If your game got stuck on "Verifying installed components..." or the AI features (Council, Chieftain Portrait) silently didn't work in v0.4.1, this update fixes it. Thanks to everyone who reported it in Discussions.

FIXED

- Setup screen froze on "Verifying installed components...". A component that connects the setup window to the game engine failed to load in v0.4.1. The window never received progress and the Try Again / Play / Quit buttons didn't respond. This affected every player on the 20/09 build.
- AI features silently unavailable in-game. Same root cause. The Council, Chieftain Portrait and the AI Engines indicator work correctly again.
- Setup errors are now written to the session log, so if anything like this happens again we can see exactly why.

NEW: GPU-ACCELERATED PORTRAITS ON WINDOWS (NVIDIA)

The Chieftain Portrait engine now runs on your NVIDIA GPU instead of the CPU when a compatible card is detected. Portraits that took several minutes on CPU now render in seconds.

- Supported: RTX 20xx through RTX 50xx, with NVIDIA driver 580 or newer.
- Older cards (GTX 9xx/10xx) or older drivers keep working on CPU. Nothing breaks, you just don't get the speed-up. The AI Engines panel tells you which mode you're in and why.
- If the GPU can't be used for any reason, the game falls back to CPU automatically. Setup never fails because of it.
- The Windows download is about 2 GB larger because of the GPU libraries. macOS (Apple Silicon) already used Metal and is unchanged.

NEW: REPORT A BUG BUTTON

Stuck before the game even opens? There is now a "report a bug" link at the bottom of the setup screen, and a "Report a bug" button in the in-game AI Engines panel. One click:

1. Copies a full diagnostic to your clipboard (hardware, install state, which step you're stuck on and for how long, recent log lines). Your username is removed from it.
2. Opens the folder containing your log file.
3. Opens our Steam Discussions page.

Start a new thread and paste. That gives us everything needed to help you fast.

HEADS-UP

- Everyone will see the setup screen once after this update. It re-validates the AI environment and, on Windows, installs the GPU libraries. This is expected and only happens once. Windows + NVIDIA users: this first setup takes a few minutes longer than usual.
- Save games are not affected. Same save format as v0.4.1.

Having trouble? Use the new Report a bug button, or post in Discussions. I read every thread.