Hello,

I hope everyone is having fun this summer conquering the Galaxy! We've made some improvements to Crusade including some important fixes to Privateers, AI improvements, and new ship weapons. Please read below for more information.

AI/Gameplay

• Added new ship weapon components that don't require special resources (But cost a lot more).
• AI won't offer trades with civs they hate.
• Improved planetary improvement AI.
• When starting an invasion, the player now chooses between three random tiles.
• Freighters will more aggressively try to find a destination.
• AI balanced to build more transports if it has sufficient military power already.
• AI fleets more aggressive in going through dangerous territory.

Privateers

• Promoting a commander to a privateer no longer fails because it chooses a custom design. 
• Privateer can now attack starbases, planets, shipyards, or asteroid mining bases without declaring war. 
• Privateers now appear as pirates in the battle viewer. Fixed issue in battle preview/results screens that showed obviously the owning faction of the privateers
• Fixed issue where privateer would sometimes be created without weapons.

Performance

• Optimized the code determining whether a player or AI knows the existence of an object (major MAJOR performance improvement).
• AI optimization of when to upgrade ships (major performance boost)
• AI only determines its primary opponent when the galactic political landscape has likely changed (major turn time improvement)

Bugs

• Fixed a GWG crash if you started a game where you didn't owned planets (like in the beginning of the Arcea campaign mission), exited to the main menu, and then started a sandbox game
• Commander abilities text no longer pops out of fleet tooltip
• Added size check to remaining available faction list when setting up random players (prevents edge-case crash)
• If the UP chairman leaves the UP from the diplomacy screen, they will be immediately fired and asked to clean out their desk. (Fixes UP oddness and crashes.)
• Matched the Crusade Arcean Faction personality to match the Mercenaries version 
• Tabbing between players in the trade window now correctly updates trade offers. 
• Updated Star Surfer description better explain its functionality
• Removed strings duplicated between the base game and Crusade. 
• Removed Interstellar Drives and Life Support Modules from all spawned fighters as this was occasionally causing "assault" fighters to act as "guardians". 
• Fixed a problem with the Crusade tutorial not unlocking its achievement.
• Crash fix for invasion system where swarm particles aren't being generated for the bonus legions from generals if the defending player is human.
• Fix for issue where AI gets semi-permanently stuck "in a trade", preventing the player from starting a conversation/trade with that AI.
• Fixed additional stuck turn issues.
• Fixed crash caused when the AI evaluates sending a ship to a given planet at the same time as the player is colonizing that planet.
• Fixed crash caused when the AI is evaluating trade targets at the same time the player has colonized the planet.
• Fixed issue where fleet faction icon would go missing from the tooltip after hovering over any ship in the shipyard screen

UI

• Removed bad clipping on some of the citizen portraits.
• Updated the Anomaly Popup Window so that the background image is correct at medium and normal UI sizes.
• Cropped and resized citizen portraits to remove artifacts in the Choose Portraits screen.
• Large UI version of Shipyard list icon is no longer blurry.
• Fixed issue where tradable stat type and strategic resource trade items were not displaying correctly in the diplomacy->treaty details screen (they would show up as "New Game")

MP

• Inviting friends to your match no longer bypasses the normal DLC checks. This would cause a crash if the DLC did not match or if one player owned Crusade and other did not. There have been no changes to being able to play MP with mismatched DLC: with a few exceptions, the host's DLC is available to everyone. 
• Fixed issue where entering an MP lobby and then leaving would not reload all the factions. This would cause a crash if you had more than 13 players in the previous game and hit quick-start (aren't edge cases fun?) 
• Quick starting after failing to enter a Lobby Enter no longer crashes
• Fix for issue where the turn system would skip over the space pirate player once they were considered dead by the system.