Release notes:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Last_Federation_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_Version_.990Restart steam to force a quicker update if you like.
Almost there! Tomorrow is the big day.
Cool things in this one:
1. Races are better about defending their stuff in the solar map.
2. Dispatches can last longer (makes sense now that you can stop at any time, fine tune control the timing, etc).
3. Improved a number of things balance-wise with diplomatic options being too strong in the player's favor previously (exploits), or just things drifting frustratingly fast in some places.
4. Combat on lower difficulties was exploitable previously if you increased your weapon power, then kited enemies. Now the enemy ranges are almost always going to be as high as yours if not higher, and the increase/decrease to your firing range when you change power levels on weapons is negligible.
5. After combat, you now get a cool summary of what happened during the battle -- total kills enemy uses, damage and turns taken, and so on. Gives a much better sense of what actually happened during the battle -- for instance, in a lot of cases your allies are more effective than you might realize, simply because you are not paying attention. They and some enemy forces take each other out, but the enemy forces were more numerous. You look over and just see that your allies are dead and there are still enemies, and think the allies were useless. Etc. Now you can actually tell what happened, and if they were in fact useless (which is possible, depending on their tech levels versus the enemy tech levels) or just deceptively helpful.
Tomorrow is pretty much just final cleanup pre-1.0, plus the remainder of the achievements.
If anyone has any cleanup things that they think are particularly important, please post them in this thread to draw our attention to them. I'll also be doing a lot of final playtesting myself tomorrow, and making some more videos of that while I do so; those sorts of things seemed to have helped a lot in the past with AI War, and so I don't want to miss that opportunity. It's also a good chance to get double-bang from my time buck (so to speak), by both testing and recording at once.
Enjoy!