Galactic Civilizations® I: Ultimate Edition news & patch notes

Stardock’s award-winning turn-based strategy game series gets its biggest release ever

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Edition now available in early access

Early Access adds ChatGPT integration: AlienGPT

• Added 'w' to default launch options from within Steam. This forces the game to launch in a window as full-screen can fail to instantiate.
• Updated prefs.ini to turn off viewable ship battles; this was also causing issues.

Star Control: Origins villains come to Galactic Civilizations III in exciting new DLC

MAJOR RACES IN VILLAINS OF STAR CONTROL: ORIGINS

Additional Features in Villains of Star Control: Origins

• Dozens of new ship parts inspired by Star Control: Origins for building and modifying your own ships
• Several new music tracks from Star Control: Origins
• New faction traits
• New ship designs, colors, and styles

v3.9 Changelog

• PlayerStartSpacingWideMod changed from 1.0 to 0.33
• PlayerStartSpacingNarrowMod changed from 0.50 to 0.175
• Basic Life Support range bonus increased from 0.25 to 0.30
• Large hull ship maint increased from 3 to 5
• Huge hull ship maint increased from 3 to 7
• Cultural treaties now benefit both sides
• Military Alliance treaties now benefit both sides
• Planets rebel a bit slower than before.
• AI values supply ships more when it's not at war.
• Surrender change: Surrendering players now destroy their worlds upon surrendering unless they are surrendering to a particular player in which case they will transfer their homeworld (and only their homeworld) to that player. This reduces the late game sudden explosion in micro-management of worlds the player may have no interest in. AI also destroys its ships.
• All territory in a player's ZOC is always visible. No fog of war (in your borders).
• New starbase module: "Ascension Gate Study." Allows the player to get a lot more out of the Ascension Gates.

• Shipyard won't rebuild the list of ships unless there's been a change to the resources the player has. This dramatically improves late-game shipyards screen performance.
• Improved turn times, especially late game.  
• Fixed issue where disabling a DLC via command line would not have the grayed out portraits show up.
• Fixed some pixelation on the Campaign screen.
• Adjusted list container on the custom faction screen to avoid clipping of the Abilities list on lower resolutions.
• Fixed typos and grammar errors
• Added typos and grammar errors
• Shorten names that were too long
• Fixed colony list in Civilization screen showing the incorrect manufacturing stat in the column labeled for social manufacturing.
• Fixed several places in the UI that were showing incomplete or inaccurate stat breakdown tooltips for manufacturing because of missing tooltip data.
• Got rid of leftover debug UI graphics in the Promotion Stats tooltip (seen in the commander unit promotion screen).
• Fixed too-skinny approval field in the main map planet tooltip if the colony had 100% approval.
• Fixed a crash whenever an AI player surrendered over their stuff to another player.
• Changed description of Silicon-Based life to reflect that their cities were changed to use Promethion instead of Durantium.

• Reworked the way that the "Max Manufacturing" stat is shown in the stat breakdown tooltip. It now also displays the social and military manufacturing stats and their breakdowns, including the slider values when Crusade isn't enabled.
• In Crusade mode, "base research" or "base manufacturing" or "base income" are now displayed as Raw Production, to accurately reflect where that number is coming from (as opposed to being some calculated value from sliders and such in non-Crusade).
• In non-Crusade mode, fixed bug in the spending breakdown at the bottom of the manufacturing, research, and income stat breakdown tooltips where it showed player-wide raw production or slider values instead of colony-specific ones.
• Moved "Collect Gameplay Data" option to it's position to prevent the spinner option from taking its place.
• Various flavor text changes to abilities, components, technologies, improvements to make them more clear.

• AI values hypergates much more.
• AI evaluates foreign influence before determining whether a planet should be colonized.

• Recently conquered planets are now immune to culture flip for 15 turns.
• Planets that have been culturally flipped have a 15 turn morale penalty.
• Planets now receive a default planetary defense bonus and a resistance bonus.
• Default colony ship loading population reduced from 2 to 1.
• Population used for filling colony ships increased from a radius of 6 to 10.
• AI ship design evaluation decreased from 20 turns to 10 turns.
• UpgradeDiscountFactor increased from 0.5 to 0.9.
• Bonuses to players playing at easier levels changed from a % to a flat.
• Civilization capital sensor range increased from 12 to 16.

• Patriot government ship loses a Railgun and a Harpoon to make it a bit less powerful.

• Echoing Heartstone Artifact power reduced from 10,000 to 1,000.
• Tech Inflation increased from 2% to 2.5%.
• Starting Taxation increased from 25% to 33%.
• Galactic News earlier turn increased from turn 10 to turn 15.
• Galactic News cooldown increased from 12 to 20 turns.
• Colony Limit Max Penalty increased from 6 to 10.
• Default starting money increased from 3,000 credits to 5,000 credits.

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• As soon as someone controls an Ascension crystal, have an icon show up and informs you that Ascension has started. Mousing over should show you how far along each civ with Ascension is from ascending as a % bar with (turns).
• UI Layout updates
  Updated most screens to use fonts, colors, and font sizes consistently. Made fonts bigger wherever possible.
  • General cleanup of margins and list entries wherever possible.
  • Removed extra returns from the "word on the street" blurbs.
  • Move some of the drop-downs in options screens to keep them from clipping.
• You can now adjust the difficulty level mid-game through the options screen (single player only).
• Starting ships don't append a number to their name unless another ship of the same design has already been spawned. This is to support custom flavorful names for core starting ships from starting ship designs
• Updated starting ship names of factions added to the game after Crusade.
• Shipyard display now shows how much production is being sent to that shipyard, so you know how fast it can build things.
• Fixed an issue causing the unit buttons from not showing up in Medium UI on the Colony List screen.
• Planet view list now displays research
• Aliens can now be tagged as being available or unavailable as random civilizations
• Fixed Tourism exploit in Crusade version of the Consulate
• The AI has been ordered top stop freezing time to keep its mission ships safe. (stuck turn fix)
• Addressed "word on the street" grammar and spelling mistakes
• Removed duplicate planet data in crusade and base game data folders that could potentially cause bad things(TM)
• Adjusted the choose civ screen to improve text wrapping
• Fixed alignment issue on the Drath starting screen
• Fixed a bug that prevented commanders from being assigned to United Earth ships

Galactic Civilizations III v3.7 Anniversary Update Focuses Exclusively on Fan Requests

Improved custom ship mod compatibility, commonwealth world adjustments, and more!

• Merging fleets no longer renames them
• Custom ships work better with mods
• Artificial life forms can no longer build farms because robots don't eat food
• Your commonwealth worlds can no longer flip worlds in your empire (because that was treason!)

v3.6 Changelog Notes

• Nerfed "Lossless Life Support" module
• Fixed typos in "Lossless Mining" module descriptions
• Updated Tourism bonus for the "Popular Race" trait to be flat 1 and 2% instead of multipliers of 10 and 20%
• Updated united planet tourism board to be flat with a 10% bonus (was multiplier of 100% which was crazy)
• Colonizing the Promethion Refinery precursor world now grants 5 Promethion
• Set "Virtual Vacation" to be a player wonder
• Changed "Influence Per Turn" from multiplier to flat on the Galactic Showcase
• Fixed mismatch of description and text in the "Antimatter Weapon Colonizing" event
• Tweaked pathfinding so that it doesn't attempt to find a path to the node closest to a blocked destination if the start tile is already the closest node
• Silicon-based life can terraform and colonize high level extreme worlds
• Removed farms for Synthetic lifeforms and enabled terraforming improvements and high end extreme world techs
• Fixed "Orphaned Improvements" and techs in the Retribution tech tree
• Fixed issue with Iridium tech tree failing on "Tariff Focus" specialization

• Changed it so that when you merge a fleet, it will keep a custom name for the resulting fleet. If both fleets being merged have custom names, it keeps the fleet name of the bigger fleet.
• Adjusted "Economic Warning" flavor text to fit with new conversation popup font size.
• Fixed typo in "Precursor Research Node" description.
• Improved the text alignment on the UP Resolutions window

• Fixed custom ship style sets having the wrong strategic icons. Players will have to re-save their ship style sets (and change the effect ships classes to what they want along with their text, since that is info that is saved off). Prevents players from having to remake the ship style sets and only deal with what was changed
• You can no longer assign commanders to planets
• Ships with "one per player" components can upgrade to ships with the same components
• Cleaned up code that clears/applies rebellion status to prevent edge cases where planets can flip when they shouldn't (like when the tile is owned by a commonwealth of the planet owner)
• Addressed a MP crash related to mismatched DLC
• Fixed mismatched strategic icons on some ship classes
• Fixed typos in "Plasma Arc" event

• Ships created with mods now show up correctly
• Prevents crash if a tech unlocks more than 12 things at once (modders -- you know who you are!)

• Fixed issue where Hypergates didn't fire any shots during battle because they didn't have range
• Changed the Hyperlane tool tip to account for the minimum move cost, so it will now show the max bonus as 900% instead of +-100%
• Removed extra space in the Korath faction description
• Added "lossless life support" back into the Retribution tech tree
• Updated Thalan conversation text to reflect that they bring in multiple ships now in mission 4
• Add basic Block Hulls to Korath Ship style

The expansion includes Hypergates, Precursor Artifacts, New Civilizations, and more.

• Artifacts - Powerful items buried on planets across the galaxy will give your civilization instant-access to new abilities.
• Hypergates - Construct powerful gateways that, when linked, allow your fleets to travel rapidly across hyperspace.
• Major Civilizations: Drath and Korath - The manipulative Drath pull the strings across the galaxy while the Korath rely on extermination. Each has its own set of special abilities, bonuses, and ship parts.
• Supply Ships - Supply ships can be constructed to deliver goods and services to your other planets to aid in their development.
• New Technology Tree - A top to bottom overhaul of the technology tree adds depth and sharpens the strategic choices in your research options.
• Retribution Campaign -The malevolent Drengin Empire made a terrible mistake underestimating humanity’s strength, and the climactic battle that will follow may end in their extinction.

Galactic Civilizations III: Retribution arrives on February 21

• Artifacts - Powerful items buried on planets across the galaxy will give your civilization instant-access to new abilities.
• Hypergates - Construct powerful gateways that, when linked, allow your fleets to travel rapidly across hyperspace.
• Major Civilizations: Drath and Korath - The manipulative Drath pull the strings across the galaxy while the Korath rely on extermination. Each has its own set of special abilities, bonuses, and ship parts.
• Supply ships - Supply ships can be constructed to deliver goods and services to your other planets to aid in their development.
• New Technology Trees - A top to bottom overhaul of the technology tree adds depth and sharpens the strategic choices in your research options.
• Retribution Campaign - The malevolent Drengin Empire made a terrible mistake underestimating humanity’s strength, and the climactic battle that will follow may end in their extinction.

Hypergates, Artifacts, new campaigns and new civilizations arrive this Winter.

• Artifacts - Powerful items buried on planets across the galaxy will give your civilization instant-access to new abilities.
• Hypergates - Construct powerful gateways that, when linked, allow your fleets to travel rapidly across hyperspace.
• Major Civilizations: Drath and Korath - The manipulative Drath pull the strings across the galaxy while the Korath rely on extermination. Each has its own set of special abilities, bonuses, and ship parts.
• Cargo Ships - Cargo ships can be constructed to deliver goods and services to your other planets to aid in their development.
• New Technology Tree - A top to bottom overhaul of the technology tree adds depth and sharpens the strategic choices in your research options.
• Retribution Campaign - The malevolent Drengin Empire made a terrible mistake underestimating humanity’s strength, and the climactic battle that will follow may end in their extinction.

Adjustments to personality traits for factions and AI decisions are among improvements

v3.2 Changelog Notes

• Stars are placed a slightly further apart than before in order to make each system independent from others.
• AI more aggressive at sending out constructors to build starbases
• Personality traits are given much greater consideration when deciding what topics the civilization wants to discuss.
• Personality traits are now given much greater consideration for deciding what types of ships to build when at peace.
• Personality traits are now given much greater consideration when deciding what kinds of treaties and offers to give to the player.

• Diplomacy ability bonus to relations reduced from 2 to 1.

• AI manages its tax rate more effectively.
• Changed default # of colonies before a government is allowed from 3 to 2.

• If you don't own the either the Mercenaries or Intrigue expansion packs, you can now still get Jeff
• Jeff is already perfect and shuns your attempts to "upgrade" him
• Added custom Starbases for Mukay, Tywom, and Free Trandals (Mowlings starbases are unchanged)

Don't have Galactic Civilizations III? Get it now!

Plays as some of your favorite Star Control: Origins races with new traits, leaders, music and more

MAJOR RACES IN HEROES OF STAR CONTROL: ORIGINS

• Dozens of new ship parts inspired by Star Control: Origins for building and modifying your own ships
• Several new music tracks from Star Control: Origins
• New faction traits
• New ship designs, colors, and styles

• Added a new racial trait, Aeroponics which allows that race to build a special low yield farm on any terrain with the Xeno Adaptation technology (requires Crusade).

• When you willingly start a campaign, A fleet may be spawned without name, If you click on that fleet - the result, bittersweet, Will engender a crash in our game.
• Fixed the Trial by Fire achievement.
• Fixed the Perseverance so it can now correctly colonize extreme worlds even if the player doesn't have the tech.
• Fixed an issue scavenging a trade ship where it wouldn't have a home port anymore.
• Fixed an end turn crash (thanks for all the reproducible saves!).