Alrighty folks, today we’re going to take a look at some of the changes brought in with our Genesis update (version 2.1) for Galactic Civilizations: Supernova. This is a meaty update full of bugfixes, enhanced features and tweaks to existing mechanics to facilitate a smoother gameplay experience for the player. To kick off, we’ve added 22 minutes of brand new music to GalCiv4’s existing soundtrack, and the midgame music will kick in at 60 turns now instead of 100, so you’ll get to hear it a little earlier into your campaign. We’ve added some more voiceovers to the game Events, and tightened up the Events scripting a bit too. Last week we discussed the new mod management tool: we’ve now integrated Steam Workshop support too, a much requested feature, and will shortly be adding a button to automatically transfer your mods over from the launcher-based mod manager over to the Steam Workshop. Now it’ll be even easier to transfer all your Tie Fighters, USS Enterprises and obligatory nekomimi civilizations. After receiving feedback from players that the numerical feedback from the battle viewer was confusing, we’ve made a few changes that should make it easier to follow. We’ve disabled all text values of 0, which some reduce unnecessary clutter from non-consequential data, added a new accuracy column next to the weapon range and split the defense column into three, to show each type of defense available in the game. On the topic of combat, we’ve increased the speed of ranged attack animations on the strategic map so the player isn’t sat around waiting, which could be a problem if there were a lot of fleets on-map and in bombardment range of enemy fleets. We’ve improved the speed at which ships are removed from the map after being destroyed, and we’re hoping you’ll find this will improve the overall speed and flow of the turn resolution as a whole. On top of the changes we discussed back in dev-journal #32, the game AI has undergone a whole new set of updates to assist it in keeping apace of the player. There are too many to list here, but notably your rivals will now declare war only if they’re actually ready to fight one, and are better at judging when they can win a fleet battle too. Since the AI is now smarter, we’ve adjusted the modifiers it receives at higher difficulties to be a little less fierce, but the overall difficulty should be about the same. We know most of you prefer to see smarter AI play over increased production and movement modifiers, and we’re keen to hear feedback on how you think the AI is playing after these changes. Maybe the most significant change for newer players is an improved tutorial. We’ve had a lot of comments that the previous tutorial was lacking, and we agree. The tutorial has been made more fun to play, with increased research times for technologies (it was way too easy to race through the tech-tree), made numerous UI changes and fixes to keep things properly focused and fixed a number of small bugs that were preventing people from easily completing it. This is just a few of the many changes we’ve brought in with the Genesis update. You can find the rest of them here. Cheers!