Clockwork Cubes

Tis the spooky season, and as is by now traditional, here's a new monster for you to fight: the clockwork cube. Cubes, in fact, as there's three of them, armed with a tentacle, a saw, and an energy beam respectively.



These will turn up during conquest play, and there's also a mission challenging you to take down all three cubes with ships worth no more than $1200. Can you figure out how?

Apart from that, there's some minor bug fixes and improvements:

• Fixed a potential situation where a ship on the winning side of a fight would be incorrectly marked as lost due to being immobilised. The game now tries harder to get such ships back into the air.
  
• Improved combat rendering speed by about 5%.
  
• AI empires' coats of arms should better match their abilities and ship designs.
  
• You can no longer refit dragonriders.
  
• New cheat option to switch difficulty levels. Note that a lot of the difference between difficulty levels is in the initial starting situation, which of course this can't change.
  
• Fixed rare text input crash.
  

There's still a bunch of bugs and adjustments I'm aware of that didn't make it into this update, so if you recently told me about something that needs fixing, don't worry.

Also, note that despite what it says at the top, this isn't DLC, it's a regular update to the game.