Master of Orion inspired open source 4x strategy FreeOrion has a new release

Inspired originally by Master of Orion, the free and open source FreeOrion project has a brand new release.

For the FreeOrion, this was a reasonably quick release considering they had another release back in February and they don't usually update too often. For a good reason this time though, as they've managed to do a major tech move from Python 2 to 3 to enable FreeOrion to stay up to date with modern code. That wasn't the only big change though.

Some highlights:

• The Arc Disruptor weapon part and techs have been added, which are useful with bad pilots, against large numbers of cheap targets, and against ships without shields
• The possible targets for each weapon type has been limited, making weapon types useful in different situations
• Fighters have been rebalanced and the Heavy Bomber fighter type was added
• Added happiness requirements for normal planet resource meter growth
• Added team-based player homeworld placement for multiplayer games
• Added separate empire affiliation for peace, distinct from allied
• Rebalanced some bonuses from techs and specials to make high population less important and mitigate runaway empire growth "snowballing"

Outside of their highlights, there's of course plenty more changed you can see in the full log. More AI improvements, quite a lot of bug fixes, scripting optimizations, improved online multiplayer, translation updates and so on.

For Linux specifically, they also now supply a FreeDesktop.org AppStream metainfo file to help integrations.

You can check out more on the official site and install it as a Snap.