Hello everyone,

We are excited to share with you a preview of version 4.0. This is a substantial upgrade to the game that introduces the "Colonial Charter" government type, which offers flexible ways to grow your civilization. We have also added Political Parties, each with its own agenda, and Institutions to expand your power. The notification system has received a significant overhaul to make it more user-friendly, and we've added a mini-map so you can better see what's happening around you. Speaking of maps, we have also added a long-requested feature – a map editor! You can now design the perfect galaxy for your society to thrive. Finally, we've made significant improvements to the AI and diplomacy systems. Read below for more information.

Steam 

• Select Galactic Civilizations IV from your Steam Library list. 

• Right-click and select "Properties." 

• Select the BETAS tab. 

• From the dropdown, select "Insider" and click Close. (if you don't see this option, restart Steam.) 

Steam should pull down the changed files; if you ever want to return, do the same as above but select "default." 

Epic 

• Open the Epic Launcher 

• Select "Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova - Insider's Edition" 

• Install and play! 

Please note: The opt-in (Insider Build) is an early preview of the next update, and you might experience bugs or other issues. 

Summary

Colonial Charter

Every civilization has access to the Colonial Charter government type that gives you flexible policy slots instead of locking you into a single strategy. Retune your policies as your empire grows and your priorities shift. Also unlocks “Institutions” and “Political Parties.”

Map Editor

Stop rolling the dice on random galaxies. Lay out the stars, clusters and homeworlds yourself. Open the editor and place stars, clusters anomalies, and homeworlds in the galaxy. Jump straight into a game on your map or hand it to someone else.

Custom Maps

Start a game on any hand-built galaxy instead of a random one, and trade maps with the community.

Updated Turn Notifications

Everything that needs you each turn shows up right on the main screen — no digging through a log. End your turn and the events that matter surface directly in the lower right corner. Click one to jump straight to the planet, ship, or decision it's about.

Mini Map

A strategic read on the whole galaxy, always in the sidebar. Zoom, pan, and jump the main view without losing your place.

Political Parties

Your civilization isn't a monolith. Internal parties pull in different directions. Win their favor and they back you or ignore them at your peril. Parties form inside your civilization, each with its own agenda. Your decisions will please some parties and anger others. If you keep a party happy and you earn its support and bonuses; there are consequences to alienating them.

Institutions

Assign your leaders to run Institutions that boost your civilization's science, manufacturing, military and more. Stronger leaders produce bigger bonuses, so it matters who you slot where. Reassign leaders as your strategy shifts to steer the bonuses that matter most.

AI Improvements

Lots of AI upgrades across the board: expansion, war, diplomacy and government play all got smarter opponents behind them.

Diplomacy & Trade

A redesigned diplomacy system built for making better deals.

July 24th, 2026 Change Log

Art

• Thousands of UI and color textures re-optimized for lower memory use and faster loads.

• New dedicated icons for the Great Museum galactic wonder (was showing a placeholder / missing art).

• New Hack Module and Diplomatic Presence action icons.

• Probe reveal and fog-of-war no longer leave straight "unexplored" seams at cluster boundaries.

• Range/graphics refresh on the fly

• When you gain a colonization tech via trade or espionage theft (or via research when another tech is queued), extreme planets are no longer rendered pink/locked

• Event-revived dead planets no longer look dead

• Starbase range rings update the moment their source changes.
  

Audio

• Updated volume levels of some ambient tracks

• Added variety to ambient track list

• Shipyard ambient loop volume corrected and is no longer blasting at full volume across a 300-unit hear radius.
  

Engine

• Fixed intermittent crashes tied to surveyed anomalies de-spawning mid-effect and to AI fleet stat calculations.

• Fixed a first-load click issue on newly-optimized UI art so buttons and icons register clicks correctly again.

• Tech tree loads non-fatally: saves referencing removed/renamed/modded techs recover gracefully with a user-visible fallback instead of crashing the tech screen.

• Multiplayer AI move-phase determinism hardening — desyncs from unordered iteration and shared-RNG asymmetry addressed on the AI planning path.

• Suppressed a spurious assert on the CrisesUp popup at scheduler boundaries and on the Leader Action popup.

• Save/load: unlimited-range ship bonuses no longer poison the range cache with an infinite value on load; older saves with the bad value self-heal.

• Thread-safety: AI war-aim and update planning now use the correct random stream, closing an intermittent multiplayer/save divergence path.
  

Galaxy Forge

• Authored maps now place strategic resources, black holes, relics, nebulae, and asteroid fields exactly where designed instead of being filtered out by procedural spacing rules.

• Authored player homeworlds no longer downgrade below class 2.

• Authored pirate, space-monster, and sentinel bases now spawn at their designed coordinates.

• Three new bundled custom maps: YinYang (small), Compass Rose (medium), and D20 (large).

• Bundled maps now appear in Galaxy Settings alongside your own custom maps; a player map with the same filename always takes priority.

• Bundled map names and descriptions are now localized, while player-authored map names are left exactly as written.
  

Gameplay

• Event-granted improvements (like the Yor Singularity Milestone's Neural Nexus) now actually get placed on your planet.

• Ship construction costs more when you're near your Fleet Supply cap.

• Auto-Build: shipyards can now auto-construct to fleet templates via a new game option; toggling stops it cleanly.

• Auto-Mine: starbase modules can auto-mine adjacent resources, and the recurring "Do you wish to mine?" popup is gone.

• Trade ships no longer stall or drop licenses mid-route — license validation happens on arrival, and retention through halt/redirect is fixed.

• New "Reroll-Breakthrough-Techs" Executive Order lets you reroll breakthrough options at a Control cost without incurring the Refocus penalty.

• AI opponent planning fixes so the AI actually uses hub-clustering and adjacency synergies instead of ignoring them

• AI quest scoring now weighs magnitude, not just sign, so the AI stops picking Mutated Animals options that hand it a permanent −25% manufacturing penalty.

• Cloaked battles can no longer hard-hang the game — cloak grants an evasion modifier instead of untargetability, and a hard round-cap guarantees battles always terminate.

• Diplomacy tech trades validate against each player's actual (possibly custom) tech tree, so offers on non-Standard trees no longer appear tradable but fail on accept.

• The first-contact trade windows can now add items to the trade window

• Fixed a problem where an improvement would get completed, but never appear on the planet

• Same-tile fleet moves: ships now face their travel direction instead of spinning or snapping after teleport-adjacent moves; halts stop and resume cleanly.

• Custom factions keep the tech tree you chose (Terran Alliance, Synthetic, etc.) through faction save/game start instead of silently reverting to Standard.

• Custom maps now honor authored anomalies, creep bases, and asteroid belts instead of regenerating over them

• Sector/cluster placement uses correct min-gap math and margin checks, eliminating overlapping or tangent clusters across small, medium, and huge map sizes.

• Crimelord: new Black Market Mineral Exchange colony improvement.

• Auto-Survey: falls back to broader exploration when no survey targets remain; Invisible Hand auto-acquire now validates its target properly.

• Redirected shipyards no longer report themselves as idle while feeding a primary sponsor.
  

UI

• Alerts are now semi-transparent, tech tree titles fade cleanly at the edge, and political party icons show faction-flavored names (e.g. "Enforcers" for Xeloxi).

• Breakthrough tech discounts now appear immediately on the HUD. No more closing/reopening the research screen to see accurate turns-to-complete.

• Promote/job-assignment menu no longer queues behind a cutscene or double-fires from spam-clicks. Esc/click-away closes the window cleanly.

• Stations tab added to the main game window strip so Shipyards & Starbases are discoverable directly instead of buried under a Ships→Stations sub-toggle.

• Diplomacy Report scrollbar/layout no longer clips or stacks arrows on short lists; small-list scrollbars render cleanly.

• Spacebar skip-turn now behaves like Standby (retains movement points) instead of hard-consuming MP like Pass.

• Input guards on the trade/route flow so you can open the window without pre-existing routes.

• "No-research" yield tooltip shows live yields instead of blank

• Tech and shipyard tooltips corrected

• Rally hotkey surfaced.

• Leader-related alerts and notifications route to the Government screen's Leaders tab

• Recruit Leader entries: dual bonus icons now centered and evenly justified in their slots; long names render without clipping.

• Leaders screen gets sort buttons (Name/Level/Stats);

• Every government screen's leader list gained Name / Level / INT / DIL / SOC / RES sort buttons.

• Leader sort tooltips now capitalize attribute names, and each attribute links to its Galactapedia entry.

• Assign-Governor dialog lists recruitable leaders alongside idle ones, cheapest first, so new players are no longer dead-ended by "no governors available."

• Fleet card weapon stats populated with mixed Beam + Missile static blueprint loadouts (Lasers + Hypersonic Missiles replacing 3× Plasma / 4× Phased Cannons)

• Fleet card's' Weapon Stat Breakdown tooltip's redundant "Details" header removed.

• Fleet Context: survey task label hidden; click tooltip moved onto the icon/stack for cleaner presentation.

• Fleet Context command bar restored to two rows so Manage Fleet stays reachable on large fleets.

• Fleet/ship context card redesigned to 3×3 stat grid with a full-width HP bar, per-weapon Beam/Missile/Kinetic stat rows, and multi-ship fleet HP now shown.

• Party description field now fits two-sentence descriptions cleanly

• Asteroid context labels no longer clip long planet names.

• Tech Navigator: opens on the first initialized category rather than a blank state.

• Unit Manager: ministry header now has a tooltip; "Promote to President" hidden on your homeworld where it doesn't apply.

• Stat Breakdown tooltip: repositions correctly after it dynamically resizes so it no longer sits partly off-screen.

• GNN alert tab icon realigned so it sits flush with neighboring alert icons.

• Range visualization's range rings clean up on deselect and no longer leave ghost outlines when switching to a smaller selection; only changed clusters rebuild.

• Range rings snap to the hex grid so the circle matches where units can actually reach.

• Starbase membership, range rings, path graphics, tooltips, and AI queries all use hex distance consistently. Range previews match actual reachable tiles.

• Starbase tooltip now shows every strategic resource yield instead of dropping some as the list changes, and resizes/repositions correctly when yields or traits update.

• Single-choice notification events resolve automatically and keep their authored acknowledgement wording in the notification detail.

• Research District upgrades now use the correct research icon instead of the Computing Center icon.

• Removed doubled percent signs from Drengin Prison Labor Camp and Prison Research Lab, and Festron Harmonious Antennae, Work Instruction Chamber, and Cerebral Chamber descriptions.

July 16th, 2026 Change Log

Colonial Charter

You start the game building a “Colonial Leadership Council” project on your homeworld. When its complete, you unlock the government button and automatically start with the “Colonial Charter” government. The Colonial Charter now unlocks the following:

• Policies: The existing Policy system is now a feature of the Colonial Charter Government.

• Institutions: You can assign leaders to different “Institutions,” which provide tiered buffs over time. Drag available leaders to Institutions to assign them. The number of turns it takes to level up an institution is based on the assigned leaders' stats. For example, Intelligence for The Academy (research) Institution.

• Parties: Citizens belong to one of four different parties. Parties provide bonuses based the average approval rating of citizens in the party.

Map Editor

• Map Editor is now accessible from the main menu.

• Choose from one of several galaxy templates to get started.

• Place stars, clusters anomalies, and homeworlds in the galaxy; draw Hyperlanes on the map

• Load custom maps when setting up a new game.

• New maps are sharable with other players

Balance & Gameplay

• AI opponents no longer surrender prematurely, better deal valuation around trade.

• New Broadcast Beacon Ship Component: deployed sensor drones project map influence over time.

• Cap Insight (discounted random research) to 3

• “Recycling center” pollution effect improved from 5% to 8%.

• War Aims updates

  • forced-ceasefire events are now optional (reject choice added) with a raised cooldown, instead of forcing surrender.\

  • New War Fatigue approval penalty: past a war's max duration, aggressor's citizens lose 1%/month approval, target's lose 0.5%/month, capped at -50%.

  • Wars now run much longer before fatigue starts.

  • New "X declared war on Y" line on war aims tooltip.

Performance / Stability

• Fixed many crash/assert guards across leader assignment, race-trait lookups, and government refresh paths

UI

• Polished Colony Summary window.

• Updated the Fleet/Ship Context to make the special actions more usable.

• Refactored the Leader Cards

• Fixed a broken hot spot in the first tutorial

• Fix duplicate defended shield on Fleet Context.

• Turn Notification redesigned

• Added a mini-map to the information panel in the upper right, along with toggles for different map icons.