Firaxis releases first major Civilization: Beyond Earth patch

The Civilization: Beyond Earth fall update is now live, addressing various technical problems including the infamous "144hz monitor issue"—the bizarre inability to run the game at resolutions greater than 1280x720 on monitors running at 144hz refresh rates—and making changes to units, the tech web, quest rewards, AI, UI, and more.

To be honest, there's nothing in the patch notesthat really leaps out at me in a, "Oh, thanks goodness they fixed that" kind of way. "Revised trade route formula for city-to-city trade, with reduced yields," is one change, selected at random; "Miasmic Repulsor now unlocks on Alien Biology (was Ecology)" is another. The combat strength of Explorers has doubled, from 3 to 6, and the AI will now only pursue Domination once the game has gone into extended mode. Individually, none of this sounds all that important, but collectively it adds up to a pretty major overhaul.

"In addition to fixing these and other issues, Firaxis has also addressed a number of gameplay balance requests from the community—like optimizing trade route yields and doing away with one particular Covert Ops exploit," Community Manager David Hinkle wrote. "This is a substantial update, so please take a few moments to pore over the full patch notes below before you jump back into Beyond Earth."

The Civilization: Beyond Earth update should download and install automatically. If it doesn't, Hinkle suggested restarting Steam.