October 2026 - v2.10 Update Change Log

Release Status: *** OPT-IN ***

October brings the Eidolon their own way to win. A fully corrupted star can now be shrouded into a Dark Star, tearing rifts open across the surrounding systems, and the Anrakhazh Scion has gone from a placeholder to a finished command ship built to make that happen (requires the Reinforcements and Harbinger DLCs).

The AI has been rebuilt on the ARES decision model and is now on for every AI player, the Advent Unity abilities have been reworked around range instead of dominant culture, alliance transfers are live with a 10% tax, and every unit description in the game has been rewritten to lead with what the ship actually does.

To Opt-In:

• 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 test_edition from the Beta Participation list.

  • Steam will update you.

• On Epic

  • Install the Test Edition build of the game from your Library.

Gameplay

Advent Unity Reworked Around Range

Unity abilities no longer require dominant culture. Chastise, Resurrection, Sacrifice and Sanctify have lost that requirement entirely, and every Unity ability now works from a Unity range measured in AU.

• The Focus planet development track adds 5 AU per level, up to 25 AU at level 5.

• Battle Meditation adds 10/15/20 AU by level.

• The Deliverance Engine's culture spread adds 10 AU, and its own culture spread rises from 15 to 20 for the Reborn and from 15/20 to 20/30 for the Wrath.

• Clairvoyance is not limited by Unity range.

Alliance Transfers

The transfer system is live. Each faction has a research subject that opens trading of resources, exotics, planets, items and influence, and every faction charges a 10% tax on resource transfers.

• Overtures (Advent), Universal Negotiation (TEC), Xeno Influence (Vasari) and Coercive Transfer (Eidolon) unlock transfers.

• Offers show gross and net values, a 0% tax is hidden, and an accepted offer keeps the rate it was agreed at.

Factional Victory

• The Factional Victory option in the lobby now explains what each faction has to do to win. Victory goes to the first player to complete their faction's objective and hold it through the countdown, and in team games the whole team wins. If the objective is lost, the countdown starts over.

  • TEC: build Planet Cracker Warheads on a Novalith Cannon and use it to finish off 5 enemy planets. One set of warheads fired again and again is enough, but if the Novalith is destroyed its kills are lost.

  • Advent: build a Telepathic Amplifier on each of 3 Dreadnoughts, bring them to a star, then keep all 3 alive at a star for 15 minutes.

  • Vasari: build Departure Supplies on each of 3 Anarkrul Wanderers or Sularkon Tyrants, bring them to a star, then keep all 3 alive at a star for 15 minutes.

  • Eidolon: build the Stellar Shrouding Beam on an Anrakhazh Scion and fire it at a star at maximum corruption. Shrouding takes 15 minutes, and once the star becomes a Dark Star you have to survive 5 more minutes.

Economy, Planets and Map

• Scuttling now refunds in full while a unit is still under construction, and half once it is complete. Exotics follow the same split.

• Pirate incursions have been halved. First wave supply from 50 to 25, per-wave increase from 30 to 15, largest single wave from 200 to 100, and total raiding supply from 650 to 325.

• NPC garrisons spawned at outposts away from their home gravity well now hold a guard mission, so raids can no longer pull them away.

• The Pirate King's Pillage now recognises Eidolon structures as targets.

AI

The AI has been rebuilt on the ARES decision model, and it is on for every AI player by default. Expect opponents that expand harder, defend their important worlds, keep research moving, and commit to a war instead of drifting between targets.

• The new model covers how the AI reads the galaxy, scores targets, decides when to fight, plans research, drives expansion, positions its capital ships and holds territory.

• Three personality archetypes ship alongside the default: rush, boom and turtle. A slot set to pick at random draws one of the three with equal odds.

• An AI that sues a human player for protection now only asks for a cease fire or shared vision it doesn't already have, waits 10 minutes between requests, and offers no more than 10% of its resources.

• AI alliance offers price and hand over items by their confirmed count rather than the full stack.

Faction Balance

Advent

• Progenitor Mothership Shield Regeneration: antimatter cost from 125/100/75 to 125/140/155, shield restore rate from 25/37.5/50 to 20/25/30, and spell power scaling from 0.35/0.4/0.45 to 0.3/0.4/0.5.

TEC

• Sordid Intel (Enclave): research time from 120 to 150 seconds, cost from 700/100/125 to 750/125/150, and moved up a tier.

• Phase Jump Inhibitor: Phasic Energy Regulation now applies its shroud limit bypass correctly.

Vasari

• Shock and Awe: research time from 120 to 150 seconds, metal from 240 to 270, crystal from 210 to 240, and moved up a tier.

• Pilot Cloning Bay now requires its own blueprint research and grants one extra squadron.

• Phase resonance utility bonuses now come from proper buffs instead of player modifiers.

Minor Factions

• Alutar Sect Safeguard Shield: shield burst cooldown reduction and shield burst restore bonus both from 25% to 20%, influence cost from 2 to 3.

Graphics, Audio and Visuals

• Shadow cascades now fit inside the shadow fade distance. Cascade splits moved to 1000/2000/3900/7500 units, and shadows fade out between 4000 and 10000 units instead of 3000 and 7500.

• The half-resolution particle composite samples depth per pixel, so particle edges against ships and planets no longer step in blocks.

Interface and Quality of Life

• Unit descriptions for the TEC, Advent and Vasari, and for every Command Ship, have been rewritten. Build tooltips now lead with the unit's role and a short list of what it does, before the prose.

• Interceptors are now called Fighters.

• New observer panel (Replays only). Watching a game you hold no player in, such as a replay, now shows a ranked player list with score, planets, fleet supply and capital ship counts, per-team totals, a planets-over-time chart, and a readout of what each AI is currently trying to do. Badges mark the leader, human players and any empire that has stalled.

• The lobby remembers your player slot setup per map, including team layout and each AI slot's faction, difficulty, behaviour and visuals. A Reset Defaults button restores the scenario's own layout.

• Position-targeted abilities that relocate their caster, such as the Dimensional Shifter, now draw a ghost and footprint circle at the destination. Green means clear, red means blocked.

• Fixture names such as Antimatter Fountain now fit and centre in the selection header instead of running under the minimize button.

• Structures built on asteroids appear as their own selection icons.

• Mod playlist search is no longer case-sensitive, and filtering keeps each playlist intact.

• Mods can declare the DLC they need. The mod tooltip lists it, and a dialog warns at load when something is missing.

• Fixed several English typos.

• Credits updated.

Performance and Stability

• The AI does far less repeated work. Defence reserves, fleet strength estimates, enemy strength, safe routes, conquest shortfalls, income and combat assessments are worked out once per decision pass instead of once per candidate, ships in the same fleet share route searches, and AI player updates are spread evenly across frames.

• Checking research tier prices and prerequisites no longer builds and throws away a purchase query each time.

• Weapons only check the target types they can actually hit, instead of testing all 32 types per cell on every scan.

• Docked strikecraft skip the gravity well lookup.

• Line rendering does less work per point.

• Corruption propagation refreshes less often and is now deterministic across clients.

Multiplayer and Fixes

• Windows on ARM launches again. The memory allocator's system hook crashed every launch on Snapdragon X laptops and under Parallels on Apple Silicon, and also made the Epic overlay crash at exit. It has been removed from the game client.

• Non-ASCII names no longer break the game. An emoji in a save name broke the Load Game screen, and an emoji in a mod folder name stopped the game from starting.

• Resizing the game window during a load no longer crashes or hangs. This affected startup, the main menu backdrop and the lobby-to-match load.

• A first-time player who lingered on the consent prompt could lose the server browser and game codes for the rest of the session. A fresh Steam ticket is now requested when the one in hand is more than five minutes old.

• Capturing a ship as a human player no longer absorbs it into one of your fleets or creates a new fleet for it.

• Players could end up sharing a colour after loading a save or changing scenario.

• Random unit spawns no longer waste supply on ineligible units.

• Alliance offer gifts are identified correctly, and giving items can no longer duplicate them.

• Fixed the Dimensional Observatory tooltip showing the wrong label.

Modding

• The entire ARES doctrine lives in player_ai.uniforms, which gained roughly 860 lines of authored values, and the protection offer policy lives in player_ai_diplomacy.uniforms. The AI stall thresholds are set in user_interface.uniforms.

• Unit factories accept a construction blacklist that excludes specific unit definitions even when their build kind is supported. It applies to factory queues, planet routing, AI selection, trade escorts and garrison spawns. Garrison selection is now one weighted pool across supported build kinds, which changes cross-kind spawn odds.

• Stars take a star block with corruption capacity, shrouding duration, a Dark Star skin, and rift stages keyed to shroud progress.

• Portal fixtures take a portal_unit_emitter that spawns supply-free waves while open, with per-stage supply budgets.

• New unity_range_origin planet and unit modifier (the Advent Focus track uses it), and uses_unity_range on abilities.

• Refund settings are split into refund_percentage_under_construction and refund_percentage_complete, with the same pair for exotics. The old single fields are gone.

• alliance_offer_asset_transfer_tax_rate on players and alliance_offer_unlocks on research carry live values, so mods that inherit them get the transfer gating by default.

• New dark_star_invasion special operation unit kind, and dark_star and temporal_echoes_equipped unit mutations.

• Tutorials can be gated behind a product through dlc_tutorials in tutorial.uniforms.

• Corruption spread buffs accept alliance and race constraints, and links re-evaluate when a planet changes hands.

• Text entry boxes support centred text.

• Lua event files regenerate safely and report an error instead of truncating.

• JSON schemas regenerated.

Localization

• Turkish can now be selected in the language settings.

Harbinger Expansion (Paid Content)

The Dark Star

The Eidolon now have a victory condition of their own, and it ends with a star going dark.

• Stellar Shrouding Beam: fitted to the Anrakhazh Scion and unlocked by its own blueprint, the beam focuses the Scion's corruption into the heart of a fully corrupted star. Once shrouding begins, it can't be stopped unless the Eidolon are destroyed.

• Every star type can now hold planetary corruption up to a cap of 10, and shrouding one takes 900 seconds. The beam can only be used on a star already at maximum corruption.

• Propagate Mode now reaches stars, so a Shrouded world can feed corruption into the star of its own gravity well. Corruption strands running into a star are visible to anyone watching the star.

• Rifts open as the shroud spreads. At half progress they reach one jump out, at 80% two jumps, and when the shroud completes they open across the whole system. A Dark Star Rift sends a wave every 120 seconds, scaling from 60 supply of attackers up to 420 as the invasion escalates. These units cost the Eidolon no Fleet Supply and are capped at 800 live supply per rift and 2.5 times the owner's maximum supply overall.

• Once the star goes dark, the Eidolon must survive five minutes to win. Every other player is notified when shrouding begins and again when the star goes dark, with the remaining time on the tooltip.

Anrakhazh Scion (Requires Reinforcements and Harbinger DLC)

The Eidolon command ship is now a finished warship, rebuilt as a shield platform rather than a hull tank.

• Hull from 8500 to 6000, armor from 3820 to 5000, shields from 5850 to 11000. Armor strength now climbs to 165 across its levels.

• Radius from 1266 to 853, top speed from 575 to 650.

• Now carries antimatter (520 rising to 790) and a strikecraft hangar scaling from five to ten squadrons.

• Build time from 200 to 300 seconds, cost from 5000/1750/1250 to 6500/3000/2750, supply from 100 to 150.

• Entropic Beam: drains the Scion's corruption while charging to increase the damage of a single massive beam.

• Continuity Field: projects the awakened captain's will onto nearby ships, greatly raising the chance they return as a Phase Echo when destroyed.

• Mass Summoning: warps a group of units from a nearby gravity well to the edge of the Scion's own. Targets are disabled while the teleport charges.

• Phasic Wave: banishes enemy ships in a cone into a deeper layer of phase space, disabling them and loading them with corruption.

• Eight new items: Additional Armor, Enhanced Shield Generator, Additional Engine, Hangar Expansion, Void Missile Silos, Observation Array (detects cloaked ships and watches phase lanes), Scion Cloak Generator, and the Temporal Echo Device, which makes Continuity Field duplicate a unit whenever it triggers a Phase Echo.

• Four new research subjects: Hierarchy Stabilization and Entropic Enticement each raise the command ship limit, and Scion Cloak Generator Design and Stellar Shrouding Beam Blueprint unlock their items.

• New voice lines, ability effects, main view icon, ability tooltip pictures and a faction picker description.

Eidolon Balance

• All five capital ships: build time from 115 to 150 seconds, cost from 3000/1425/1000 to 3450/1800/1500.

• Zhaltharien Anathema: build time from 400 to 500 seconds, cost from 10000/3500/4000 to 12500/4500/5000, supply from 200 to 250.

• Thalkerin Revenant Dark Shell: damage reduction from 25/30/35/40/50% to 15/20/25/30/40% across ranks.

• Lakhaziel Archon Neural Overcharge: values reduced across all ranks, from 1.5-4.0 to 1.0-3.5 and from 15-40 to 5-30.

• Lakhaziel Archon Vortex Missile Salvo: missile damage from 125-150 to 150-275, with a smaller area effect.

• Israthil Silencer: now keeps at least 10000 units from its target instead of 8500.

• Anrakhazh Scion Summoning: research time from 260 to 235 seconds, cost from 1450/650/650 to 1400/600/600.

• Lakhaziel Archon Weapon Refit: research time from 175 to 235 seconds, cost from 1050/400/400 to 1400/600/600.

• Fixed the Eidolon starbase void missile carrying the wrong weapon tag.

Interface, Tutorials and Visuals

• Three new tutorials for Planetary Corruption, Ship Corruption and Cloaking, shown to owners of the Harbinger expansion.

• New main view icons for the Azgerin Suppressor, Azithel Mote, Kaziel Shade, Ithasaz Invader, Nethril Husk, Sythren Onslaught and Ithren Sleeper.

• New effects for the cloaking transition.

• Two new Eidolon player portraits.

Paths to Power and Reinforcements DLC Changes

• Takadaran Command Fortress: can now build capital ships, except the Marza Dreadnought.

• Justicia Dreadnought: Harvest damage with a Malefic Locus fitted is no longer lost when many ships die at the same moment, for example from Volatile Nanites.