Custom factions are here! Build your own faction from the ground up!
You are no longer limited to the six premade factions. You can now customize the name, color, emblem, portrait, home planet and traits of your own faction. Most options are purely visual, but the home planet and traits can completely change how you play the game.
There are 97 traits available to choose from, with up to 4 per faction and 2 trait points to spend, allowing huge number of possible faction builds. Some traits cost more than others, and negative traits like Astroprocessing Blindness hand you extra trait points in exchange for a drawback.
Powerful traits like Precursors replace your explorers with the mighty Ancient ship. Reinforced Hulls make your ships convert all their shield hull points instead. Traits like Technological Geniuses decrease the cost of all techs by 2 gas, opening the door to a much heavier research focus.
Save and create multiple custom factions, let the AI design its own from scratch, or set the AI loose with factions you've built yourself.
In addition to custom factions, this update brings a long list of other changes and improvements.
Balance Changes
Tweaked some premade factions
Change network hub to always have range of 2
Change the tech levels of many buildings and upgrades, generally making network extensions higher level techs
AI Improvements
Fix an issue which prevented AI from overbuilding stations and an issue which made AI defend unnecessarily
Make AI to build network hubs
AI improvements for starports and metal management
UI Improvements
Add delete save file button
Add autosave frequency and file limit options
Add faction specific cursors
Improve text readability by adding black text outline
Unify font sizes
Show colonization cost in tooltip even when colonization is not possible
Allow zooming closer
Add possibility to increase network indicator alpha by clicking toggle network
Graphics Improvements
Add faction specific weaponry sprites
Improve Harbinger ship graphics
Bug Fixes
Fix foundry world anomaly reward texts
Fix issue which caused colonization cost to be wrong
Fix an issue which left tech options empty
Fix an issue which caused hackers to offer duplicates of same tech
Fix minor faction relation tooltip texts
Fix crash on AI turn
Fix experimental ship code anomaly reward
Fix stranded trader convoy anomaly relation changes
This content update increases the replayability a lot. If it's been a while since you last played, now's a great time to jump back in and build something absurd.