Now that I have been playing a 1.5 game for the first time and have finished about 300 or so turns I have some thoughts on the current status of the game. My biggest problems are the fallowing:

1. The AI still doesn't really feel aggressive enough. It is thankfully better than the last time I played the game since it now seems able to actually put together strong fleets, but it still doesn't seem to bother actually invading other planets. As far as I can tell, even long wars between AI players don't result in any real border changes because nobody is actually invading anyone. I am currently at war with 3 alien factions and even after hundreds of turns of war I still haven't seen them send ONE transport ship at me. And this is in-spite of them having a stronger fleet than me. They have the upper hand and yet they never invade.

2. The game still does a poor job of informing you about what is going on in the galaxy. It's annoying having to go to the diplomacy screen over and over just to see what is going on between the different alien races. What the game should do instead, is to have a news like pop-up screen that informs the player of all diplomatic actions taken between all known factions. So if the Terrans and Altarians sign a free trade agreement for example then next turn a news pop-up appears and says something like "in today's news the Terran federation and the Altarian republic signed a free trade treaty etc". It would inform the player what is actually going on and add immersion at the same time.

Those are currently my single biggest gripes. Hopefully they will be fixed.