It's a beta patch, hence the [b], so the information you're looking for is in the Beta forum. Luckily for you, I compiled the relevant bits right here:
The first beta of 1.6 is purely fixes and performance improvements. The new features and game balance tweaks will come in subsequent betas.
That said, these changes are pretty significant.
First off, the defense handling has been changed which should have far-reaching consequences to how the game is played.
Secondly, the new ship stacking handling should increase performance as there's now much smarter drawing routines for ships which should greatly improve performance for players. This build should be faster than any version of GalCiv ever.
Here's what's new:
+ NEW: Stacked ships will only show one ship in the tile
+ The ship that is displayed is chosen like so:
+ If a ship is the galaxy’s selected ship it is always shown
+ Otherwise, the toughest selected ship is shown
+ If no ship in the stack is selected, the toughest ship is shown
+ An icon appears next to ships that are in a stack
+ when you move a ship off of a stack, it will show the next ship in that stack
+ This significantly increases performance in our tests. We had a stack of about 50 ships and no major hit to frame rate.
+ FIX: Fixed bug where non-optimal defenses were never decreased as the defenses absorbed damage during a battle round
+ FIX: Fixed end of turn crash that happened if you had the Force AI to use Max CPU option ON.
+ FIX: Made Build Menu update after a project is decomissioned. 1 per planet improvements like Orbital Terraformers will now show up in the build list again if you remove them from the queue or destroy an existing one. 1 per civ and 1 per galaxy improvements may not be destroyed and rebuilt - this is by design.
+ FIX: Fixed bug where if you changed the settings for a custom opponent's Natural Abilities and/or Financial Resources, the values would not remain the same after leaving the tab.
+ FIX: Fixed error where invalid information was being returned by the activation code in Win98 and Windows ME by adding alternate code if the first instance failed.
+ FIX: Fixed bug where save game was not saving the campaign file name and added code to fix save games currently exhibiting this bug (should fix problem with people continuing their campaigns)
+ FIX: Fixed crash bug where if the random event that creates a new minor race happened mulitple times, the minor races would end up with the same name and then delete each other's ship designs, causing a crash on the end of a turn
+ FIX: Fixed bug where the turn a ship was created was not saved/restored when loading a save game, which could cause a ship design to be deleted too early
+ FIX: Fixed bug with loading height maps for planet surfaces
+ FIX: Fixed bug where ending the game from the planet screen resulted in a crash because the planet screen was not hidden before the end game screen was unhidden
+ FIX: Added strings that were not being saved to scenario save game code
+ TWEAK : Turned off some debug strings to try and improve loading time
This beta will be up this week. Stay tuned.
Hey all,
We are having some technical difficulties with the servers but we wanted to get you another beta. We are still having slowdown issues from the ships, but at least the minimap is much more efficient. Here's the change log for the beta:
+ FIX: Made it so that your allies won't declare war on you in the mega event Allied War where the good races gang up on you.
+ NEW: Added code to save score data for non-metaverse games locally in the My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar folder
+ TWEAK: Added dialog to warn you if you start/load a metaverse game with a cheater flag
+ NEW: You can now change the social project (if there is stuff in the queue) from the colony list in the civ manager
+ NEW: The popup for adding money to negotiations on the trade screen will now open with the value needed to make the AI accept the offer (or the total amount in your treasury if they won't accept it).
+ FIX: Minimap and line graphs now uses Direct3D for drawing, which should show an increase in framerate.
+ FIX: Updated the QUICKSTART command line parameter code to work with DarkAvatar's settings (Starts a sandbox game with your last settings without needing to go to the menu.)
+ FIX: The minimap scrolling lag on Vista should be resolved, and scrolling in general should be smoother with better frame rates.
+ FIX: On Vista PCs, the debug.err will now be saved in the Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar folder. (This will not work if you run the exe in WInXP compatibility mode.)
+ FIX: If you turn off the Show Damage Animations option, it will now remove the damage animations from fleets.
1.6 Beta 3 will show up if you have pre-release versions checked on SDC. Its version number is 1.59[b].095 in SDC but it will show 1.6 Beta 3 in the title menu. If you are getting the error message when trying to start a metaverse game that your game will be invalid, you don't have the correct version.
1.6 Beta 3 is mostly data changes and AI tweaks. (Sorry, Frogboy didn't give me a list of changes, but he did mention nerfing the pirate mega event.)
I also fixed a minor bug with the money popup in the tradewnd if you were in debt. I also fixed one where the influence and morale bonuses did not show up correctly on the summary screen (from the planet screen) if there was a influence or morale bonus (respectively) on that tile.
We're still working on some optimizations and other fixes. There's a few wrinkles to iron out with the new minimap and line graph code but after that I should be able to work on adding some new features.
Also available today is a new optional module for pre-generated height maps, which is about 250 MB (before compression). If you turn down the randomness of the heightmaps, the game will use the pre-generated ones more often. This should mean a decrease in RAM usage, quicker loading times, and increased performance. Note that these are available for people who do not have Dark Avatar yet as well, with the same benefits.
If you haven't updated from 1.50x3 before now, this would be a good time to do it since you can get it from SDC now. I have been taking a lot of care to make these betas stable. If you are worried about trying a beta, you can archive your current version of GalCiv2/DarkAvatar from the File->Archive menu in SDC so that you can un-install and restore 1.50x3 if you find that you need to. If you have Windows Vista, the beta will be particularly beneficial to you as 1.6 beta 2 resolved the slowdown issue when scrolling or panning. (Windows XP users should also see better performance, but it was REALLY noticeable on Vista.)
Update:
GalCiv2: Dread Lords and Dark Avatar will both attempt to find pre-generated heightmaps for a given class (and type) of planet. If it can't find one, then it will generate one randomly. So just by downloading the heightmaps module, you will be reducing load time and the amount of memory used because the game will not have to randomly generate as many maps. The Planet Surface variety slider on the Video Tab of the Options Menu will further reduce the number of heightmaps that are used. If it is at 100%, it randomly chooses between all the heightmaps available for that class and type. If it is at 50%, it will only choose among the first half of the heightmaps available for that class and type. So you may find that just downloading the heightmaps module is enough, but if you're still having memory issues on gigantic galaxies, try turning down the Planet Surface variety.
