we are mostly not talking about new features, we are talking about tweaks based both on Steve's thoughts and experiences over these years of playing Aurora.
This is cool and all, but all the new 'features' there might possibly be aren't particularly interesting compared to the massive, exponential, groundbreaking improvement of the game actually being playable past 80~or so years with multiple species.
If you look at something like Steve's own Nato vs Soviets campaign, from back in 2010, it took him 6 real-life months to play through about 10 years of game-time. Sure, some of that will have been 'playing' the game, but the reality of VB8 aurora is that 90%+ of the time is spent not being able to interact with the game, not being able to look at your fleet list or your science officer stats or your mineral income, because the game is processing turns and locks you out.
I think that's probably why Steve writes those fiction/AARs. . . he needs *something* to do while he waits for the game to iterate through those interminable 5-second steps and endless interupts
I don't mean to disparage the work put in to working out the details of ground combat and what have you, but at this stage the game is *great*, feature-wise. Space combat is excellent. Exploration is interesting and rewarding. Spreading in to the galaxy is an adventure. The game has tons of modifiers to tweak the difficulty and challenge to your liking, and near infinite ways to play. New features now going to tweak that experience, making it more realistic here and there, giving you more control over certain aspects, letting you play as 'cool space empire X' in just the way you imagined, compared to having to role-play some aspects differently.
But all that really doesn't mean a whole lot if every minute of game-time takes 5 minutes of real-time, when the game is supposed to span years.