We are pleased to unveil the first major update to Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade (Crusade being based on version 2.1 of the base game, we now unveil version 2.2).

Release date: May 24, 2017.

Below is the change log:

New Map Size: Ludicrous

Map sizes made bigger.

• Tiny: 18 to 20 hex sectors
• Small: 32 to 36 hex sectors
• Medium: 40 to 50 hex sectors
• Large: 75 to 90 hex sectors
• Huge: 95 to 120 hex sectors
• Immense: 240 to 250 hex sectors
• Excessive: 290 to 300 hex sectors
• Insane renamed to Ludicrous 
• Ludicrous: 500!

== AI ==

• The AI will have harder time stealing techs from you if you have counter agents (e.g. unassigned agents).  
• The AI no longer tries to bribe you to pick on minor factions.
• AI now fully uses the new Crusade multicore engine in pathfinding, diplomacy, ship movement, tactical analysis, economic planning, planetary invasions, citizen assignments, etc. are all broken up into tiny jobs and sent out to your CPU cores drastically reducing turn times.
• AI is much, MUCH smarter in what ships to build when (thanks to the GalCiv Discord community for rapid strategy testing responses) and how.
• Substantial improvement in the general feel of AI intelligence when dealing with other civilizations diplomatically.
• Improvements to AI trade intelligence based on the new multi-turn need analysis system.
• AI more savvy on how to use spies as it now takes the consequences of retaliation into account before targeting someone.
• Easy AI no longer rushes defensive units
• Easy AI is no longer capable of rushing colony ships
• AI no longer tries to reinforce planets with individual defender units if they are far away (this is the cause of lone ships streaming to their death in far off places)
• The AI will have a harder time stealing techs from you if you have counter agents (e.g. unassigned agents).
• The AI no longer tries to bribe you to pick on minor factions.
• AI will no longer trade ships away on the cheap
• Lots of new alien dialog based on more background data (what the galactic situation is).

== Gameplay ==

• Ported more of the GalCiv III base game tech tree elements to the new Trait based system.  Crusade replaces the monolithic tech tree system with one that is procedural generated based on what traits you have for your civilization.  
• First internal pass on getting ready to let players submit their own tech tree parts via Steamworks (i.e. create a bunch of techs, tie them to player traits, and have them just work).
• Anomalies and Events from other DLC have had their rarity adjusted to be in line with Crusade's new rarities (basically, other DLC stuff was relatively rare).
• AI is more chatty

== Multiplayer ==

• General multiplayer performance improvements.  
• Reduced multiplayer Checksum fragility to only deal with differences that are material.
• First pass at networking layer upgrade to pave the way for fully customized civs playing each other (i.e. you play as your favorite sci fi civ vs. someone else's sci fi civ). The main challenge here is bandwidth on sharing what amounts to some pretty big assets.

== User Experience ==

• Adjusted the Espionage screen to clarify that unassigned agents lower the chance the AI can steal techs from you.
• Resource upgrades improvements are no longer flagged as one per planet.  
• You can now select a fleet even if there's a non-selectable ship on the same tile. 
• Decommissioned ships refund their administration points and legions.
• Improved up the commander information on the citizen summary screen
• Removed access debug error messages. This matters because modders could find themselves with a lot of debug output which on non SSD drives could slow framerate.
• Reduced the number of event log entries displayed

== Balance ==

• Beam Weapon space usage reduced from 5% to 3%
• Kinetic Weapons cost reduced substantially.
• Entrepreneurs now provide a trade route to their civ as well
• General comes with Xeno Combat techniques
• Colonizer Ability changed such that every time they colonize a planet, they get their administrative point back.  
• Xeno Combat Techniques now unlocks the General. Combined with Station Garrison, player can protect planets without having to research invasion.
• Port of Call tourism improvement moved to only require Universal translator
• Capital city now allows up to 16 population
• Computer Core cost reduced from 35 to 16 so that players that don't want to rush it don't wait too long
• Port of Call cost decreased from 150 to 32
• Port of Call benefit changed from a 10% tourism income boost to a flat 1 with each level adding another 1
• Starport now military production increased from 1 to 2
• Space Elevator general production decreased from 2 to 1
• City population cap increased from 8 to 16
• Silicon city population cap increased from 8 to 9
•  Military Academy improvement now requires planetary invasion to eliminate confusion in which players thought they had to train legions to invade.
• Station Garrison cost reduced from 75 to 50
• Influence specialization now provides a flat 1 influence to every colony instead of a 10% boost.
• Majesty Tech now quires the diplomatic ability
•  Master Trade now requires the entrepreneur ability
• Other high-level biz/trade techs now require entrepreneur race ability
• Robots can't have cruise lines
• Improved AI conquest strategies
• Slight balance tweak to opposing culture affect.
• Mild balance pass on the weightings of faction power.
• Hot Springs moved to require Planetology (for frog races)
• Hot Springs benefit changed from 3 to 2.
• Increased AI's guts by 25%. Basically, AIs tend to be a bit too careful in when to attack. This is partially because players think AIs are "dumb" if they make suicide attacks. But there is a time and place to use suicide attacks to wear down an opponent.  Cracking a turtler requires sacrifice.
• New ship design method that lets us see how many ship designs are in the library.
• General increase in late game tech costs.
• Defenses now use less space but cost more
• Carrier modules cost more but use less room
• Eyes of Universe now requires "Interstellar Travel" instead of "Interstellar Survey"
• Farming no longer requires "Xeno Adaptation" but comes sooner with Planetology
• Cities now require Planetology (or "Torian Planetology")
• Slight increase in cost for later improvements
• Minor balance updates
• Xenophobic tripled benefits at the cost of decreased "Ship Construction".  
• Set default faction to Terran Alliance
• Nerfed Renaissance event's research bonus

== Performance ==

• Continued improvement to turn times thanks to Crusade multicore
• Improvement to speed of clearing out an old game so you can get back to the main menu.

== Bug Fixing == 

• On the starbase list, the "upgrade" icon isn't always enabled.  
• Fix Virtual World improvement, now requires Promethean instead of Promethean Stones (which are no longer in the game)
• Stuck turn fixes.  This issue is caused by the very delicate balance between turn speed and the difficulty of resyncronizing the threads quickly.
• Various crash bugs fixed.
• Fixed the Scientist Coerced Promotion which was giving 10x points
• Fixed a bug where if food was ever >0 but then later became 0 that it would never update again.
• Fixed strange bug that was causing pirates to not get to take a turn because the game thought they were dead. They're not dead!
• Fixed bug where asteroids from dead players would become owned by pirates and unkillable. Mining bases are now autodestroyed when a player dies.
• Fixed edge case bug where the player somehow allies with an event race which in turn causes a strange diplomacy flag to show up.
• Fixed minor bug where planned destination of a virtual fleet wasn't being copied from the source fleet. This would sometimes cause the AI not to attack targets of opportunity.
• Typo fixes. English isn't our first language. Our first language is Drengin which doesn't have vowels.
• Graph power buttons now toggle properly
• Updated the Entrepreneur Citizen text to better reflect its ability.
• Ship designer window: removed a duplicate resource bar

Have fun!