Here's the latest scoop on v1.15:
Added a new minister of ship naming. Players can use this guy to auto rename ships after retrofit. For example, if the ship "Tiger 0005" of the "Tiger" design is upgraded to a "Tiger II" design, it will be re-named "Tiger II 0005" etc.
Worked out a number of bugs in the new AI anger scheme. There's a SE5 bug with log dating that cuts off some combats in sequential turn games, so they are missed for anger items, but I'm hoping that will be fixed for the next SE5 patch.
I started to debug the AI's setup routine as I have suspected its had problems for some time. Uncovered a few issues! One of them was sometimes the AI would sometimes add a negative racial trait when they shouldn't have. Uncovered another SE5 bug where the starting tech levels of technologies were not being considered during the AI's starting tech selection, so they were wasting starting tech points on items they have by default. That needs a MM fix.
Still looking to tweak some racial trait costs as per recent discussions here. I did add back the extra facility space for "Advanced Storage Techniques" so you will gain 20% more facility space for 2000 racial trait points.
You can find out more v1.15 changes in this thread at SE.net:
http://home.spaceempires.net/ftopict-4254.html
Overall, there are a few big changes. The biggest one is that racial technology traits are available right from the start. A related change is that Organic and Crystalline only have their respective hull types available and not both their racial and normal hulls.
The new version should be posted with the next SE5 update.