Beta 5 is the last major public beta of Galactic Civilizations II.  We will have a minor update on Monday to fix a problem discovered with nVidia cards (crashes on start for them).

Some of the highlights of the new version include:

+ You can set the resoluton from within the game (which is what we think causes the problem on nVidia cards).

+ The Miles Sound System is now in replacing our own home made sound system.  However: If you had a previous version installed, your sound and such will not be set right, you'll need to go to options and turn up the sound since it uses a totally different volume control system.

+ It's been optimized for performance. So it should be faster than previous versions.

+ It should use less memory.

+ The human colony ship has a high-resolution texture. We want to see how this performs for people as it's 8 times larger than the typical "high res" texture you have in other games.

+ The planet screen has been re-designed. We don't have all the icons and graphics in yet but the basic layout is there.

+ The Invasion screen is much closer to completion now.

+ Lots of gameplay tweaks. 

+ ALL your settings are now kept in \my documents\my games\galciv2

+ There is a lot more "jewelry" in the game for customizing ships including the ability to rotate the stuff.

+ A lot of stuff was done with custom races to make it more seamless.

+ Computer AI is smarter about ship design and what ships it builds.

+ Ethical Alignment choice bonuses are now working.

+ Tons of bug fixes.

Also, this beta marks the end to new beta testers being able to join.  Users who pre-order (regardless from where) will get the Collector's Edition version of the game which has additional content.