- New AI difficulty: Brutal, between Hard and Deity
- The AI improvements in this release made every difficulty play sharper, so the old Hard tuning now lives at Brutal: bonus yields, a free starting technology, faster expansion, near-parity war declarations, and relentless raiding
- Hard has been retuned as the fair fight: the AI plays its best game – purposeful expansion, real war prosecution, armies that respond to yours – but with almost no bonus yields, no free technology, no hidden information, and it only declares war with a clear advantage
- Existing games keep playing at the difficulty stored in the save, so a game started on the old Hard now uses the gentler new Hard tuning
- Fixed AI empires losing interest in expansion mid-game – an AI that has fallen behind the leading empire now keeps founding cities while open land remains, instead of stalling at two or three cities for the rest of the game
- Fixed AI armies never marching on a neighbour once borders had grown to touch – late-game wars against an adjacent empire played out as a stand-off with warships idling offshore and soldiers waiting at home; armies now advance overland and prosecute the war
- Fixed AI empires repeatedly sending gold gifts that had long stopped improving relations, draining their own treasuries (and quietly bankrolling their rivals, including you) every few turns
- Fixed AI expansion planning overvaluing distant and poor settlement spots – AIs now weigh new city sites the same way when deciding to build a settler as when choosing where to send it, and a settler left with nowhere worth founding disbands instead of wandering the map forever
- Desktop app: new “Quit to Desktop” button on the home screen and in the in-game menu
- Fixed the desktop app triggering a Windows Firewall prompt on first launch – the game’s internal server now listens only on your own machine and is no longer reachable from your local network
- Villages no longer spawn hostile warriors on anyone who has yet to found their first city – an early ambush could kill the starting settler and decide the game on a single roll. Applies to both players and AI empires; once a first city stands, the ambush returns to the reward table
- Fixed a captured city – and the territory around it – still showing its previous owner’s colours under fog of war. Losing sight of a tile now records what you actually watched happen there, and your own border lines always reflect territory you have genuinely lost; existing games are repaired automatically on load