Stardock Entertainment and Oxide Games announced today that a free demo for Ashes of the Singularity II, the highly anticipated sequel to the massive-scale RTS, is available now as part of Steam Next Fest. The demo will feature two factions, 8-player multiplayer, and full skirmish mode. Ashes of the Singularity II is an RTS where you command thousands of units across continent-sized maps, fighting a war for control of the solar system.

The Ashes of the Singularity II demo is set in a near future where the United Earth Forces represent humanity's last stand against the Post-Human Coalition. Each faction commands unique units, with the advanced Post-Humans fielding mechs and tanks with energy weapons vs. the UEF’s flesh and blood army. Players will battle it out to determine the winner. 

"We built Ashes of the Singularity II for people who want to think like a general, not compete in a clicking contest," said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock Entertainment. "Your strategy should decide the battle, not your APM. Next Fest is a chance for players to find out if that's the kind of RTS they've been looking for." 

• Two playable factions: United Earth Forces and Post-Human Coalition

• Skirmish mode against AI

• Full multiplayer for up to 8 players (with AI backfill as an option)

• Three maps: Small (2-4 players), Medium (2-6 players), Large (2-8 players)

• Arctic and Desert Environments

• Day and Night scenes

• Save and load functionality

Developed by Oxide Games, renowned for their technological innovation, and published by Stardock Entertainment, the company behind the acclaimed Sins of a Solar Empire series, Ashes of the Singularity II promises to elevate the RTS genre once again.

Engage directly with the development team and community through the official Discord[discord.gg].

We have an exciting year coming up for Galactic Civilizations IV, probably the biggest year of updates and improvements yet. I’ll talk about the Expansions and DLCs we have in development first and then the free updates next.

We’re very happy about our plans for the next two years of GalCiv, and we wanted to make that concrete for players by laying out those plans; and making it easy for players to get on board with a single purchase. The issue isn’t the content, it’s the price: It’s $75 which is a good deal when you consider it’s what we’re making for the game going into 2028. However, users just see the price tag.

So we will make a big change to Expansion Pass 2 – we’re going to add content to address those concerns. We are adding onto the Pass with an entirely new DLC: Tales of the Snathi.

If you have already bought Expansion Pass 2, you need do nothing, and the Snathi will be added automatically when they are released. If you felt that the Pass was too expensive, hopefully you will see more value in it now.

As a reminder, the schedule for 2026 is:

1. Federations & Empires (Spring)

2. Ascension (Fall)

These DLC will also be purchasable separately if desired.

Now we get into the free updates and there’s a lot on our plate! We’ve been reading this thread and taking notes.

A few big things on our list:

1. Combat: We really want to beef this up in interesting ways this year. Some of this will involve updating the Warlords DLC, but a lot of it will be in free updates.

2. Planet Depth: Even the OS/2 version of GalCiv back 30 years ago had things like planetary statistics and more world depth. This is something we want to introduce in the big v4.0 update later this year.

3. UI, UI, UI: There’s a lot of UI work we’ve been doing in some of our other games that we want to bring over to GalCiv this year.