Just want to give you guys some news that isn't really that spoilery and is way way too technical for the marketing team to care about.

AI

Technically speaking, FE: LH is probably the first multi-core AI.  But the GalCiv III AI is likely to be the first AI designed from scratch for multicore.  

What that means to you: I can run background simulations that last multiple turns.  I did this some in GalCiv II but late game, I had to disable them (I put in a setting in Twilight to allow people to set how much CPU to use for the AI which affected this).

Also, some AI calculations are going to be off-loaded onto your video card (just the hard number crunching stuff).

The reason for that is that unlike GalCiv II where the main evaluations only involved weapon types, GalCiv III has sublight speed, mass, rate of fire, weapons range, accuracy and evasion to deal with along with the roles of ships in a fleet.  So lots more number crunching than before but with DirectX 10/11 I can toss that onto the video card to deal with.

Steamworks

I don't plan to have the AI design ships in GalCiv III in the sense it did in GalCiv II.  I will give it a bit of a try but the ships have a lot more sophistication to them this time (very easy for a human but much harder for a computer, traveling salesmen problem here).  Instead, I am planning to have the AI look at every ship design any player has ever designed and do evaluation on that and pick from that.  So the better players get at designing ships, the better the AI will get.  While this might seem like "a lot" of ships, let's assume there are 15 million ship designs in the database.  I can narrow that down to a few hundred thousands for my purposes. That might seem like a lot but it is a lot fewer than the AI doing tons of permutations on the fly.

Right now, the above is theory as I haven't done this yet.  But in GalCiv II, I really only had to worry about weapons and defenses.  GalCiv III has more goodies you can put on a ship.

Multiplayer

We are not making any promises for MP to be "fun".  I am skeptical on whether 4X MP can be fun outside of very small galaxies. But the alpha will have multiplayer in it (it's not going to be a feature that comes late, it's already in now in our builds).   I do think that 2 vs. AI might be fun. It'll be interesting to see how this works out.