First off, I did not read every note in the change log, since it was longer than I thought it would be. So, saying that, I have played 3 games, all on easy, large galaxy, with only 3 other npc races included.
All three games I was attacked within 10 mins of starting the game, not just a single planet attack but up to 3 of my planet/roids were attacked.
The game has lost what fun it had, I am not playing the slow do as many upgrades to everything I can. I had 6 colonies in each of the games. Nor did I start the attacks via blowing off explorers as they passed through my space. In fact on 2 of the games there were no explorers, the npc attacked without sending any ships to my outer settlements.
This is a bad balance issue in my opinion, The speed of attacks is I feel something that needs to be slowed down, not speeded up for the single player game. I have yet to find a way of protecting my planets in the LACK of time I am given to explore and setup my settlements.
This is just my opinon, but as a first impression, I am not impressed with the changes that have been made.
Reasoning,
1. It is impossible to explore without for some reason I have yet to discover drawing an attack from some other npc player.
2. The splitting of the research between civilian and military slows the upgrades, and discovery of new weapons, or improving weapons to a point that now the first to rush into attacking will gain the advantage.
3. Exploring as a seperate planet research is useless, it takes time and money to do this and with the npc players trying to blow you out of the galaxy in less time than every, Not worth even trying to research.
Being able to select your flag ship is nice, but after that, the capital ships are useless if you cannot get the time to build up an economy to use them.
All in all, I do not like the changes made to the agressivness of the npc players.

Glenn