Update addresses the most-requested change since launch by letting players set their empire's crafting priorities at the nation level

Get Ara: History Untold | View the Changelog

Stardock Entertainment and Oxide Games, in partnership with Xbox Game Studios, released the v2.1 Update for Ara: History Untold today, introducing a new National Crafting Policy System that addresses the most-common piece of player feedback since launch: managing crafting across a large empire took too long. With v2.1, players set their empire's crafting priorities once at the nation level, and every crafter follows the policy automatically. The free update is available now on Steam for all players.

Ara: History Untold is a turn-based 4X strategy game where players guide a civilization from antiquity to the modern era. Players build cities, run detailed crafting and production chains, lead armies, and shape their nation's culture and religion as they compete with rival civilizations for power and influence. The depth of Ara's crafting and civilization-building has been a hallmark of the game since launch, but managing that depth at the scale of a large empire required significant player attention.

The new National Crafting Policy System changes that. Players can set crafting priorities and production goals at the nation level, and every crafter in the empire then follows the policy automatically, without the need to manage individual workshops. Players who want fine-grained control in specific cities can still override the policy whenever they want, through a new three-mode dropdown on the Improvement Panel. The result is a game that asks players to think like rulers, not foremen.

"The biggest piece of feedback we got from Ara players was that managing crafting across a large empire took too long," said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. "The v2.1 Update fixes that without taking control away from the players who want it. You set the direction at the nation level, override the cities that need a different approach, and spend your time on the parts of the game you actually want to play."

v2.1 Update Key Features

• National Crafting Policy System. Set your empire's crafting priorities once at the nation level, and every crafter in the empire follows the policy automatically. A new three-mode dropdown on the Improvement Panel lets you override the policy for any city or any individual crafter whenever you want.
• Expanded Culture Traits. Twenty-seven new Culture Traits across all six domains (Commerce, Military, Science, Government, Religion, and Industrial), giving players more meaningful options when spending Influence and more ways to shape their civilization's identity.
• New Religious Verses. Seven new verses that pair with the expanded culture options, giving religion-focused civilizations more ways to shape their empire's character.
• Balance and Gameplay Refinements. Cities accumulate workers faster as they level up, AI civilizations now settle with more variation in distance from other civilizations, and notification controls have been expanded to reduce noise during the late game.
• Stability and Performance Improvements. Terrain rendering fixes, CPU optimization through adaptive spin-wait, multiplayer turn resolver updates, font rendering improvements, and UI fixes for dropdown menus.

Beyond the policy system, the v2.1 Update expands the cultural and religious depth of Ara with a large set of new Culture Traits and religious verses, giving players more meaningful choices about how to spend Influence and how to define what their civilization stands for. The update also includes balance refinements tuned to the late-game pace and a round of stability and performance improvements.

Ara: History Untold v2.1 is now available as a free update with purchase or existing entitlement of the base game on Steam and Xbox Game Pass for PC. For the latest information on updates, community initiatives, and future content, visit the official website at www.arahistoryuntold.com.

Wishlist Federations & Empires

When a civilization chooses the Oligarchy government type, they get a “hero ship” and we originally called them squatters. The ship gets a special ability to go around to class 0 planets and claim them as collateral, which they use to purchase investments that get added to their portfolio.

When investments mature, they provide a new executive order for the player. For example, Dumping Rights lets you flood a target foreign planet with your goods and get 10 turns of their income. It makes them mad but you have the money without going to war. Another one is Resource Embargo where you can have all the supplies of a given foreign core world go to your closest core world instead. It deprives them of resources for two years (24 turns) from their core worlds. But I’m drifting off topic here.

The point being, the ship isn’t squatting. It is merely… acquiring planets that no one else has claimed. People complained about all those class 0 “dead” worlds. The Oligarchy civs agree. They are on your side. Not squatters. They are quite literally, single handedly, making this cash grab 4X game’s obvious design flaw worth something. What else were you going to do with Mercury anyway?

So you like space games eh? Play them all day and night!

I know a lot of you are my age. I turn 55 this month. When I was a kid, back in college, writing Galactic Civilizations for OS/2, I never would have guessed that 35 years later I’d still be playing it. Addiction doesn’t really cut it here. Even now, every time I play the game, I think, “Oh this would be so much better if we just did X, Y, and Z.”

Now we were supposed to have this new expansion out on June 11. The expansion is “done” in the sense that it’s all there. The problem was that when playing the game over and over again, there were things in the game that just annoyed me so much and I kept adding them to the list of requirements for v4.0 and the expansion pack requires v4.0.

I probably won’t be able to get everything I want into 4.0. I have rewritten the tech navigator screen twice and thrown it out twice. Tech screens are tough.

But other things have come along better. Minimap is less critical on a single sector map but man is nice to have on multi-sectors. The updated ship context window is nice being able to see the special abilities in their own section.

One of the bigger holdups is art. Icons. Funny fact: the icons in GalCiv are done by the same person today (not me) as they were 25 years ago. And right now I need a good icon for collateral.

The governments do NOT get unlocked by techs. But rather by cultural progress.

So it’ll be pretty obvious which ones give you a government type.

Vacation

Next week is the Steam Next Fest and the week after that is the Steam Summer Sale. That’s my cue to go take a vacation. I’m going to go find someone’s unoccupied house and hole up in there for a couple weeks. Oh wait, that is squatting. Well in any event, don’t burn the place down while I’m out!

Get Sins II  |  View Changelog Below

We've switched gears for our June update. The ARES AI overhaul still needs more time in the oven, so rather than rush it, we're holding it in the opt-in build and shipping a smaller, focused v1.61 in the meantime.

This one is about making the AI a sharper opponent. AI players now survey the planets they own based on difficulty, and we've adjusted their bonus modifiers to clear up situations where they used to get stuck (the classic "AI runs out of exotic refineries and stalls" problem). A new AI loadouts system lets them make smarter choices about which abilities and upgrades to pick for their units.

The Radiance Battleship also got attention. Its autocasting is a lot less wasteful now. It picks better moments and better targets for its abilities instead of firing into open space.

Modders, there's something for you too: new player AI tuning values and a .loadout system for defining ability and upgrade pick order. Details are in the change log below.

A note on ARES: the new ARES AI system is still available in opt-in, and we'll keep updating that build as we go. Our plan is to release ARES alongside our next DLC THIS SUMMER. Thanks for the patience while we get it right.

Changelog:

June 2026 - 'Prelude' v1.61 Update

Release Status: *** RELEASED ***

We’ve decided to switch gears for our June update to a more modest v1.61. Our ARES update (which is still available in opt-in) requires more time in the oven before a full public release. As such, our plan is to release the new ARES AI system along side our next DLC in early Fall. Expect continued updates to the opt-in build for ARES as we work.

Change Log - v1.61

• AI players can now survey planets they own based on difficulty level.

• AI bonus modifiers adjusted to help ease issues that get an AI’s progress blocked (e.g., not enough exotic refineries).

• Added new AI loadouts subsystem which allows AI players to better pick out abilities/upgrades for all units.

• Improved autocasting and AI only autocasting for the Radiance Battleship. It will now use its abilities more intelligently. Animosity and Cleansing Brilliance will now activate in the center of groups of units, while Detonate Antimatter will favor targets that are higher level or channeling abilities.

• By user request, the original AI portrait art is now selectable for each faction (we won’t judge).

• Players can now use custom portrait art in the faction customization section - scroll to the bottom and click the + box. These appear in single-player games only.

Modding

• Added two new enums to player_ai.uniforms:

  • surveying_upgrade_check_interval_in_minutes

    • Type: array

  • max_concurrent_surveying_upgrade_requests

    • Type: positive integer value

• Added new .loadout system. Allows you to define ability/upgrade picking order.

To Use Older Versions (for Mods, etc)

• On Steam

  • Select ‘Sins of a Solar Empire II’ in your Steam Library.

  • Click the gear icon in the upper right.

  • Select Properties → Game Versions & Betas

  • Select the version you want from the Beta Participation list.

  • Steam will update you to that version.

Wishlist Ashes II

This dev journal covers the new headquarter upgrade system coming to Ashes of the Singularity II, and it's worth a watch if you've ever lost a region because your HQ couldn't hold the line on its own. Each faction's headquarters can now be upgraded twice, and the final tier adds a unique turret that fits the faction's identity. The UEF gets a rail gun that hits incredibly hard against armored targets, the PHC Nexus gets area-of-effect artillery batteries that shred infantry and light units before they can soak up damage, and the Substrate HQ gains Serpentine turrets with a more balanced rate of fire for handling mixed threats. The video shows all three in action against incoming attacks, so you can actually see how the damage profiles play out in practice rather than just reading numbers.

But I can easily say that this game has been won by one type of ship: fighters. I think they are the best class. Thry are cheap, can be produced from early game, can be used in swarms and their Evasion bonus gives them better chance at survival than their low HP would otherwise suggest.

Cruisers became nearly useless once enemy started using Nanite Repair Cloud.

Here are some screenshots from this game:

It has been a busy Spring.

The Galactic Civilizations community has posted vast amounts of suggestions, requests and just generally amazing feedback. There really should be a study on why 4X game communities are just, well, they really are just the best.

The new expansion, Federations & Empires is pretty closely tied with version 4.0. That’s because version 4 supports the new government system and the base government, Colonial Charter, comes with the game. This will be good news to players of the base game, but creates a wrinkle for us in that we can’t release the expansion pack until version 4 is done.

Version 4

So let’s talk about version 4.

First off, the Colonial Character government replaces the old Policies and Leaders screens with a single unified screen for managing your interstellar government. The Colonial Charter government is the concept that you have a home world and your core and colony worlds but there is no question about who is in charge – the home world.

And this concept – having core worlds and colonies that are in service to your homeworld has been the cornerstone of Galactic Civilizations IV since launch. The idea with the expansion pack is that there should be other ways of playing the game and so each government represents a different set of game mechanics for building your civilization. But like I said, it does require we nail version 4.

Now in these screenshots, you (hopefully) have noticed that we have cleaned up the UI. This is something we’re doing as much as possible across the entire game. Consistent UI. We are also adding a mini map. I find it difficult to deal with multiple sectors with the current UI and it has been high on the list. We are also revisiting the trade screen. There’s a lot of information that we think we can (and should) display on there that will make trading more enjoyable and more understandable. And then there’s balance. So many opportunities there.

Works in progress

And that is what brings me to the heart of this entry. There’s a lot of WIP (work in progress). Take the screenshot below. What do you notice?

There’s a new option: Map Type (custom map). Version 4.0 is going to include custom maps in addition to the random maps. Now for this we are working on a map editor. I don’t know when/if the map editor will be “good enough” to make available, but we are pretty confident we can create some custom maps for people to play.

If you want to see our first pass at a map editor you can look here: Galaxy Forge Map Editor UX Prototype

But the UI is not done and it’s just buggy. And that’s the case with a bunch of stuff. Even piddly stuff. For instance:

I’m waiting on getting new icons for the toolbar (top left of the mini map) and for the bottom area. I have to wait for the art team to finish the new senate screen. You get the idea.

Scope

This expansion pack is vast. Four new governments. Hundreds of new events, senate bills, new ships, new systems, new AI, etc. It’s a lot. Luckily, that part is almost done. It’s version 4.0 that we still have quite a bit of work to do and the expansion pack relies on it. We’re burning the midnight oil (please feel free to join us on Discord: Join the Galactic Civilizations Discord Server! Keep us company on the weekend as we work on this!

Timelines

We are pretty confident that we will have version 4.0 done by early July. But that means that we have to delay the expansion pack until then too. Apologies in advance. We had expected to have the expansion done before end of May (and indeed, the expansion itself is in pretty solid shape), but version 4.0 is going to take more time to get it right.

So the plan is: Release 4.0 and the expansion together sometime in July. Please let us know what you think in the comments.

Avast ye scurvy dogs! Today I thought we could share pretty pictures of the concepting process for the Galleon, the Pirate’s newest unit featured in Pirate Incursions!

Players have been asking to see the beautiful concept art created by resident concept artist Mike Doscher for this plundering beast and now seemed like a great time to share.

“We want to introduce a more formidable unit for the pirates, a commander type unit. We're thinking a retrofit Akkan colony ship seems like a fun idea. The TEC colony capital ship is currently the weakest capital ship in the TEC fleet, so flipping that on its head and making a very tough version for the Pirates seems like a fun subversion of expectations.”

We knew this ship needed teeth…literally and figuratively! So we combined elements from the first set of options and the form of this retrofit unit took shape!

We went back and forth how prominent the forward-facing skull should be and how the armaments should look.

And we carefully considered how far to take the emissive elements of the unit, ultimately deciding this ship was meant to flaunt its power and visual flair dialed it up to 11!

And here we have the final concepts used for the full model:

Thanks for playing!

Wishlist Ashes II

In this dev journal, we're taking a first look at Observer Mode in Ashes of the Singularity II. Jump into any match and spectate from a specific player's perspective with full visibility into their economy, resources, research, and army orders, or switch to Revealed View for a fog-free cinematic look at the whole map. We also showcase our new Tactical View, which keeps fog of war intact for the player you're observing while letting you, the spectator, see through it. It's a powerful set of tools for streamers, content creators, and anyone who wants to learn the game by watching it played at a high level.

The Background

Here are some early concepts we played with how to manage these that I thought you might find interesting:

You can play around with the interactive mockup here: GC4 Government: Oligarchy

This eventually became this:

And even that isn’t what it will fully look like. So let’s dive in!

Holdings and the Prospector

The Oligarchy's first new tool is the Prospector, a special ship you can only build while running an Oligarchy government. It works like a Colony ship in that you send it somewhere and it gets consumed on arrival, but what it does when it arrives is completely different. A Prospector can land on any unowned planet: Class 0 dead worlds, barren rocks, gas giants. Worlds that no other government would bother with. When it arrives, that world becomes a Holding. Holdings are not colonies. There's no build queue, no governor, no citizens, no production. You don't manage them. What a Holding does is sit in your portfolio and contribute Collateral (the Oligarchy's unique resource) equal to that planet's quality rating plus one. A Class 2 world contributes 3 Collateral. A Class 0 dead rock contributes 1. Not much on its own, but the Oligarchy doesn't think in terms of individual acquisitions. Holdings can be conquered and destroyed just like regular worlds. Losing one hurts, and we'll get to why that matters. The key thing to understand up front: you're claiming territory nobody else wants, turning it into a financial asset, and the rest of your empire never has to think about it. That's the loop.

Collateral

Collateral is not a resource you earn per turn. It's a stock: the sum of every Holding in your empire.

If you have eight Holdings averaging Planet Quality 2, you're sitting on roughly 24 Collateral. Claim another world and the pool goes up immediately. Lose one in a war and it drops immediately.

There's one exception: the Chairman of the Board, one of your four Council positions, provides a bit of Collateral assigned leader's Social stat. It's a starting point, not the foundation. Holdings are the foundation.

Collateral doesn't get spent. It gets tied up. When you make an Investment, some amount of Collateral is committed to that Investment for as long as it stays in your portfolio. Your available Collateral is whatever's left over.

Your money isn't going anywhere. It's locked up working for you.

The Portfolio

The Oligarchy's central action is buying Investments.

There are five at launch that you get right away, others are unlocked through techs, events, etc.

• Stellar Logistics Conglomerate: your entry point, matures in 5 turns.
• Pan-Galactic Banking Syndicate: mid-game financial anchor, 12 turns to mature. 
• Xeno-Resource Holdings: a resource cartel, 15 turns. 
• Helix Pharmaceutical Cartel: social disruption play, 18 turns. 
• AstroDyne Defense Trust: a defense contractor, 20 turns.

When you buy an Investment, the Collateral cost is tied up in your portfolio and a maturity timer starts counting down. Once the timer hits zero, the Investment is matured, and that matured state is what unlocks your access to the Oligarchy's exclusive Executive Orders.

The Investment itself stays in your portfolio indefinitely. Playing an Executive Order doesn't consume it. The Investment just needs to exist in a matured state, and you can keep using the Order it unlocks for as long as you hold it. Sell the Investment later and the Order disappears, but you do get 1.25 times your original Collateral cost back, paid out in Credits.

There's a natural tension here. Selling Investments turns long-term strategic commitments into short-term cash. But the purchase cost scales up every time you buy an Investment. It's a monotonic counter and selling doesn't reset it. The player who churns their portfolio chasing Credits pays more and more for every new Investment. The player who holds everything has a deep deck of plays nobody else in the galaxy can access. Neither approach is strictly correct, and that's exactly what we wanted.

Executive Orders

Once an Investment matures, you unlock an Executive Order no other civilization can use. These aren't passive bonuses. Each one is designed to make something happen.

Dumping Rights (from Stellar Logistics): Flood a rival civilization's economy with cheap goods for 20 turns. Their trade route value drops 75% civ-wide, and you earn Credits equal to 10% of what they're losing every turn. You corner their market and profit from it at the same time.

Leveraged Buyout (from the Banking Syndicate): Target one of your own Corporation Links. Convert that soft 5% bidirectional exchange into 15% of the destination world's output flowing entirely to you, permanently. It costs you one permanent Corp Link slot, and it costs the foreign world their share of the exchange.

Resource Embargo (from Xeno-Resource Holdings): Block a rival's access to one of their active strategic resources for 15 turns. Any ship they try to build requiring that resource costs 25% more during that window. Particularly useful during a war.

Private Navy (from AstroDyne Defense Trust): Three mid-tier warships show up at your homeworld, mercenaries, maintenance-free, yours to command. The battle log will show them as hired ships. 

Plague Scare (from the Pharmaceutical Cartel): Engineered panic. Pick a rival and every one of their colonies loses 25 Approval for 20 turns. 

Corporations

Separate from Holdings and Investments, the Oligarchy runs three Corporations:

• A Research Combine
• A Cultural Syndicate (Influence)
• A Manufacturing Trust

Each civilization has their own names for their corporations. 

Each Corporation lets you build a special Freighter-pattern ship from your shipyards. You send it to a foreign world. It's consumed on arrival and establishes a permanent Corporation Link between your origin world and that destination.

Every turn, each active Corp Link transfers 5% of each world's relevant resource bidirectionally. Send your Research Corp Ship from your 200 Research/turn homeworld to a foreign world producing 80 Research: your homeworld picks up +4 Research/turn and their world picks up +10. They benefit from the exchange too, which is part of why the design doesn't require any foreign civ approval mechanic. 

Your Corp Link cap runs parallel to your Trade License cap. Same maximum number with its own pool. Corp Links and regular Trade Routes don't compete for the same slots. Get more Trade Licenses through tech and both your Trade Routes and your Corp Link capacity increase.

Corp Links pause automatically during wars with the destination civ and resume when peace is declared. The only permanent break is if you conquer the destination world yourself. At that point the world is yours, and the Link is gone.

The Council

The Oligarchy has four Council positions, each bending a different part of the system.

Chairman of the Board speeds up Investment maturity. New Investments purchased while this seat is filled take 20% less time to mature. The Chairman also generates a small per-turn Collateral trickle based on the assigned leader's Social stat.

Chief Investment Officer raises your Investment sell-back from 1.25x to 1.50x while occupied. The Sell button is worth more.

Director of Acquisitions upgrades every Holding in your empire from contributing PlanetQuality+1 Collateral to PlanetQuality+2. Fill this seat and every dead rock you've claimed is worth more. Also speeds up Prospector construction by 25%.

Director of External Affairs adds one to your Corp Link cap and gives your Corp Links a 5-turn grace period before they pause when you declare war. Five turns to prepare for the economic disruption of a conflict.

We may end up adding more as we play test.

When Things Go Wrong

If a rival conquers one of your Holdings or a planet-killer event destroys it, your Collateral pool drops. If that drop puts you below the amount currently tied up across your Investments, your Investment maturity timers pause.

Nothing auto-liquidates and you don’t lose investments. BUT you are just frozen until you recover: claim new worlds with Prospectors, sell Investments to free up tied-up Collateral, or take back a lost Holding with your fleet. Executive Orders you'd already unlocked through matured Investments still work. The pause is on the clock and not on your existing matured portfolio. We didn’t want to make this super painful.

The Chamber of Commerce

All of this lives in a new government screen called the Chamber of Commerce. Holdings, Portfolio, Corporations, and Council each get their own tab. Your Collateral displays as both a total pool and an available amount, with the tied-up portion shown explicitly so you always know how close to the edge you're running.

The Oligarchy isn't trying to have the most worlds. For the civilization that wants to play tall, this might be the way to go. You could have a single home world and no colonies. Just holdings.

Let us know what you think!

Stardock Entertainment today released Treasures of the Magi, the first DLC for the fantasy turn-based strategy game Elemental: Reforged. Priced at $8.99 (enjoy the 20% launch discount through May 28!), the expansion adds new monsters, treasures, items, and quests drawn from the First Age of Elemental, the era when the Magi ruled through sorcery and their golems stood watch over the cities of Anthys.

Get Treasures of the Magi  |  Get Elemental: Reforged 

Treasures of the Magi Release Video

About the Setting

Thousands of years before the Cataclysm, the Magi were sorcerers whose mastery of magic shaped the early civilizations of Elemental. They forged golems out of stone and iron to defend their sovereignty against the feudal barons rising up around them. When the Titans came, the Magi retreated into hiding, their golems went dormant, and the Cataclysm later buried most of what they had built.

The reawakening of the Fallen Enchantress has sent a pulse of dark magic across the surface of Elemental, and the old enchantments that animated the golems have begun to stir once more. Fissures are opening across the twin subcontinents of Anthys, and the golems and the treasures they once guarded are returning to the surface.

What the DLC Adds:

• New gear including new weapons, magic wands, unique armor and much more.

• New monsters, including several varieties of awakened golem.

• New treasures and items recovered from Magi-era ruins, including potions that can transform the player into magical creatures in battle.

• New quests that send players into the fissures to uncover what the Magi left behind.

• New encounters and lore.

Free v1.1 Update

[full changelog below]

A free v1.1 update is also available today for all Elemental: Reforged owners. Shaped largely by community feedback, the update brings a number of quality of life improvements along with a wide range of stability and performance fixes. Among the highlights, weapons, armor, accessories, and consumables that previously required the Legendary Heroes DLC are now available to all players at no cost, and crafting ingredients can be purchased directly from shops.

Treasures of the Magi Screenshots:

v1.1 Changelog

Key Features

Legendary Heroes DLC Items, Now Free: 12 weapons, 3 armor sets, and a dozen accessories and consumables that previously required the Legendary Heroes DLC are now available to everyone

Stability Improvements: A wide range of crashes have been fixed across all phases of play, including early turns, high unit count games, large maps, and post-battle screens

Crafting Ingredients Now Available in Shops: Players can now purchase crafting ingredients directly from shops, making the crafting system more accessible and removing friction from the crafting loop

May 21st, 2026 Hot Patch

Gameplay

• Defeated enemies now drop a wider variety of items and crafting ingredients, with fewer plain gold payouts and better odds on uncommon and rare drops

Stability

• Resolved an issue were playing on the largest map size with lots of enemies caused a game lock when hovering over tooltips

• Fixed a threading issue that could cause rare hitches or hangs during gameplay on busy maps improving performance

• Resolved random crashes that can occur due to the sound in the game getting desynced from the computer

May 21st, 2026 Update Changelog

Achievements

• Added in Steam Achievements for players to unlock

Controls

• Ensured hotkeys are working

  • F5 will quicksave

  • F9 will quickload

Gameplay

• Resolved issues where player’s units would get offset from their intended tile

• Crafting ingredients are now available for purchase and selling in shops

• Resolved issues where some champions on the map were unrecruitable

• Fixed issues where if a city gets razed the land attributes and resources underneath would disappear

• Fixed missing city influence from the city of Urwenn in the Fallen Enchantress Campaign

• Resolved a bug where enchantments can be casted on cities with no enchantment slots

• Fixed issues with auto move not properly functioning on armies

• Tech trees will correctly load when starting a game after previously playing a tutorial

• Fixed quest rewards for "Ribald Banter" and "Eight Legged Troubles"

• City totals for Food, Gold, Mana, Production, and storage now correctly match the values shown on individual improvement tooltips instead of being counted twice

• Units no longer teleport to the end of their turn when the camera moves the unit off screen

• Resolved some Prelude stuck turns when loading a save from in between 2 quest points

• Added core armor to be purchased in the shop

  • Chain Armor, Chain Breast Plate, Plate Mail Armor and Champion's Armor can now be bought and sold at shops

• Wargs are no longer able to use throwing knives

• Resolved issues with horse and warg production for cities

• Added in a loot rebalance

  • Reduce Tilda Herbs drop rate by 50% across all 36 monster treasures

  • Reduce Splintered Staff drop rate by 50% across all 21 monster treasures

• Resolved an issue where if a player razes a city their sovereign and units disappear with the city resulting in a soft lock

• Fixed some issues with treaties not showing up in the existing treaties section of the diplomacy screen

• Fixed an issue where the technology treaty would be accessible before a player researches the literacy tech

• Reworked monster loot. Killing a monster can still award more than one item, but every time something drops, the odds of the next drop fall by 67%. Common loot still appears reliably; stacking multiple rare drops on a single kill is now much harder"

• Loot drops are now thematically appropriate to each creature/monster type

• Gold is dropped for humanoid and sentient monsters instead of common ingredients and scales depending on the monster threat level

• Added loot to monsters that did previously did not have any loot drops

  • Higher-tier monsters drop loot more frequently and drop rate will scale over time

• Removed potion drops from wolves

• Random potion, scroll, and weapon drops are now limited to casters, knights, bandits, ghouls, mercenaries, and other plausible carriers

Added in more Legendary Hero Weapons, Armor, Accessories and Consumables

• Weapons

  • Bleeding Blade

  • Possessed Axe

  • Breathstealer

  • Enzo's Knife

  • Skath Longbow

  • Stag Longbow

  • Vorpal Blade

  • Golden Shortbow

  • Harridan Shortbow

  • Shadowbolt Staff

  • Staff of the Serpent

  • Staff of the Stag

• Armor

  • 4 Assassin leather armor pieces

  • 4 Blood God plate armor pieces

  • 4 Lady Umber plate armor pieces

• Accessories & Consumables

  • Pazuzu's Horn

  • Rabisu's Horn

  • Pillar of Grazna Figurine

  • Cursed Bell

  • Lucky Dice

  • Bishop's Ring

  • Revenging Ring

  • Bottled Wind

  • Quicksilver Potion

  • Battle Cry Scroll

  • Imprison Scroll

  • Silence Scroll

Stability and Performance

• Fixed a crash caused by Fog of War map creation and DirectX 11 loading

• Fixed a multi-threaded crash that caused scattered, hard to reproduce crashes across many screens (research, marriage, tactical, treaties, and others) that was mostly common in early turns and games with very high unit counts

• Fixed crashes when razing a city while its panel is open

• Fixed a crash on the post-battle screen when an AI faction was eliminated in combat

• Fixed a crash when transitioning from tactical to strategic maps

• Fixed crashes in the city info panel when the selected city was destroyed or its owner had been eliminated

• Fixed late-turn crashes during AI processing related to city building updates and unit selection

• Fixed a rare crash during world unloading

• Fixed a memory overload crash when starting a new game on a large, huge or gigantic map

• Reduced frame time on idle and cinematic camera frames improving graphics performance

• Resolved issues when loading a previous save and trying to engage in a battle was causing some players' games to freeze

• Resolved a crash that can occur when an AI is upgrading their city

Text

• Fixed Essence tooltips to have the correct tooltip information

• Fixed Typhoid Fever having an incorrect hp effect in the tooltip

• Resolved Tax Office up to Treasury Vault city improvement text to show correct information in the tooltips

• Fixed missing text when hovering on a mountainside

• Fixed incorrect information on the Destiny Force Scroll

• Fixed duplicate and old tooltips in the tech tree

• Fixed a missing word in Hunter's Short Sword description

• Fixed a typo in the builder forge for Volcano Lava tiles

• Adjusted some confusing text in the Prelude campaign

• Book of Defense now correctly says "+1 Defense"

UI

• Hardware mouse cursor option has been added in the options menu

• Added an option to hide battle advice during battle initiation in the options menu

• Improvement tooltips for simple resource buildings (Food, Gold, Mana, etc.) now clearly show the direct "+ Resource" benefit instead of hiding it

• Fixed a UI issue occurred when switching between city, kingdom, and unit leaving map shortcuts in the wrong state

• Adjusted Item Popups to accommodate items with longer names to avoid text clipping

Welcome to this Dev Diary! I’m Tom Fortune, one of the engineers on Sins of a Solar Empire II, and I’ll be walking you through the reasoning and motivations behind the upcoming AI overhaul. Let’s get started. 

Cause & Effect

If you've spent some serious time playing against the Sins II AI, you likely already know the shape of the general complaints we get. The AI doesn’t really like to fight as much as we’d like. It builds a credible early empire and then has issues maintaining it. It spends wildly and in ways that don’t necessarily make sense. You show up to a planet, and structures and items are not built in a way a human would ever do. Fleets get distributed a bit strangely. Exotic factories rarely get built, research wanders instead of compounding. At higher difficulties, the answer to "make it harder" has historically been more resources rather than smarter decisions, which feels less like a stronger opponent and more like a tax.

None of this is for lack of effort. The existing AI is a layered system of specialist controllers: One for purchasing, one for fleets, one for colonization, one for research, one for defense, and several more. Each makes locally reasonable decisions on its own. That architecture has carried Sins II from launch through every expansion, and it does an enormous amount of work that players never see: keeping economies solvent, keeping fleets supplied, keeping planets defended, reacting to threats. The reason it struggles in the late game isn't that any one controller is broken. It's that there has never been a layer above the controllers whose job is to look at the whole board, decide what the AI is actually trying to accomplish, and then make the controllers cooperate toward that plan. Until now, each controller optimized its own little kingdom without strong coordination.

Introducing ARES

After more than a year of fixing symptoms, last December we decided to bite this rather large bullet and fix the cause. Rather than patch each controller into being more aggressive or more focused in isolation, we wanted to introduce a single strategic brain that owns the AI's intent for the match; and then have the existing controllers execute that intent.

The controllers are very good at how. They've never had much of a why. So, we created a top layer to sit above all of them, the Adaptive Reasoning & Execution System, or ARES for short. ARES is now our why.

Three principles drove the design:

ARES is a director, not a suggester.

When ARES is enabled, its decisions are orders. Controllers don't get to quietly re-evaluate them or fall back to their old autonomous behavior when ARES says something inconvenient. If ARES picks a target, fleets go there. If ARES says the economy needs a refinery world, the planet controller builds toward a refinery.

Strategy is goal-shaped, not rule-shaped.

Instead of a thousand if/then statements describing what the AI should do in every situation, ARES generates and scores a list of candidate goals:  capture this territory, defend this border planet, build a capital ship for your fleet, rush this tech tier. Basically, instead of a behavior tree branch that says ‘if enemy fleet > my fleet, then retreat,' ARES asks 'Is continuing this goal still worth more than the alternatives?’

It will commit for as long as those goals remain the best option. Goals are concrete things with a target, a cost, a chance of success, and a payoff. That makes them tunable and inspectable in a way that hand-written behavior trees aren't. 

Difficulty should mean better thinking, not bigger numbers.

Higher difficulty AIs should see the board more clearly, score targets more accurately, commit to plans more decisively, and tolerate more risk, not just earn 30% more credits. That's a long-term goal and it's not fully realized yet, but the architecture is built for it.

ARES sees the game through a perception filter whose accuracy is data-driven per difficulty level; and its scoring noise, goal-switching inertia, and concurrent-plan caps are all dialed in per difficulty as well. However, this has a caveat: eliminating the AI’s need for cheats does not mean that we won’t give them some anyway. We envision a future of Sins' AI where no difficulty needs cheats, but some may be given anyway to further increase difficulty. In short, impossible truly becomes impossible. 

What Makes ARES Tick?

So how does this new layer work? Here's a quick overview of what happens every time ARES thinks:

1. Perception: Everything ARES learns about the world passes through a per-difficulty perception filter: Fog of war, intel staleness, capability flags for things like, "Can I detect chokepoints?" or, "Can I estimate enemy income?" Lower difficulties see less and guess worse.

2. World State: ARES rebuilds a single snapshot of where it’s at: Estimated game phase (rough boundaries, not strictly defined), economic phase, peak vs. current income, fleet strength relative to neighbors, supply utilization, attrition, front lines, chokepoints, expansion candidates, per-enemy threat assessments, and which gravity wells border whom.

3. Engagement Appetite: Based on the world state, ARES decides how aggressive it feels: willingness to commit forces, tolerance for losses, appetite for risk. This number feeds into how it scores its options next.

4. Goal Planning: ARES scores its candidate goals: Military ("capture this," "defend that," "destroy their fleet") and economic ("expand here," "establish a factory world"); ARES then picks the best ones up to its concurrent-goal caps and commits. Once a goal is active, it persists until completed, abandoned for cause, or dominated by something dramatically better.

5. Directives: ARES writes orders into a per-domain output bus: Attack directives, defense directives, fleet composition directives, economy directives, research directives, colonize directives, diplomacy directives; and the pre-existing controllers then consume them. Directives are rebuilt every tick; they are guidance, not state. The persistent state lives in the goals.

6. Feedback: Before scoring next tick's goals, ARES reads back what the controllers couldn't do last tick: Research it couldn't afford, structures blocked by missing infrastructure slots, ships that needed a research subject the AI hadn't unlocked, etc. ARES then folds those signals into the next round of planning. This is what closes the loop. The strategic brain learns from the executors instead of just shouting at them.

The result, is an AI that picks a recognizable plan, commits to it, builds the economy that plan needs, builds the fleet that plan needs, and presses the plan instead of getting distracted. You can tell from watching the map. Fleets converge on real objectives. Defense forms up at the right gravity wells. Research advances along a coherent track. Pressure mounts in one place instead of dribbling everywhere.

What’s Still Being Worked on?

ARES is in the player's hands as an opt-in because it's functional and competitive, not because it's finished.

Here’s an honest list of what we know still needs improvement:

• Late-game fleet composition

  • Capital and super-capital build targets flow through correctly, but the AI is still under-investing in titans and command ships relative to where a strong human player would be by the established and late phases. We want the AI's late-game fleets to look like late-game fleets, not just to be larger early-game ones. Expect updates on this very soon.

• Fleet engagement commitment

  • ARES decides when to attack pretty well, but its in-combat commitment, "Do I press, do I disengage, do I reinforce?",  is still leaning on the existing fleet behavior. We have a phase of work planned to bring that decision under ARES as well, so the fleet doesn't break off when ARES wants it to push.

• Econ-to-war signaling

  • Economic state already informs which military goals look attractive, but there are patterns the AI still misses (e.g. recognizing when an enemy's economy is brittle enough to be worth a targeted strike, rather than a frontal assault).

• Difficulty as cognition

  • As discussed, we want difficulty to scale ARES's quality of thought more than its income. Some of this is wired (perception, scoring noise, concurrent goals, re-evaluation cadence), but more difficulty-scaled tuning is still ahead of us.

• Team play

  • ARES is an angry fella. It really struggles to recognize the difference between an ally and an enemy, and in team games, can generate war goals against allies; and wind up getting stuck on an unresolvable goal. This should be resolved, but, keep an eye out!

• Tuning, broadly

  • Every number in ARES - scoring weights, posture thresholds, attrition limits, role templates, goal caps, demand profiles - is data-driven precisely so we can keep tuning during opt-in based on what we see in real games.

• Multiplayer

  • Multiplayer works, however, there are issues with hot-joining at the moment causing desyncs. Do so at your own risk. Everything else: single-player, full multiplayer from the lobby, is fair game.

Conclusion

ARES is going to keep evolving throughout the opt-in period and beyond. We're not shipping this and walking away. We'll be iterating on it in public, based on what you tell us and what we see in our own playtesting. That's the whole point of the opt-in: not for you to play a finished feature, but to help us find the rough edges. The games where ARES felt sharp, the games where it did something baffling, the difficulty that felt miscalibrated, the faction that didn't feel like itself. All of that is gold to us right now.

There's no substitute for real games. If you've got a save or replay where ARES did something especially smart or especially stupid, send it our way, ideally in the Discord.

Thank you for your continued support and we’re eager to get your feedback!

Wishlist Ashes II

This week's dev journal dives into something that doesn't always get a lot of attention: the numbers behind how units actually fight. We walk through the tooltip changes we've made and what they reveal about weapon behavior, range, and damage in ways that aren't always obvious just from watching a battle. 

Wishlist Ashes II

Two new orbitals are coming to Ashes of the Singularity II. The EM Blast stuns enemy tanks and Titans while leaving your infantry standing, and the Nano Mesh Barrier throws a temporary shield on any friendly units to help them survive a bad engagement.

Tech trees are one of those parts of a strategy game that look obvious from the outside and turn out, every single time, to be one of the hardest things to get right. Game designers have been struggling with how to present technology research to the player since the early 90s, and three decades in, nobody has really solved it. There are good answers, there are interesting answers, and there are answers that work for one game and fall apart in another. There is no settled answer.

As part of the work going into GalCiv IV 4.0, we have been revisiting our tech tree. The question we are sitting with is whether to redo it from scratch or to focus on making the one we have more effective. Both are real options. Both have real costs. We are not done deciding.

Pretty | Easy to Use | Provide Good Gameplay.

Pick 2.

But that doesn’t stop us from trying to have our cake and eat it too. And of course, that means a lot of failure. So much fail.

Why this is hard in the first place

A tech tree is doing more work than it looks like it is doing. It is not just a list of unlocks. It is the spine of the strategic identity of the game. The decisions you make in the first thirty turns of research are not "what gets unlocked next," they are "what kind of game am I playing." If your tree fails at that, no amount of balance work fixes it. If it succeeds at it, players will forgive a startling amount of imbalance.

That is the bar. Two players in the same game, same map, same starting civ. Do they end up feeling like they played different games? If yes, the tree is doing its job. If no, what you have is a checklist with nice art on it.

Then on top of that, the tree has to be legible. It has to be plannable, at least somewhat. It has to survive 500 turns of play without becoming a chore. It has to be teachable to a new player and rewarding to a veteran. It has to scale to hundreds of nodes without turning into wallpaper.

These goals fight each other. Always.

How the genre has tried

Our genre has tried a bunch. Let’s take a tour.

The Civ lattice. Directed graph, eras as horizontal bands. The thing everyone pictures when they hear "tech tree." Strong theater, you really do feel like you have crossed into the Industrial Era. The weakness is that the optimal path crystallizes within months of release, and by Civ V the community had spreadsheeted out the dominant openings to the point that the lattice was largely a memorization exercise.

Master of Orion's tier-and-drop. Each tier offered a few techs and you picked one; the rest were gone for that game. The first 4X I can think of that was honest about the fact that the exclusion is the choice. Two MoO games were not the same game. The cost was that a new player could lock themselves out of something critical without realizing it.

Classic GalCiv parallel tracks. Our own heritage, in various forms, since GalCiv II. Military, economy, diplomacy, social, all advancing in parallel with cross-track prerequisites. It solves the "tech tree is one rail" problem and lets a player visibly be a military civ or a research civ. The honest weakness is that the tracks tend to drift toward feeling like four small linear trees that happen to share a screen.

SMAC's blind research. You set a category bias and the game picked your next tech. The most radical answer in the genre to "the optimal path becomes orthodoxy," because there is no path you control. Beloved by a hardcore niche, hated by everyone who wants agency. I respect it more than any other system on this list and I would not copy it.

Stellaris's card draw. Three weighted options every time you finish a tech, drawn from a pool. The slot machine answer. The dominant build cannot exist if the build is not replicable. The cost is planning. You cannot say "in twenty turns I will have X" because the deck might not deal it. Some players love this. Some bounce off it in the first hour.

Beyond Earth's web. No clear forward, no era bands, total radial freedom. The designers were trying to make every game feel different by removing the spine. The community decided it removed the legibility too, and the game's reception suffered. The cautionary tale on the shelf above my desk.

Endless Space 2's era quadrants. Four wedges per era, era-gated. A clean compromise between the Civ lattice and parallel tracks. Pretty, legible, and the era gate occasionally forces you to research something you did not want, which is good for the game even when it is annoying for the player.

Every one of these is somebody's favorite. Every one of these is somebody's most hated system. That tells you something about how unsolved the problem is.

Our own scrap heap

The reason I am writing this post is that we have been building prototypes. A lot of prototypes. Most of them did not work. Showing the ones that did not work is more useful than pretending we walked straight to the right answer.

The image at the top of this post is one of them. Here is the rest of the museum.

I am going to include a link to an interactive version of each of these. What looks pretty in a screenshot tends to fail in actual use.

• The Constellation. The picture above. A central node with category-colored hexes branching out across a starfield. Looked like the wallpaper for a sci-fi novel. Stopped being readable somewhere around thirty techs, and we have a lot more techs than thirty. https://www.clairvoyanceai.com/view/share/OLWNMjbf9bpL

• The Radial. Circular layout, techs arranged around the rim. Easier to scan than the constellation. Harder to see how techs related to each other.

• The Web. Free-form graph, nodes wired by relationship rather than tier. The most expressive of the prototypes and the most chaotic to look at. Felt like the Beyond Earth lesson coming back around. https://www.clairvoyanceai.com/view/share/KQvwmm1DmS8X

• The 3D Circuit. A stylized circuit board in three dimensions. I personally pushed for this one longer than I should have. It looked great in stills and was a nightmare to use. https://www.clairvoyanceai.com/view/share/e0N6XCPZ7Inf

• The Organized Table. Rows and columns, no graph at all. The boring one. The one we had the hardest time arguing against on legibility grounds, because it was always the easiest to read. The argument against it is the argument against any pure list view: it is legible the way a spreadsheet is legible, which is not the kind of legible we want. https://www.clairvoyanceai.com/view/share/HK20lSPF7eZT

• The Hex Grid. A flat hex map of techs as tiles, with adjacency standing in for prerequisite. Felt promising for about a week. https://www.clairvoyanceai.com/view/share/aPRde_wgjEsP

There were others that did not survive long enough to make this list. The six above are the ones we sat with for at least a couple of weeks each.

The lesson, after a long stretch of this, is one I should have learned faster. The visualization is downstream of the structural decision. If the underlying structure is a directed graph with several hundred nodes, no amount of art direction makes it feel small. The most expressive layout for forty techs becomes unreadable at eighty and unusable at one twenty. You can hide complexity behind zoom and filtering, but hiding complexity is not the same thing as designing for it.

The reason GalCiv has tended toward parallel tracks for twenty-plus years is not that we lacked imagination. It is that parallel tracks scale. The reason every Civilization ships with the lattice is the same reason. The reason Beyond Earth's web is the cautionary tale is that they tried to escape this and the math caught up to them.

Redo, or refine

Which brings us back to the question we are sitting with for 4.0. Do we replace the existing tech tree, or do we focus on making the one we have do its job better?

The argument for replacing it is the constellation, the radial, the web, the circuit, the table, the hex. We built six prototypes for a reason. The current tree has the four-little-linear-trees problem I mentioned earlier, and dressing that up does not make it go away.

The argument for refining it is the lesson from the scrap heap. Every fancy visualization fell down at scale. The current tree, whatever its faults, scales to the size of game we ship. The risk of throwing it out and replacing it with something prettier is that we end up with our own Beyond Earth web.

Right now I lean toward refine, with one specific structural change I have been chewing on that might do most of the work without us starting over. I am not going to commit to that here, because we are still arguing about it. If we land on something I am sure of, that will be its own dev journal.

My top complaint is that I can’t have a tech have multiple prerequisites. It’s just virtually impossible to do that and make it work in a decent UI of any size.

In the meantime, I wanted to put the failed attempts on the table. Some of them are pretty even when they did not work, and the road to the right answer goes through showing the wrong ones honestly.

If you can think of a tech tree in any game that has over 200 techs (or skills or whatever) that you liked, please leave it in the comments below.

-Brad

Play Sins II Now

In this video developer journal we show off some of the new gameplay features added in v1.6 "UI Horizons", including all new active abilities for static defense Military Structures.