- The units sidebar, Cities screen, Empire screen, gold breakdown, and Annhexopedia can now be used with a gamepad – the d-pad or left stick moves the highlight, A activates (jump to a unit, open a city, switch government, open an article), the right stick scrolls, and B goes back
- Steam achievements: twelve achievements for the desktop edition, from founding your second city to winning without ever declaring war – including one hidden achievement for the truly destructive
- Steam Cloud saves: your games now follow you between machines, with Dynamic Cloud Sync on Steam Deck – suspending the Deck uploads your progress, and resuming picks up anything you played elsewhere in the meantime
- Desktop app: the in-game menu’s “Exit” is now “Back to Menu”, so it reads clearly alongside “Quit to Desktop”
- Fixed the missing Lumber Camp icon on the controller action wheel
- Removed the research quick-pick dropdown – it duplicated the tech tree and popped up in the way. Choosing research now always happens in the tech tree (click the Research stat, or the “Choose research” prompt at end of turn)
- Controller: the city wheel (Y on a city) now carries quick actions alongside the garrison
- Production opens a compact build list – every available unit, building, wonder and project with build times; A builds, or queues when something is already under construction
- Focus opens a sub-wheel to set the city’s yield emphasis (Balanced, Food, Production, Gold, Research) without entering the city screen
- A on a city still opens full city management, and the wheel now works on cities with no garrison too
- Controller: the hex cursor now appears at the centre of your current view when you pick up the gamepad, instead of scrolling the camera to wherever it last was
- Steam Deck: the camera starts noticeably closer to the action – the desktop default reads fine on a monitor but left everything tiny on a 7-inch screen. Zoom is still fully adjustable and remembered per game
- Fixed the controller hint bar not mentioning Y opens the city action wheel when the cursor is on one of your cities
- The toolbar’s Research readout now shows turns until the next discovery – “(3t)” instead of the raw per-turn rate; hover it for the technology name and full countdown
- New HUD scale setting (Settings -> Display): grow or shrink the interface and its text from 75% to 150% – handy on the Steam Deck or a distant TV. Per-device, so your Deck and desktop can each keep their own size; on Steam Deck it defaults to 125%