So you don’t want to play as the Humans? Not even the Drengin? You want your own race completely? Then I have good news for you. Galactic Civilizations III allows you to create incredibly custom civilizations right in the UI.

The marketing department isn’t happy about this. So much DLC money lost.

This guide will show you how to make your own truly custom race really fast.

Step 0: Preparations

We presume you will want to have your own unique leader image.  So you will need to do two things:

FIRST:

You will need to find your documents\My Games\GalCiv3 folder

Microsoft seems intent on making it harder and harder to find documents but I digress.

SECOND:

Inside the GalCiv3 folder is a Factions folder. Inside there you will find Portraits and LeaderFGs.  Find the images you want and save them there as .PNGs. Make sure they don’t have the same name.

Now, load up the game…

Step 1: Press the “Create Custom Race” button

Step 2: Click on the Picture button to choose the image you want in the foreground.

I found and downloaded an Angry Joe image.  I want to point out that he already has a publicly available image of him standing in front of a space background.  Therefore, it is safe to say that him leading an alien civilization was his destiny.

Step #3: Pick the portrait

The Portrait can be stylized or just a headshot.  I personally prefer stylizes images.  And again, amazingly enough, Angry Joe has a really cool stylized portrait. I kid you not. I did not make these, they already existed. 

Pretty cool eh?

Step #4: Make a description

Step #5: Race Overview

There is also a very small “customize button” there at the bottom you should definitely click too.

Step 6: Give them traits

You get points to put into your civilization. They are all over powered.

Step 7: What should their stuff look like?

Here’s an ironic thing: We came up with way better materials and textures after we finished the aliens. So your custom ships will likely look better than what we originally provided.  So have fun!

Step 8: Give them an AI

This is the feature that the bean counters at Stardock are unhappy about.  So not only can you make your own Civilization, we put in the tools to determine how the AI will use them.  Look, hey, I like DLC. My jet fuel doesn’t pay for itself.  But this was just too cool not to give players. 

GalCiv is about being a sandbox. You shouldn’t have to pay to get more aliens.  I mean, we will totally sell you more aliens too.  But we don’t want you to feel forced to.  Well, I mean, we do. We just don’t mean forced forced. Okay, they’re waving at me to stop typing.

I like the Terran tech tree but you could pick one of the others as well.  This page basically tells the AI how to play when you want to play against the Angry Joe Army.

And so I have my custom race. 

And now, once you have saved it. You can share it with others by zipping the contents of your faction folder (getting rid of the extra junk)

Here’s Angry Joe: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8051911/AngryJoe.zip Unzip to your faction directory.

And for Total Biscuit fans, I spent some time today making one for him as well:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8051911/TotalBiscuit.zip

I had to do some custom stuff for TB since he doesn’t present in front of a spaceship.

We will have an Export button in soon.  They wanted to have it in by release but we are still kind of new to the Steam workshop stuff so we’re holding off until 1.1.