Stardock

DeskScapes 2026 includes AI upscaling that runs on your own hardware. Open an image, select AI Upscale, and the app uses your GPU (or balances across CPU and GPU on lower-end machines) to upscale up to 8K. The image never leaves your PC. No tokens. No subscription. No third-party processing. This matters for two reasons: privacy, and the fact that most of us have wallpaper collections going back 10+ years that look rough on modern displays. DeskScapes turns that archive back into something worth looking at. Available standalone or as part of Object Desktop: https://lnkd.in/esmk3UFi

Observer Mode is now in Ashes of the Singularity II. Drop into any match and watch from any player's perspective. You see their economy, Durantium and Thorium resources, Quanta, logistics, research choices, and order queues in real time. Three viewing modes: Perspective View puts you inside the player's fog of war. Revealed View removes all fog for clean, cinematic shots across the full battlefield. Tactical View keeps the player's fog intact but lets you see through it as the observer. You know what threats are incoming before they do. Whether you're creating content, studying competitive play, or watching a match unfold, the tools are there. Watch the Video: https://lnkd.in/eFcWaWy7

If you want to know more about Treasures of the Magi before getting into it today, our latest dev journal goes behind the design of the DLC. It covers the lore of the Magi and the role of their golem constructs in the setting, walks through favorite new additions including the Mage Wands and the Shapeshifting Potions, and the reasoning behind giving the early game a richer weapon pool with more meaningful choices. Worth a read if you are interested in how design decisions get made on a remastered strategy game. Link in the comments.

New Dev Journal is up. This one covers the Oligarchy government coming in Federations & Empires, the next expansion for Galactic Civilizations IV. The design question we wanted to answer: what does a hyper-capitalistic civilization look like in a 4X game? The Oligarchy doesn't want the most worlds. It claims dead rocks and gas giants nobody else bothers with, turns them into Holdings, and uses those as Collateral to buy Investments. Mature an Investment and you unlock Executive Orders no other civ can use, things like Dumping Rights, Leveraged Buyout, and Resource Embargo. It's the first government in GalCiv IV that genuinely supports a "tall" playstyle. You can win with one homeworld and a portfolio. Read More: https://lnkd.in/grTyHq-r

Treasures of the Magi released today as the first DLC for Elemental: Reforged, our fantasy turn-based strategy game. The expansion builds out a piece of the world's history that the base game only gestured at, sending players into ruins left behind by an ancient order of sorcerers called the Magi. The DLC adds new weapons, unique armor sets, a new line of magic wands that any class can wield, new quest lines, awakened golems in several variants, and a category of consumable items we are particularly interested in: potions that transform a champion into a bear, ogre, demon, or elemental during tactical battles. A free v1.1 update for all Elemental: Reforged owners shipped today as well, shaped largely by community feedback. The update brings a number of quality of life improvements alongside stability and performance fixes, and weapons, armor, accessories, and consumables that previously required the Legendary Heroes DLC are now free for everyone. Treasures of the Magi is is available now on Steam or direct through Stardock. Link in the comments.

For over a year, the team has been working through feedback on the Sins II AI. The consensus from players was clear: the AI fought well early, but lost the plot as games dragged on. The team wrote up the full reasoning behind our answer to that problem. It's called ARES, the Adaptive Reasoning & Execution System. Rather than patch each AI controller in isolation, we built a strategic layer that sits above them and owns the AI's intent for the whole match. The controllers were always good at the "how." ARES gives them a "why." A few principles guided the design. ARES is a director, not a suggester. Strategy is goal-shaped, not rule-shaped. And difficulty should mean better thinking, not bigger numbers. Read More: https://lnkd.in/gVi6k-EV #GameDev #GameAI #StrategyGames #SinsOfASolarEmpire #Stardock

One of the harder problems in strategy game design is the gap between what a unit's stats say and what actually happens in a fight. This week's Ashes of the Singularity II dev journal digs into that gap. We walk through the tooltip changes we've made to weapon modules and explain how stats like cycle time, burst duration, and overkill affect real combat outcomes in ways that raw DPS numbers don't capture. There's a live battle at the end that shows some of this in action. If you're interested in how RTS games communicate mechanical depth to players, this one is worth a watch. Watch Now: https://lnkd.in/gt7N2j-u #GameDev #RealTimeStrategy #GameDesign #AshesOfTheSingularity #IndieDev

DeskScapes 2026 is now available. This release moves image generation off the cloud and onto your machine. Every wallpaper you create, restyle, or upscale runs on your own CPU and GPU, which means no tokens, no per-image fees, and no usage caps. What's new: • Generate. Create original wallpapers locally using your own hardware. • Restyle. Apply dozens of artistic effects to any image you already own. • Upscale. Bring lower-resolution images up to 4K desktop quality. • Hybrid Dream Editor. Build advanced animated backgrounds with LUA scripting support. • Info Panel. Add custom text overlays for device stats, time, or anything else you want on screen. • Supported on up to five devices and included in Object Desktop. Learn More: https://lnkd.in/g_VmyFJj #Windows #PCSoftware #Stardock

After 1.0.3 shipped, the team sat down and made a list of the things that were nagging us. Not features. Not roadmap. Just the stuff you start to feel after a long play session: items you find too many of, encounters that don't reward you the way they should, late-game turns that grind on modest hardware, a handful of bugs that had been on the "we'll get to it" list for too long. v1.1 is the result of getting to it. New weapons, armor, and accessories uplifted from twenty years of Stardock fantasy art that never made it into Reforged, with the middle of the loot curve filled in so progression feels continuous. Tilda Herbs and Splintered Staves drop at half their old rates so they no longer crowd out the rest of the pool. Cloth-map calculations were rewritten so late-game turns are faster on modest hardware. v1.1 is free for everyone who owns Elemental: Reforged, arriving next week. Full dev journal in the comments.

Most AI tools forget who you are between sessions. You brief them today, you brief them again tomorrow. Today Stardock released Clairvoyance Beta 2 with a different model: AI agents that live on your PC, train on your knowledge bases, and run real projects end to end. "Knowledge bases are the missing element from most AI workflows," said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. "Rather than running a skill after the fact, knowledge bases ensure that your agents start knowing where to look and how to function from the get-go." Beta 2 ships with: • Knowledge-trained agents. Train an AI on a body of knowledge when you create it, and that base shapes the work. A Writer trained on your voice writes in your voice. A Reviewer trained on your team's standards reviews against them. • Autonomous Missions. Hand an agent a goal once and the runtime keeps spawning the next todo until the work ships. 14 archetypes to choose from on day one. • Wireloom. Ask an agent for a UI mockup and it renders a wireframe inline in the chat as SVG. No design tool needed. • Constellations. A visual map of how every note, file, and todo in your work connects, with right-click dependency views for your code. • A real code editor. Full language-server support for C++, TypeScript, Python, Rust, and Go inside the same app where the agent is writing the code alongside you. Works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Copilot, or entirely local via Ollama. Free to download. Object Desktop subscribers get Plus, which adds sync, hosted AI, and previews. Download link in the comments.