Release Status: *** RELEASED ***

September marks the end of the summer and the beginning of dreadful new tidings to the Sins' universe with the release of the Harbingers expansion. After 10,000 years of running and 36 years of war in Trader space, time is up. The great enemy of the Vasari has arrived and all will fall to the corruption they bring.

Of course, we’ve also added new content and quality of life improvements for all users in this update. The Advent get two new units to fill in gaps in their force makeup, visuals get another big boost with enhanced lighting, planet storms, and more. We’ve also overhauled the Mod.io front-end to be easier to use and added requested features like playlists. The AI also gets some initial ARES improvements in the early game. We will be continuing to deploy ARES improvements over time.

To Use Older Versions

• On Steam

  • Select ‘Sins of a Solar Empire II’ in your Steam Library.

  • Click the gear icon in the upper right.

  • Select Properties → Game Versions & Betas

  • Select the version you want from the Beta Participation list.

  • Steam will update you to that version.

v2.00.3 - September 4, 2026 Hotfix

• Corruption Decay delay value changed to 60 seconds.

• Corruption Decay value changed to 0.001 (1 Corruption decays every 10 seconds)

• Azithel Mote Void Missile cooldown increased from 15s to 20s.

• Azithel Mote Corrupt Recursion Phase Echo duration reduced from 30s to 15s.

• Eidolon Very Light Void Missile (Azithel Mote, Amalgam Bomber) Armor Points removed, Hull reduced from 5 to 1.

• Eidolon Void Blast Charge Missile (Sythren Onslaught) Armor Points reduced from 10 to 5, Armor Strength reduced from 25 to 20, Hull reduced from 5 to 1.

• Eidolon Light Void Missile (Akeniel Geist, Lakhaziel Archon) Armor Points increased from 10 to 15, Armor Strength reduced from 25 to 20, Hull reduced from 5 to 1.

• Eidolon Medium Void Missile (Thalkerin Revenant, Lakhaziel Archon, Phase Dart Defense Platform, Zhaltharien Anathema) Armor Points increased from 10 to 40, Armor Strength reduced from 25 to 20, Hull reduced from 5 to 1.

• Eidolon Heavy Void Missile (Iskazhar Epitaph) Armor Points increased from 10 to 80, Armor Strength increased from 25 to 40, Hull increased from 5 to 10.

• Eidolon Vortex Missile (Lakhaziel Archon Vortex Missile Salvo) Armor Points increased from 10 to 15, Armor Strength reduced from 25 to 20, Hull reduced from 5 to 1.

• Afterimage Phase Echo duration reduced from 60s to 30s.

• Persistent Afterimage Phase Echo duration reduced from 90s to 60s.

• Nethril Husk Weapon Refit moved from Vanguard Tier 3 to Vanguard Tier 2.5.

• Azithel Mote Weapon Refit moved from Vanguard Tier 2.5 to Vanguard Tier 3.

• Material Communion focus conversion rate reduced from 10:1 to 1:1.

• Greater Material Communion focus conversion rate reduced from 10:1 to 1:1.5 (Final conversion rate with both techs is 1:2.5)

• Added correct ship corruption debuffs to minor factions and militia to account for edge cases where they gain control of capital ships.

• Fixed Advent Focus Conversion hud icon.

• Applied correct access limitation to Amalgam Grafter unit item (Carrier only)

• Corrected Sythren Onslaught preferred weapon range to favor its longer range missiles.

• Corrected Epitaph Starbase Super Heavy beam weapon name.

• Corrected naming of Culture Center Blueprint to match structure name (Communications Node Blueprint)

v2.00.2 - September 3, 2026

New Units, Abilities and Research

• The Advent gain two new warships. They were the only faction without a medium cruiser, and the Vespa is the first anti-armor corvette in the game.

  • Prisma Witness: a well protected warship equipped with numerous turrets to deal with a wide variety of targets. Unlocked by Prisma Blueprint.

  • Vespa Corvette: a heavy corvette equipped with anti-capital ship and anti-structure plasma weapons. Unlocked by Vespa Blueprint.

• Material Communion and Greater Material Communion (Advent): new research that translates Focus directly into credits, metal and crystal when making purchases, so psionic surplus can cover material shortfalls. Base conversion is 10 of each per point of Focus; the second tier raises it to 20.

• Pilot Cloning Bay (Vasari ship item): uses nanites and cognitive programming to rapidly duplicate the best pilots aboard the ship, increasing Heavy Fighter capacity.

Gameplay

Planet Development

• Planet track tooltips show before and after values, and each track can show all of its values rather than only the next step.

• Fixed planet track population growth and its tooltip modifiers.

Bombing

Planet bombing has been rebalanced rather than simply buffed. Population damage per shot is up sharply, but every planet type now resists bombing damage as it accumulates, up to a 90% cap on a squared curve.

• Advent Siege Frigate: bombing cooldown from 15 to 10 seconds, population damage from 0.2 to 1.0.

• TEC Siege Frigate: bombing cooldown from 15 to 10 seconds, population damage from 0.2 to 1.0.

• Vasari Siege Cruiser: bombing damage from 30 to 36, population damage from 0.24 to 1.5.

• The practical effect is that bombing bites harder at the start of a siege and tails off, instead of scaling linearly with time on station.

Strikecraft

• Vasari capital ships and the Vasari Carrier Cruiser are capped at one interceptor squadron, with bombers effectively unlimited.

  • Auto-added carrier squadrons are balanced by assigned count rather than filling arbitrarily.

• Vasari Interceptor: build time from 120 to 60 seconds, squadron size from 2 to 3, beam damage from 30 to 36.

Economy, Planets and Map

• Loot collection range increased at every tier: 1500 to 2500, 2500 to 3750, and 3500 to 5000.

• Asteroid starting population from 0-15 to 20-30.

• Frozen Asteroid starting population from 0-20 to 25-35.

• Geomagnetic Planet starting population from 25-100 to 60-125, and its guaranteed metal and crystal asteroids from one each to three each.

• Planetary Shield Array now protects friendly units rather than only the structure that projects it. This applies to the Advent, TEC and Vasari starbases, the TEC Loyalist Titan and the Ancient Starbase.

• Uncolonizable fixtures now say so in their name: Brown Dwarf, Ice Field, Magnetic Cloud, Plasma Storm, Radiation Storm, Shattered Planet, Space Junk and Antimatter Fountain.

• Clouds and storms now draw proper generated names instead of falling back to their type.

• Aluxian Resurgence: starting unit count from 2 to 1, supply caps from 100/200/300/500 to 125/250/400/600.

• Advent Titan Foundry renamed to Grand Factory, along with its blueprint research.

• Advent Repossession is now flagged as an ultimate ability.

AI

• A broad pass over economy and military planning.

  • Better fleet mission execution, threat evaluation refreshed each update, and improved home defense policy.

  • Improved retreat recovery and structure-slot handling, and defense transfers no longer leave empty fleets behind.

  • Better military research selection, proactive fleet supply research, improved traversal research timing, and wormhole travel research is prioritized.

  • More resilient progression recovery, including Deimos progression.

• The AI understands the new planet development tracks, including in the legacy controller.

• The AI uses cloak and manages corruption, both ship corruption and planetary corruption modes.

Faction Balance

Advent

• Thirty research subjects had their research time reduced from 135 to 120 seconds.

• Carrier Cruiser: build time from 75 to 65 seconds.

• Hangar Defense: durability from 500 to 600, metal cost from 300 to 200.

TEC

• Carrier Cruiser: build time from 55 to 45 seconds.

• Hangar Defense: durability from 500 to 600, metal cost from 200 to 100.

• Gauss Defense: the Meson Bolt bonus damage value was corrected from 1500 to 150. This was a tenfold typo against a base damage of 150, not a balance change.

Vasari

• Antifighter Frigate: maximum angular speed from 48 to 24, but time to reach it from 4 to 2 seconds.

• Carrier Cruiser: build time from 58 to 48 seconds.

• Pulse Defense: armor point restore rate from 3 to 4.

• Overseer Cruiser: now carries a medium pulse weapon and actively hunts light corvettes, pursuing targets above 100 speed out to 4,000m with doubled effective range against its preferred targets. It no longer simply follows whatever is attacking a threat.

Graphics, Audio and Visuals

• New Planet Textures and Visuals

• • The planet atmosphere shader gained a multi-band sunset gradient at the terminator (day, golden, orange, red, magenta), with colours set per planet skin. Clouds pick up the sunset tint near the terminator and fade with view angle.

  • New atmosphere features: city light dispersion, surface emissive dispersion, and planet lightning with per-skin frequency, intensity, duration, colour, and cloud threshold.

  • The City planet has been fully overhauled visually.

  • Added new planet icons when zoomed out.

  • Crystal rendering rework: crystalline planet materials gained refraction transmission, depth scale, roughness reduction, edge fade, chromatic aberration, interior intensity and blur, and per-crystal iridescence strength and shift. The shader ramps crystal in across the mask instead of hard-stepping, scales brightening with depth, adds thin-film iridescence at grazing angles, and applies player colour to crystal.

  • Planet shields now carry per-owner-race impact effects (city, crystalline, gas giant, hive asteroid, moon, pirate base, terran).

• New standard build effect. The hull assembles plate by plate along a rising front, with weld heat and cooling metal on freshly placed plating and a hologram skeleton of what remains. Plate ordering is a deterministic hash of position, so every client sees the same build with no simulation involvement, and turrets and child meshes build as one object with the hull.

• Point light attenuation is now measured from the light's surface radius out to its attenuation radius, so the falloff cutoff matches the culling radius.

• New animated ship and structure components.

  • TEC Carrier Capital Ship: five flight pods that fold down and pitch up through a phase jump, and bay doors that open once construction completes. Strikecraft launch is blocked while the pods are in transition.

  • TEC Support Capital Ship: the side cannon recoils on firing and the cannon chamber spins while the ability is firing.

  • TEC Capital Ship Factory: components transition between idle, cruiser and capital ship configurations.

  • TEC Research Labs and the Advent Deliverance Engine: continuously rotating habitat and engine rings.

• Added new Narrator VO lines for TEC, Advent and Vasari to cover additional empire-wide alerts (e.g, pirate incursions).

• The intro movie now plays during startup loading, behind an optional title screen loading bar, and stays skippable through the end of loading. A new 720p cinematic ships with the game.

• The game window can be moved and resized while startup is still loading in windowed mode.

• Graphics settings are chosen to fit the machine on first run, with a notification explaining that they were adjusted.

• New ‘Very High’ texture quality tier, with per-map-type texture caps.

• A live space battle now plays behind the main menu.

• Shadow quality Lowest is now actually the lowest setting.

• Removed the turret visual-aim override, restoring the original turret tracking.

• Fixed game thread hitches when releasing streaming sounds.

Interface and Quality of Life

• Actions that cannot be performed now explain why. Seventy-nine new refusal messages cover research tiers and points, inventory and item rules, alliances and offers, intelligence purchases, minor factions, markets and auctions, unity and phase resonance, corruption and shrouding.

• Ability targeting explains itself too. Invalid targets name the requirement they failed, such as missing hull points, able to use hyperspace, fully built, recently damaged, cloaked or detected, and abilities list their valid target types and ownership.

• Added a Do Not Engage auto-order mode. Ships will not attack any targets on their own and will only fire on explicitly ordered targets.

• Quick bars are now expandable, sit as one centered row along the bottom bar, expand on hover, and can be pinned open with a new Pin button.

• NPC markets show a price history chart.

• Weapon ranges of already-built defensive structures are shown while placing a new one.

• New Unit Model Visibility Distance setting controls how far you can zoom out before unit models become icons.

• Buff tooltips indent their value lines under the buff title and keep them attached to the name and duration.

• Warnings about mutually exclusive items now take priority over maximum-amount warnings.

• Common HUD icons (i.e., planet tracks) are now colored to stand out more. (Special thanks to Vivilyn from the modding community for the inspiration on this part of the update.)

• Small reductions no longer display as "-0".

• The colonized planets window summary was reworked and now includes a Surface column.

• Oversized notification icons no longer spill out of their cards.

• Dominant Culture is highlighted consistently across ability descriptions and requirement messages.

• Fixes to the faction picker's inline text, component visibility, rotation and asset preview, and drag and dropdown behaviour is unified in the lobby window.

• Fixed the map dialog layout, and the top bar is now hidden in the front end lobby.

• Updated Loading Screens:

  • Added 21 new base-game load screen images: Advent Hangar Defense, Refinery, Research Structure, Resource Extractor, Temple, Vengeance and Wrath; Cobalt Light Frigate, Harcka Heavy Cruiser, Hoshiko Robotics Cruiser, Prova Scout Corvette; Ship Graveyard; TEC Orbital Transport Hub; Vasari Exodus Ship, Factory, Matter Reprocessor, Mobile Sector Capital, Regeneration Bay, Resource Extractor and Ship Studies; and the Harbinger key art.

  • [Harbinger] Added 25 Eidolon load screens.

• Traffic and refinery ships for all three factions switch to icons sooner and can be zoomed closer.

• Pirate torpedoes zoom closer.

• Pirate king and Vasari super capital debris were retuned.

Performance and Stability

• Upgraded to mimalloc 3.3.2, with malloc redirection working correctly again.

• Added asset memory reporters, and texture out-of-memory recovery is serviced during startup loading.

• The startup rendering throttle was dropped and startup presentation is driven from the real rendering thread.

• Per-unit render caches are cleared on unit release, and cloak detector stats are resolved once per tick per well.

• Crash fixes: a start-game crash when a chart node had no gravity well, a particle effect system crash on save load, a loading-thread crash that bypassed the crash reporter, factional victory crashes, a buff crash, a corruption structure crash, and a race condition crash.

• The crash-reporting boundary was extended to the video decode prepare-frames thread.

• (The gist of all the above is that the game will now run much better on low-end machines.)

Multiplayer and Fixes

• Save game compatibility, including ported save and migration fixes.

• Several desync sources closed: structure placement and fleet spawn random streams are isolated, simulation expressions were made floating-point model invariant, strikecraft launch no longer reads render state through the carrier launch gate, and both research subject unlocked weapons and the cloaked unit registry are serialized and checksummed.

• Permanent team alliances are preserved correctly.

• Fixed repeatable research pricing, exotic consumption and completion tracking, and an exotic reservation assert when starting research.

• Restored missile retargeting.

• Fixed duplicate hyperspace registration on phase lane release.

• Fixed fleet combat supply and deterministic evaluation.

Modding

The mod.io front end has been overhauled.

• Mod collections: browse collections curated by the community, follow and unfollow them, and view their contents. Following a collection subscribes you to its mods and saves a playlist.

• Playlists can be saved, loaded and deleted, and a playlist that references mods you do not have offers to Install All of them.

• Browse by category, with Most Popular, Mod of the Month and Rising Star sections, and Today or Overall popularity periods.

• Mod info pages gained Description, Screenshots and Dependencies tabs, plus creator, popularity rank, downloads, size, subscribers, rating, last updated and date live.

• Download activity is visible on every modding screen, with per-mod status for downloading, extracting, installing and uninstalling, plus transfer speed.

• Disk space is checked before a mod or collection is installed, and the tooltip warns before you subscribe.

• Mods whose dependencies are no longer available on mod.io are reported by name instead of failing silently.

• Two new settings: Hide Negatively Rated Mods and Only Show Compatible Mods.

• Buttons to open a mod's folder, open its mod.io page, or delete it locally.

• External update checks are deferred until subscription traffic is quiet, so they no longer compete with active downloads.

• Playlist save and delete failures now report rather than silently discarding the file.

Data-driven systems opened up to modders:

• Planet development tracks are defined in planet_track.uniforms instead of being hardcoded, including their icons, names and tooltip labels.

• Start modes are now a documented entity type with a published JSON schema, covering display name, description and per-faction starting configuration.

• Ship items can be restricted to specific units through item access tags. All titan and super capital ship components now declare their host.

• Berserk has its own uniforms file and schema.

• New unit mutations: disable auto weapon target acquisition, and disable shield damage absorption.

• New weapon tags (Shock Cannon, Null Cannon, Phase Dart, Void Missile) and a new strikecraft kind (Gunship).

• Weapons can bypass shields through the firing definition.

• New target unit limit constraint, so an ability can be refused when a gravity well is already at its limit for a unit.

• Owner-race overrides for shield effects.

• Child meshes can be locked behind research.

• Unit item modifiers read value_name.

• Portal fields are grouped into a unit_portal_effects_definition block, planet shrouding effects into a shrouding_effects block, and sound keys may reference assets that do not exist yet.

• Carriers can be limited per strikecraft class. Capacity is set per kind rather than as a single pooled number.

• Strikecraft classes can be gated behind research or ship items, and the interface explains which requirement is missing.

• Per-quick-bar HUD skin styling blocks with shared-key fallback.

• Berserk is now a supported weapon modifier and ability effect, with a unit constraint for whether a target can be driven berserk. Torpedoes preserve berserk targeting.

• Planet skin atmosphere block: sunset colours, lightning parameters, cloud shadow parameters, city material and minimum city level, corona. Every planet skin also gained a shrouded_skin key and an is_shrouding flair constraint.

• Crystal material parameters (listed above).

• shield_effect supports primary_by_owner_race.

• Build shader constant buffer exposes plate scale, unit origin and up, and the portal plane.

• Fixtures, clouds and storms declare a name group, which is what drives the generated names.

• Twenty-five JSON schemas were updated and two added (berserk uniforms, start mode).

Localization

• All existing languages received a full pass for the new content and to fix old mistakes.

• Copy fixes throughout: "strike craft" is now consistently "strikecraft", and several duplicated words and typos were corrected.

Harbinger Expansion (Paid Content)

New Faction: The Eidolon

Originating from another layer of phase space, the Eidolon are ruthless outsiders intent on subjugating all life. Valuing individual power above all else, they wield abominable technologies and arcane energies in spite of the toll it exacts on the fabric of space. They see no distinction between biology, technology and psionics, merging them to create warships and facilities controlled by a single augmented being.

Corruption rises as Eidolon ships use their abilities, increasing their weapon damage at the cost of escalating penalties. Corruption is gained by spending antimatter, and at high corruption Eidolon ships start taking hull damage, though they cannot be destroyed by it. Build Corruption Reservoirs to corrupt planets and empower Shroud Modes. Cloaked ships enable infiltration and ambush, and advanced psitech allows ships to temporarily resist destruction.

Corvettes, frigates and cruisers

• Ithren Sleeper (scout corvette): a light corvette with advanced engines and defenses, optimized for scouting in hostile territory. Auto-explores and is immune to jump inhibition.

• Azithel Mote (attack corvette): a small attack corvette equipped to destroy low durability targets, with automatic evasive maneuvers that prevent some weapons from targeting it effectively.

• Azgerin Suppressor (point defense frigate): a light frigate armed with numerous fast firing point defense weapons designed to defeat enemy missiles and strikecraft.

• Nethril Husk (heavy frigate): a tough combat frigate effective against low durability frigates and corvettes.

• Kaziel Shade (light frigate): a fast frigate with a cloaking device, effective at destroying support ships or harassing structures.

• Sythren Onslaught (missile frigate): a long range combat frigate that relies on void missiles to destroy heavy cruisers and capital ships.

• Ithasaz Invader (colony frigate): a large frigate capable of colonizing unowned planets, with a limited offensive armament.

• Athezil Creator (constructor): a utility frigate equipped with many assembly tools, it builds structures within range of the planet.

• Akeniel Geist (carrier cruiser): a fragile cruiser equipped to create and support amalgam strikecraft.

• Anzarien Corruptor (corruption support cruiser): built around a dark reservoir, it can rapidly increase or manage the corruption levels of Eidolon ships during combat.

• Nalazhin Defiler (disruptive support cruiser): a heavily protected support cruiser capable of disrupting or repairing armor, and an effective front line combat unit.

• Israthil Silencer (fire support cruiser): an advanced combat ship with a long range weapon that excels at destroying capital ships and structures.

• Sirathaz Scourge (siege cruiser): a versatile assault ship that engages a variety of targets in direct combat while also bombarding planets.

Capital ships, command ship and titan

• Thalkerin Revenant (combat capital ship): high damage weapons and defensive support. Abilities include Cloak, Dark Shell, Devour Energy, Corruption Pulse, Persistence and Predator Instinct.

• Lakhaziel Archon (carrier capital ship): carries many powerful amalgam strikecraft and the systems to support them. Abilities include Awaken Amalgams, Splice Amalgams, Neural Overcharge and Vortex Missile Salvo.

• Izharien Demiurge (colony capital ship): spreads corruption to planets and ships, and colonizes planets. Abilities include Corruption Bomb, Vile Presence and Absolution.

• Sazhirel Annihilator (siege capital ship): long range weapons and offensive support. Abilities include Bane, Corruption Shield, Hateful Onslaught and Infusion Strike.

• Kalizaeth Profaner (support capital ship): cloak capable, spreads chaos among enemy forces. Abilities include Confusion Bolt, Mirror Field, Particle Decay and Spatial Lensing.

• Zhaltharien Anathema (titan): equally capable of breaking the minds of enemy crews as of destroying any ship it engages. Abilities include Madness Shroud, Oblation, Overpower and Phasic Breach.

• Iskazhar Epitaph (starbase), which can teleport into hostile territory.

Structures

• Minor Portal and Major Portal replace conventional shipyards, building frigates and cruisers, and capital ships, command ships and titans respectively.

• Corruption Reservoir: corrupts the local planet, and additional reservoirs offset the corruption upkeep imposed by Shroud Modes.

• Azhelrien Dominion Lab and Iskaniel Vanguard Lab: research structures. The Vanguard Lab provides Retrofit, allowing nearby friendly ships to construct items at full speed.

• Shock Cannon Defense Platform, Phase Dart Defense Platform and Support Defense Platform, with abilities including Maddening Pulse and Revivify.

• Communications Node, Exotic Refinery, Metal Extractor and Crystal Extractor.

Strikecraft and weapons

• Amalgam Fighter and Amalgam Bomber strikecraft, plus Amalgam Penitents and Amalgam Grafter ship items.

• New weapon families: shock cannons, null cannons and null beams, phase darts, and void missiles from Very Light through Large, plus the Vortex Missile and Void Blast Charge.

Other

• Rifts now appear as galaxy fixtures. An open rift can be used to summon an Eidolon capital ship.

• The Eidolon are playable in the All As One, Spearhead and Superpowers scenarios.

• Advent, TEC and Vasari each gain shroud mitigation or shroud removal research to answer Eidolon corruption.

• 178 Eidolon research subjects, 54 ship items and 47 abilities in total.

• Phase Cloak (Vasari Scout Corvette) and Combat Phase Cloak (Vasari Raider Corvette), unlocked by the Phase Cloaks and Combat Phase Cloaks research subjects.

• Detection Droids (TEC Robotics Cruiser): deploys a fleet of detection droids with advanced sensor systems that allow detection of objects with more advanced cloaking.

Cloaking and Detection

A full cloaking and detection layer has been added to the base game.

• Cloak quality is graded on five levels, and each level tells the enemy something more.

  • 4: Perfect - the unit is completely hidden, giving the enemy no indication of its presence.

  • 3: Good - the enemy can detect that cloaked units are present in the gravity well, but not how many, what type they are, or where.

  • 2: Standard - the number of cloaked units can be determined, but not their type or location.

  • 1: Poor - the enemy can see the approximate position, but the type remains unknown and the unit cannot be targeted by weapons.

  • 0: Revealed - the unit's type can be determined and it can be attacked as normal.

• Taking damage, firing weapons, or completing a phase jump degrades cloak quality for a short time rather than ending the cloak outright.

• Cloak and Decloak buttons apply to the whole selection, and a quick cloak bar shows cloak state, cloak quality and detection level at a glance.

• Empire-wide engagement modes decide how cloaked ships answer once an enemy reveals them: Stay Cloaked / Hold Fire, Stay Cloaked / Return Fire, or Decloak and Engage. Press to cycle forward, right click to cycle back.

• A separate empire-wide Hold Fire While Cloaked toggle governs ships that are still hidden. Manually ordered attacks are still carried out.

• Detection is a structure and fleet network rather than a single stat.

  • Civilian and Military Research Labs: +3 detection quality, +10,000m detection range (all three factions).

  • Advent Progenitor Capital Ship, TEC Support Capital Ship, Vasari Marauder Capital Ship: +3 detection quality, +8,000m detection range.

  • Vasari Overseer Cruiser: +3 detection quality, +5,000m detection range.

  • Starbases: +1 minimum detection level in their gravity well (including the Ancient Starbase).

• Detector range rings are drawn in the galaxy plane at the smooth render position. Enemy rings appear whenever a cloak-capable ship is selected, and a Show Own Detector Ranges toggle adds your own.

• Cloaked ships fade in and out instead of popping, carry a blue aura while cloaked, and use a per-ship visual seed so their shimmer does not move in lockstep.

• New notifications fire when one of your cloaked units is detected by an enemy, and when an enemy cloaked unit is detected.

• Dead units no longer provide detection, and detector UI is hidden for dead detectors.

• The AI cloaks its own ships, defends allies while cloaked, and only scans relevant players when looking for cloak-defense targets.

• New unit modifiers for modders and items: Cloak Quality, Raise Cloak Speed, Lower Cloak Speed, Detection Range, Detection Quality, Minimum Detection Level.

Planetary Corruption and the Shroud

Corruption is now a first-class simulation system. Every player, ship and planet carries corruption values, and the Eidolon (Herald DLC) are built to exploit them.

• Ships accumulate corruption and suffer escalating faction-specific penalties as it crosses each threshold. Corruption decays on its own after a short delay.

  • Advent: Corrupted Unity - telepathic interference disrupts ability usage. The Advent also gain Corrupted Psi Power, a benefit that augments the crew's psi power.

  • TEC: Corrupted Sensors - unknown signals interfere with sensor range.

  • Vasari: Phase Drive Corruption - unknown energy interferes with phase jumping.

  • At maximum corruption a ship progressively loses hull repair, then armor repair, then shield regeneration, recovering each as corruption drops back below the threshold.

• A Planetary Corruption window lists corrupted and owned planets, their status (No Corruption, Corruption, Ready to Shroud, Shrouding, Shrouded) and their assigned mode. It has its own hotkey and a persistent quick bar.

• The galaxy map gains a corruption overlay with tiered rings on corrupted planets and organic branching strands showing propagation between them, with hover tooltips for source, destination and progress.

• Fully corrupted planets can be shrouded, which permanently alters them. Every planet type has a shrouded skin and name, from Shrouded Asteroid to Shrouded Primordial Planet.

• Shroud Modes can be switched for a small corruption cost and stay active until deactivated. Only one runs at a time.

  • Exploitation Mode: increases planetary income rates by using the shroud to enrich resources.

  • Propagate Mode: projects corruption outward to nearby planets over time, with tunable radius, speed and strength.

  • Summoning Mode: increases build rates by attuning the shroud to the frequency of incoming portals.

  • Phasic Veil Mode: distorts local phase space to hinder enemy movement.

• Modes require corruption upkeep. A planet that runs dry keeps its mode active at greatly reduced effectiveness, raises a Corruption Depleted notification, and shows reduced values in its tooltip with the base value in parentheses.

• Maximum corruption and shrouding duration are set per planet type: asteroids, ship graveyards and pirate bases 0.2 and 300s, moons 0.25 and 300s, barren/ice/swamp/volcanic 0.5 and 450s, oceanic and terran 2.0, city and gas giant 2.5 and 900s.

• A Corruption planet development track was added alongside the existing five.

• Shrouding restricts how far other factions can develop a planet's tracks, and the tooltip says so instead of failing silently.

• New notifications: Ready to Shroud, Planet Shrouded, Enemy Shrouding Begun, Enemy Planet Shrouded, Enemy Destroying Planet, Enemy Planet Destroyed, Corruption Depleted.

• Corruption is a distinct UI colour, with mild, moderate and extreme alert fills on main view icons.

• The AI understands corruption: it manages ship corruption, runs a planetary corruption controller, and picks corruption modes.

Achievements

Eight new achievements were added.

• Systemic Corruption: corrupt and shroud 25 planets during a single match.

• Harbinger Foothold: win as the Eidolon.

• An Ancient Enemy Returns: defeat a Vasari Alliance or Exodus opponent as the Eidolon.

• The Predator Becomes the Prey: defeat an Eidolon player as the Vasari.

• Against All Odds: eliminate an Eidolon as the TEC.

• Unlikely Allies Revealed: get a synergy pact with an Eidolon player as the Advent Wrath.

• Combat Jump: teleport the Eidolon Starbase into hostile territory.

• Portal Nexus: have 10 Minor or Major Portals on a single planet.

Privateer, Military Researcher and Adept Administrator now unlock under the correct conditions, and Epic achievement unlocks rejected by the platform are retried rather than lost.

Paths to Power and Reinforcements DLC Changes

• Khevarkov Modular Battlecruiser: Tactical Assault splash damage radius from 750 to 1000 at every rank, and its splash damage as a share of total damage dealt from 0.05-0.3 to 0.25-0.5 across ranks one to five.

• Ancient Starbase: gained the detection modifiers shared by all starbases, and its Planetary Shield Array now protects friendly units.

• Vasari Mad Titan and all super capital ships now carry corruption values.

• All super capital ship components declare item access tags, so they can only be fitted to their intended host.