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:

• Added clockwork cube monster and challenge mission.
• 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.