A new national crafting system, 27 culture traits, religious verses, and more

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The v2.1 preview build is now available on Steam. This update brings a new national crafting system, 27 culture traits, new religious verses, and a handful of balance and stability improvements. 

Managing crafting across a growing empire just got a lot easier. The new national crafting policy system lets you set priority tiers and quota targets for recipes at the nation level. All your crafters will automatically follow the policy, so you no longer need to manage each workshop individually.

Individual crafters can still opt out and be managed on their own if you want more control in specific cities. The Improvement Panel now includes a three-mode dropdown (You / Shop Owner / National Policy) so you can quickly see and switch how each crafter is being managed.

A large expansion to the Culture Trait system across all six domains: Commerce, Military, Science, Government, Religion, and Industrial. These give you more options when spending Influence, with effects ranging from bonus Paragon spawn chances to trade production bonuses, city cap increases, and resource yields.

A few highlights:

• Imperial Reach (Government): +2 City Cap. City cap is always a big deal.

• Heroic Tradition (Military): +1% Paragon Spawn Chance per Military Improvement

• Maritime Glory (Military): +2 Culture per Sea Force commanded. Ties military to culture in a new way.

• Enlightened Prosperity (Science): Commerce Improvements gain +2 Happiness per Science Improvement in region. Cross-domain synergy.

• Fervent Awakening (Religion): +25% Religion Spread Strength for 20 turns after gaining Paragon. Strong combo potential with Paragon traits. 

Seven new verses that complement the expanded Culture and Trade systems, including Sanctified Trade (+25% Trade Production), Sacred Song (+5 Culture in all Cities), and Guiding Lights (+5 Influence per turn). 

• Cities now accumulate workers more frequently as they level up

• Autocracy has been tuned down: high tax tier benefit reduced from 80% to 70%, and policy money per turn decreased from 4 to 3

• AI civilizations now settle with more variation in distance from other civilizations, and will generally settle further away

• Difficulty settings now properly override server defaults

• More granular notification controls help reduce notification volume in the late game 

• Fixed pulldown/dropdown menus not sizing and positioning correctly in certain configurations

• Fixed undefined vehicle movement behavior when turning radius was invalid

• Fixed terrain visual artifacts (black pixels, flashing) caused by values propagating through the shader pipeline

• CPU optimization: adaptive spin-wait reduces waste during idle and loading states

• Additional font rendering improvements

• Updated multiplayer turn resolver for improved client-server compatibility

This is an opt-in build, so we want to hear how it plays. If you run into any issues or have feedback, let us know!

How to Access the Opt-In BranchRight-click Ara: History Untold in your Steam Library > Properties > Betas > select the opt-in branch from the dropdown.