Played the new version all weekend. The logistics system feels like it still needs a bit of balancing here and there, but I enjoy it for the most part. As you start getting more and bigger ships you need to start thinking of battles in a cost to reward sense. Is it worth deploying your battleship to fight these pirates knowing it'll be unavailable for a while afterwards? Will the loot from this battle be enough to cover the supply cost from deploying these ships?
Meanwhile the new encounter system is a source of endless frustration for me. With the right skills or upgrades I can make my fleet significantly faster than everything else on the map, but yet I can't force an engagement with a significantly slower fleet or even prevent them from immediately disengaging and running away. Instead I need to constantly fight pursuit battles for the off chance that my ships can make up the distance on the battle maps or harry them and chase them for several minutes until their CR reaches minimum and my ships can catch them in battle. Not to mention the annoying tendency for some AI fleets to force a second round of combat only to never deploy any ships. When this happens you've got two choices, you can deploy single ships and harry them after the battle, thereby burning insane amounts of CR from your ships until they decide to disengage at which point you need to burn even more CR to pursue them. Alternatively you can choose to disengage and forfeit ALL of the loot from any previous fights because some asshat freighter captain decides he wants a piece of you but then doesn't deploy.
Hyperspace looks pretty enough, the new system is nice, but the new faction doesn't really DO anything. All I've seen them do is float around the station there.
The Tech skill tree still seems hilarously overpowered. Ordnance points, fleet speed and a bunch of other great bonuses plus most of the hull mods. I ended up dumping almost all my points into tech with a few in leadership to increase logistics capacity.
The new fighter changes are interesting. I like that fighter wings don't just evaporate now provided there's a carrier in the fleet, a large carrier group can prove to be a real pain in the ass in battle as you send some fast attack craft to try and find the carrier and take it out before the waves of fighters and bombers nibble you to death.
Boarding seems to be pointless at the moment. Marines cost their weight in gold to maintain, the chance of a boardable ship after a combat is incredibly low (I've seen 3 so far in about 40 hours) and there's a good chance that the ship won't be salvageable. Meanwhile you can still buy pretty much any ship you could ever want and since supplies are incredibly expensive now you can amass huge amounts of cash by slapping a freighter into your fleet and hauling supplies to stations after battle.
Overall I like the new version's improvements, but it's still not quite there for me. As you'd expect there's a lack of endgame and now with the encounter mechanics it becomes a chore trying to fight anything smaller than defence fleets when you've got anything resembling a strong fleet. I'll give it a few weeks and see what mods take my interest, then probably shelve it a few months for the next version.