Faction Designer

The Faction Designer allows players to create their own custom factions to play with.

How to use custom images for your factions

To use your own images you need to put them into your "My Documents\My Games\GalCiv3\Factions" folder. Having images with the same name in different folders may cause problems. There are four subfolders for:

Leader Background

Folder name: LeaderBGs
Suggested Image Dimensions: 1920x1080 Pixels*

Leader Foreground

Folder name: LeaderFGs
Suggested Image Dimensions: 1920x1080 Pixels*

Leader Portrait

Folder name: Portraits
Suggested Image Dimensions: 128x128 Pixels*

Faction Logo

Folder name: Logos
Suggested Image Dimensions: 128x128 Pixels*
*(other sizes work but try to keep the aspect ratio)

Factions can be created in two ways

Faction Creator in the New Game tab

Click on “Create Custom Race”
Note: This will create a binary file in order to have the faction available without restarting the game. This means that you will not be able to edit the parameters for the faction outside GalCiv 3 in XML format. If this matters to you then see the other methods of mod creation on this page.

Here are a few things to know about Faction Creation:

• If you added your own images to the factions folder, you can have a custom image.
• You can customize your race description and give your new civilization its own history.
• The traits of your civilization.
• Decide what your ships should look like.
• You now have a civilization ready to go.

Make a MOD of the faction

This way gives more ability to customize some things that are not in the game faction editor. But is harder for many as it involves using a text editor on multiple files as well as management of those files.

For more information on how to create and mod a custom faction, check out this post from Stardock’s Derek Paxton on the official forums.

Civilization Builder

Crusade expansion replaced the faction designer with the Civilization Builder, which offers powerful new tools for creating custom factions.