Star Control Factions and Fleets — Tywom, Slyne, Trandal and Scryve as playable factions

from GalCiv4 Forums

Hello everyone.

I have put together a mod that brings the four Star Control races from Galactic Civilizations III — Tywom, Slyne, Trandal and Scryve — into Galactic Civilizations IV as complete playable factions: each with its own faction and leader, home system and worlds, colours and ship style, and a full fleet. In numbers: 4 factions, 4 home systems, 14 named planets, 560 ship classes, 28 commander ships and 296 ship designs, every one with its own icon.

Download and full description: https://www.nexusmods.com/galacticcivilizations4supernova/mods/19

The mod is installed by its own installer rather than by the mod manager, and both the installer and the mod's texts come in English and Russian — the installer asks which language to use before anything else. In English, ship, planet and system names are the ones these races already carry in Galactic Civilizations III, not translations back from Russian.

A few things that may be useful to anyone else modding GalCiv IV.

Ship designs have to live in the game's own archives. I tried the user folder first (My Games\GalCiv4\Designs). It is not reliable for designs: across 18 game starts, 13 ended with the race losing its entire fleet. Moving the same 296 designs into Designs\objgfxcfg.zip and Designs\ship.zip made the losses stop. That is why the mod comes with an installer that adds its pairs to those two archives — and removes exactly those pairs when you uninstall — instead of shipping as a folder.

The style field inside a .ship file decides whether a race's ships work at all. A .ship is a zip with a Save.tmp inside; after the design name there is a block of eight 32-bit numbers, and the third of them is the style. One wrong value there cost me an entire fleet: with style 18 (live Slyne), every ship of the race broke in GalCiv IV. The values that work are Tywom 25, Trandal 30, Scryve 32, Slyne 35.

Race fleets are all-or-nothing. If a single design a ship class refers to is missing, the game drops that race's whole fleet rather than the one ship — which is why the installer verifies every entry before it touches anything.

Language folders inside a mod do not work. Only Data\Text is read, so the English and Russian text sets are two separate copies the installer puts in place, not two subfolders the game picks between.

This is fan work: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by Stardock. Galactic Civilizations and Star Control are trademarks of Stardock Entertainment. The mod ships no Stardock files — it needs your own copy of Galactic Civilizations III with Crusade, Star Control: Heroes and Star Control: Villains, and reads the shared designs from there.

Bug reports are welcome. The installer writes a log to %LOCALAPPDATA%\SCFleets\install.log; attaching it makes a report much easier to act on.

Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv IV Modding
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Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

The interesting thing here is that this is the second translation these four have been through. They started out as people you talked to, GalCiv III turned them into factions, and now they move again. Each pass keeps the hulls and the colours and loses a bit more of the voice.

That is not a complaint about the mod, it is just what a 4X can hold. The Tywom stuck with me because Origins let them talk at length, and there is no slot in a GalCiv game where that goes. What does survive is the silhouette, which is why putting the effort into 296 designs with their own icons is the right call. In a 4X you know who you are looking at from the shape on the map and very little else.

The part I would not have guessed is the fleet being all or nothing, one missing design taking the race's whole complement with it. Writing that down somewhere the next person will find it is worth about as much as the mod.

Galactic Civilizations IV