Stardock Entertainment today released the monumental v1.1 update for Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, adding a tremendous number of improvements and features to its award-winning space-based strategy game. Since the game’s release in February, Stardock has gathered an enormous amount of feedback from the game’s devoted fan community, and is using their requests and suggestions to implement new gameplay options, enhance usability, improve computer AI and more.

This free update is available to all registered users of Galactic Civilizations II, and can be downloaded directly at GalCiv2.com or via Stardock Central.

Stardock has added a number of gameplay options to increase replayability and to further flesh out the open-ended gameplay. Among the new gameplay options:

» No tech trading

» Blind exploration (players cannott see spheres of influence on the mini map)

» Random intelligence (players select a general difficulty level and the game will randomize the intelligence of each computer player)

» Random number of players (players can elect to have the game decide how many computer players they will face)

» Random opponents (players can elect to have the game choose which computer players they will face)

» Random galaxy size (players can elect to have the game randomly pick a galaxy size)

Additional improvements:

» Computer AI significantly enhanced

» Computer AI updated to work together with other players (including human player) to thwart a common foe

» New alien dialog added

» Fleet Manager Screen added to more easily manage stacks of ships and fleets on the same tile

» Rally points can be moved

» User interface improved

» Ship Designer revamped to be easier to use and more powerful, now allowing players to rotate ships pieces on the fly

» Selected ship displays an animated line showing its destination

» Ship-destination markers display how many weeks remain until ship arrives there

» Ship upgrading improved

» Unused social production now transferred automatically to military production

» Economic system overhauled to be more transparent and intuitive

» Population growth revamped to put more emphasis on population growth ability and morale

» Large number of hotkeys added

» Metaverse scoring revamped

» Constructors display starbase’s area of effect before it is built

» Technologies, planetary improvements, starbase modules, etc. further balanced

» Many new options added to options screen

» Better support for modding (full-blown mod UI planned for v1.2 update)

» New music

» Many player exploits removed

» Performance and memory optimizations

» Bug and glitch fixes