transports full of leafy Soldiers.Once the Baratak are ready, if they do turn their mind towards conquest, like the Mimot their enemies can find themselves swarmed by more Transports and Soldiers than they can handle, but unlike the Mimot the Baratak make decent Soldiers and can potentially take a lot of territory very quickly.It goes without saying that the Cosmic Contaminant are mortal foes of the Baratak Grove and must be taken out of the game as fast as possible, lest they turn the Baratak’s beautiful gardens into radioactive cess pools. Their worlds are usually useless to the Baratak once conquered as they’re so heavily Polluted, but with some tender loving care, maybe a few of them could be regenerated into something worth living on once more.As you can see, the Baratak have some unique challenges but also the potential to be very powerful, and they do it in their own unique way. Getting the most out of Spores does require some significant investment into Cultural Progression and that in of itself is quite a challenge, but perhaps that’s a topic for a future developer journal.Let us know what you think in the comments below.Cheers!