A number of gameplay options have been added to increase replayability and to further flesh out the open-ended gameplay. Among the new gameplay options:
- No tech trading
- Blind exploration (players cannott see spheres of influence on the mini map)
- Random intelligence (players select a general difficulty level and the game will randomize the intelligence of each computer player)
- Random number of players (players can elect to have the game decide how many computer players they will face)
- Random opponents (players can elect to have the game choose which computer players they will face)
- Random galaxy size (players can elect to have the game randomly pick a galaxy size)

Additional improvements:
- Computer AI significantly enhanced
- Computer AI updated to work together with other players (including human player) to thwart a common foe
- New alien dialog added
- Fleet Manager Screen added to more easily manage stacks of ships and fleets on the same tile
- Rally points can be moved
- User interface improved
- Ship Designer revamped to be easier to use and more powerful, now allowing players to rotate ships pieces on the fly
- Selected ship displays an animated line showing its destination
- Ship-destination markers display how many weeks remain until ship arrives there
- Ship upgrading improved
- Unused social production now transferred automatically to military production
- Economic system overhauled to be more transparent and intuitive
- Population growth revamped to put more emphasis on population growth ability and morale
- Large number of hotkeys added
- Metaverse scoring revamped
- Constructors display starbase’s area of effect before it is built
- Technologies, planetary improvements, starbase modules, etc. further balanced
- Many new options added to options screen - Better support for modding (full-blown mod UI planned for v1.2 update)
- New music
- Many player exploits removed
- Performance and memory optimizations