Gog is telling me that SMAC has an update waiting. I'm not sure what to make of that, since the game was released decades ago. Does anybody know what's in the update?

Oh, wow, okay. Excellent. Thank you.

I have the update installed, and was running Alien Crossfire with my usual preferences as normal through 21 November 2024; however, when I tried playing SMACX this evening (22 November), I had a couple of major glitches immediately after my faction's landing on Planet:
1) I got a pop-up message that "sea levels are rising dramatically!" (This message repeated on each succeeding turn.)
2) I then got a message that all factions could now work on the Ascent to Transcendence (something which ought not happen until the very late game).
3) Although I saw our faction landing, our faction's initial colony did NOT appear on the map, and no units appeared on screen, so I couldn't build anything in my initial colony, and couldn't explore or build new colonies.
I had been playing Alien Crossfire with a custom mix of factions (the 5 new human factions, plus my 2 favorites from the original game), so I tried playing Alien Crossfire with the original Alpha Centauri factions, and encountered the same problems.
I would note that, if I play the original Alpha Centauri post-update, these problems do NOT arise. However, I prefer Alien Crossfire -- IF I can get it running glitch-free again!