I see several things that have changed.

When ships get damaged, there are no effects. No flame, smoke or other indications that the thing is near death. I was just expermenting with the new 1.0 and had a Cobalt that was down to 15 hull and it looked like it was fresh off the shelf.

Another little bug: The loading bar on the start spash screen is now off center, the left most edge is covered by the feet of the officer standing there. It is no longer centered on the image above it.

I have only finsished the download 10 minutes ago, but both of these things jumped out at me.

The Pirates are a lot harder from The Diplomacy .95? AWESOME!

The Vicious and Cruel AI has also been implemented now. In beta, they never used their vast amount of resources (they cheat, yes). Now looking at the stats after a game, you can see that they are using it. I would imagine that the ai improvements implemented in Entrenchment and Vanilla are also in Diplomacy. The AI seemed to build their fleet composition better as well. With resource hax, of course, it is easy for the AI to get super high on the tech tree while still building a fleet. Though that is not quite what people are looking for, at least single player will be more challenging that way.

No, to pretty much all of that.

Pirates got a really hefty boost. They get some massive anti-structure damage in particular with a very long range. Later in the game, the Flaks and Heavies will even tank Marza Barrage. And the Pirate Base. Remember parking a few carriers and watching all those gauss turrets die uselessly? Not anymore. The pirates are dangerous. And they upgrade every time they launch on a Raid or Mission.

The AI: Very small 2v2 map, not a lot of income, 2 human vs 2 AI. Luck would have it, there were a lot of neutrals, and random put us as TEC+Advent vs 2 Vasari. We ended up with two starbases fully upgraded side by side at the chokepoint neutral supported by two decent size fleets. Multiple Halcyons, lotsa flak in particular, as the AI was focusing on carriers. We lost two caps in the first fight, three in the second after we rebuilt, along with I-don't-know-how-many frigates both times. Finally went on the offensive just three jumps away, had to pull our fleets as we couldn't afford two at a time. We lost the TEC starbase that time. Won the game, but the AI sure put up a fight. Oh, and this wasn't even Vicious AI, which by the way, gets new cheats aside from resources, I understand.

In my test game right now, first Vicious AI to max fleet research did so at 53 minutes. 11 minutes later, they hit that for used slots and have pretty much stayed there. First AI to max all Combat research did so at 66 minutes. Same AI maxed Civilian research at 75 minutes. One AI managed to get 11 caps on the field at once. Here's some interesting tidbits: First AI cap to hit lvl 6 was at 24 minutes. 5 was at just 12. One AI has built a total of 7 caps, and bought 27 levels. One AI has 98 starbase upgrades spread across 7 starbases. It hasn't lost one. Have fun storming the castle!

Oh, and artifacts are a little bit better.

Edit: BTW, replays are broken.

There is a snow storm on the east coast this week end - I am sooooo playing sins

All of this sounds very interesting, but where's the diplomacy?? Did they forgot to add it?

Me and my brother teamed up against a single vicious ast night. He actually put up quite a fight. Sent huge fleets in, and killed several of our caps. The AI still doesn't know how to penetrate defenses though (needs to build more bombers!). However, the AI never upgraded a single planet's health. Their defenses were pretty good, but they needed a few more repair platforms.

Also, we had at least 3 crashes to the desktop (no minidump). I had to up the autosave frequency, as it always crashes a couple minutes before another 15-minute autosave. Really would like this fixed!  

On a side note Vasari Raider Xenophobia is acctually a useful tech now.

Edit: By the way a small bug is that the technology you are currently researching in the diplomacy tree is not surrounded by a glowing box. I have only tried this with vasari but assume it is the same with other races.

Vasari Armament pact is a really nice thing for them to offer players late game 20% increased fire rate isnt as race specific as the TEC and Advent ones

Edit: Another small bug is that it says an armament pact only increases all caps and destructor/enforcer rather than all frigates

Karmic Retribution - a research that puts automatic bounty on a faction that destroys Advents tradeships :>