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See how regions now work in Ashes of the Singularity II. In this dev journal we cover the new baseline resources you earn just for owning regions, how structures like the Quantum Archive multiply a region's output, and why grabbing the richest spots in the contested middle of the map is a real risk and reward call.
Wishlist Ashes of the Singularity 2 on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/34...
Elemental Reforged v1.2 has landed and it is a meaty patch. Focusing on stability and bugfixes, v1.2 irons out many of the crashes and performance issues reported since launch.
In this video, we highlight some of these fixes and changes made to improve the game.
Full changelog: https://steamcommunity.com/app/379696...
This time BATTLEMODE explains the reasoning and method behind the recent balance adjustment to the Vasari, to tone them down a little and bring them back into line with the Advent and TEC.
Hey all, pushed a localization update for Star Control: Origins today.
We went through and did a full pass on every supported language. German, Finnish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese all got improved and refined translations. It covers in-game dialog, galaxy object names, and the Earth Rising DLC strings.
If you play in one of these and have run into lines that looked off or just plain wrong, this should have caught a lot of it. That said, this stuff is never perfect on the first pass, so if you still see something weird, post it here or in the forums with a screenshot if you can grab one. Makes it way easier to track down. Thanks to everyone who's flagged translation issues over time, that feedback is what drove this.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/271260/view/675124650460578011
The v1.2 update came out today and a decent amount is based on community feedback.
Most of the work went into the AI. On harder difficulties it pushes back against a runaway leader instead of letting you snowball, settles more cities on large maps, and applies pressure if you go to war or take cities while ahead. It uses potions and scrolls in battle, stops wasting teleport spells like Tectonic Shift on occupied tiles, and obeys fame, so it will not pull high level champions in the opening turns.
Loot was reworked too. Monsters pull from themed tables now, so drops fit what you fought, rare and uncommon items show up more reliably, and plain gold payouts came down. The Hergling no longer drops far more than other creatures of its rank.
The stability section covers crash fixes across tactical battles, city turns, quick saving, and text rendering, plus faster combat predictions. Treasures of the Magi owners get a few fixes as well, including the transformation potion mount bug.
A smaller maintenance update, mostly bug fixes and quality-of-life changes from community reports.
A few things worth calling out:
The main change is the National Crafting Policy System, which has been the most common piece of feedback since launch. Managing crafting across a large empire was tedious. Late in the game you'd have dozens of cities and needed to visit workshops individually to keep production running the way you wanted. The new system lets you set crafting priorities at the nation level, and every crafter in the empire follows the policy automatically.
You still have full control at the city or crafter level. There's a three-mode dropdown on the Improvement Panel that lets you override the national policy for any city or for individual crafters. So if most of your empire is running a general policy but you want one city focused on something specific, that works fine.
Update Highlights:
Learn More: Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition - Steam News Hub
Hello all,
Time for another peek behind the curtain at what the team's been up to lately. Here's a snapshot of what we've been working on over the last week.
DISCLAIMER: This is just a slice of recent work and there's always more happening behind the scenes than what fits in one of these. Think of it as a timely snapshot rather than the full picture, and subject to change over time
Recent Work as of June 11th, 2026
Headquarters
HQs got a real glow-up this week. Every HQ building now has two tiers of upgrades, each bringing new content along with. For example: pushing one all the way to level 3 unlocks a set of new defensive turrets. We also squashed a nasty bug where upgrading an HQ could occasionally zero out your stockpiled resources, which... yeah, nobody wanted that.
Campaign
More work was done on mission balance and design. Campaign balance and pacing are still very much a work in progress, so expect continued tuning here.
Game Modes
Score (Turinium) Victory Mode has made its first appearance in a very early, testable state. It's rough around the edges for now, but we have high hopes.
Units & Combat
The Substrate's Emergent Swarm Orbital got a rework so now it has a smaller footprint, and the hatchlings it spawns should now come at you a lot more aggressively.
Pathfinding & Army Behavior
A lot of quieter work went into making armies behave the way you'd expect. Units should now try to settle on destinations along the same elevation tier, the Stop order does a better job of actually stopping, and air-only armies queue their orders properly now. Plenty of smaller pathfinding improvements landed alongside those.
Controls & UI
Several quality-of-life fixes here: Army Facing orders now account for camera rotation, Faction-HUD colors apply even when you roll Random, gamepad Harvester construction and building placement should line up with your cursor more cleanly and with noticeably less 'wobble'.
Under the Hood
Numerous small performance updates throughout. We want to do our best to ensure the game runs smoothly for everyone once its ready. So regular optimizations and performance improvements are happening between dev builds
Look forward to more in the coming weeks!
We decided to keep the June update modest while ARES gets more time. v1.61 is mostly about making the AI a better opponent:
ARES is still in opt-in and we'll keep updating that build. The full public release is planned alongside our next DLC later this summer. Full change log is in the patch notes. Happy to answer questions here.
Full patch notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1575940/view/683004046342096440
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.
I really couldn’t think of a good theme for this week’s journal entry. There’s a bunch of things we’re working on simultaneously so let’s tackle them in no particular order.
- General polish and bug fixing
- AI Players
- Loot Tables
One of the recurring pieces of feedback we've received during Steam Nextfest and closed testing has been around unit production. While players understand how to create armies and reinforce existing armies, it has become obvious that we need to continue to improve the visibility into what is being produced, where units are being built, and how production queues are progressing across their production pipelines.
As we continue to work on ways to address this feedback, we've have implemented several new UI and gameplay improvements designed to make unit production easier to understand and manage.
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.
In this Ashes of the Singularity 2 dev journal, we're showing off the new Observer Mode (a.k.a. spectator mode). Drop into any AI vs AI or multiplayer match and watch it unfold from any player's perspective, complete with their economy, Durantium and Thorium resources, Quanta, logistics, research choices, order queues, and army movements.
We walk through all three viewing modes:
Perspective View – See exactly what a chosen player sees, fog of war and all.
Revealed View – All fog removed for clean cinematic pans across the whole battlefield.
Tactical View – The new standout. Fog stays in place for the player you're watching, but you can see through it as the observer, so you know what's coming before they do.
Whether you're a streamer, a content creator, a competitive player studying strategy, or just someone who likes watching big RTS battles play out, Observer Mode gives you the tools to do it well.
Thousands of years ago, before the Cataclysm, before even the reign of Titans, was the age of the Magi: powerful sorcerers whose mastery of magic tapped into the mana that suffused the winds and the waters of Elemental.
Unwilling to be subjugated by feudal lords, the Magi constructed many varieties of golem, powerful soldiers hewn from stone and forged from iron to maintain their sovereignty.
When the Titans arrived they gave the Magi the choice between death, subjugation, or hiding.
By the time the War of Magic broke out, these golems and the riches they once guarded had all but vanished. Recently, however, a spike of dark magic from the reawakening of the Fallen Enchantress has rippled through the surface of Elemental and reignited the enchantments that once gave life to the golems. Now, fissures are emerging all across the twin subcontinents of Anthys, disgorging legions of frenzied golems and revealing the Treasures of the Magi.
The first DLC for Elemental: Reforged dropped today along with the v1.1 update.
The DLC is called Treasures of the Magi and it builds out the First Age lore that the base game only mentioned a few times. You'll run into awakened golems guarding the old Magi ruins, find new gear including magic wands, get a new quest chain that ties into the fissures opening across Anthys, and find a new line of consumables: potions that transform your champions into bears, ogres, demons, or elementals for a short duration in tactical battles. The DLC is $8.99 on Steam.
The v1.1 update is free for everyone who owns the base game and most of it came directly from community feedback. The big one is that weapons, armor, accessories, and consumables that previously required the Legendary Heroes DLC are free for everyone now. There is also a stability and performance pass, crafting ingredients are now available in shops, and a bunch of smaller bugs and quality of life things are in. Full patch notes are on Steam.
Update Key Features
Welcome to our upcoming June 2026 update - Ares: God of War! This v1.65 opt-in is all about improving the game’s AI system; and we’ve spent months writing a huge update around it. As such, this month’s change log looks pretty different than normal. We invite everyone to try it out and let us know what you think!
On Epic Games
On Steam
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May 21st v1.65 Update Changelog
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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.
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.
So how does this new layer work? Here's a quick overview of what happens every time ARES thinks:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Fleet engagement commitment
Econ-to-war signaling
Difficulty as cognition
Team play
Tuning, broadly
Multiplayer
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!
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May 22nd, 2026 v1.65.8 Update Notes
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We're aware of the AI passivity issue and hope to address it head on in the next update.
Hello all,
We wanted to start sharing insights occasionally of what the teams been working on behind the scenes from time to time for Ashes II. So here's a bit of what we've done over the last couple days.
DISCLAIMER: This is just about the last week, theres been much more done since the original Demo, think of it as a more timely snapshot
Recent Work as of May 20th, 2026
Campaign
The Campaign has been a focus recently. Right now, we've been playtesting the campaign and iterating on difficulty to ensure a positive player experience. Part of that endeavor includes adding a difficulty dropdown with three tiers:
Cutscenes will be skippable, and we've been working through mission-level fixes for playability, balance, and stability. Campaign balance, especially at higher difficulties, is still actively being tuned.
Units
On the UEF side, we've been building out some new content. The Lantha Processor is a new economic building that generates resources without a node but at the cost of heavy power consumption: sitting as the ultimate tech in their third tree.
The Cavalier Team is getting hover jetpacks, making them faster hovering ground units. There's also a new orbital in the works, the Emergency Turret, and the Containment tech tree is being redesigned to feel more distinct from the others.
Maps
Map-wise, we have a new medium map coming called "Vallis Rift" on Mars. Soon Custom maps will support random Biome and Topography options. An 8-player volcanic biome map called the Burning Temple, has had its layout fully reworked. Resource seeding on skirmish maps is also getting a substantial pass; the goal is more resources per region and a fairer distribution overall.
U.I
A lot of UI work has been going on too. Orbital recharge clarity, production queue improvements, Logistics cap handling, alert spam protection, and several smaller fixes to make information easier to read at a glance.
Look forward to more insights in the coming weeks!
Hello all,
We wanted to start sharing insights occasionally of what the teams been working on behind the scenes from time to time. So here's a bit of what we've done over the last couple days.
DISCLAIMER: This is just about the last week, theres been much more done since the original Demo, think of it as a more timely snapshot
Recent Work as of May 20th, 2026
Campaign
The Campaign has been a focus recently. We're adding a difficulty dropdown with three tiers:
Cutscenes will be skippable, and we've been working through mission-level fixes for playability, balance, and stability. Campaign balance, especially at higher difficulties, is still actively being tuned.
Units
On the UEF side, we've been building out some new content. The Lantha Processor is a new economic building that generates resources without a node but at the cost of heavy power consumption: sitting as the ultimate tech in their third tree.
The Cavalier Team is getting hover jetpacks, making them faster hovering ground units. There's also a new orbital in the works, the Emergency Turret, and the Containment tech tree is being redesigned to feel more distinct from the others.
Maps
Map-wise, we have a new medium map coming called "Vallis Rift" on Mars. Soon Custom maps will support random Biome and Topography options. A map called the Burning Temple, has had its layout fully reworked. Resource seeding on skirmish maps is also getting a substantial pass; the goal is more resources per region and a fairer distribution overall.
U.I
A lot of UI work has been going on too. Orbital recharge clarity, production queue improvements, Logistics cap handling, alert spam protection, and several smaller fixes to make information easier to read at a glance.
Look forward to more insights in the coming weeks!
