Opt in 2.72

I don't recall seeing one posted here, but there was one posted on the GC3 Discord server.

According to a steam post (link):

Gameplay
+ AI now will adjust how big its fleets need to be based on the assignment of the fleet. Thus, scouts and survey ships don't need escorts while mega fleets now need larger fleets.
+ AI smarter at picking quality ship designs.
+ AI much better at going after key technologies based on the conditions of the game
+ Streamlined the base game tech tree.
+ Tweaked the AI fleet governor to use defenders.
+ Adjusted the culture tree to be more in line with the planetary improvements
+ Set default colony ship population to 1.0
+ Minimum population for colony ships increased from 0.5 to 1.
+ Decreased the spacing between civilization starting positions and pirates
+ Base game laser weapon now comes with Militarization tech.
+ Nerfed several of the crazy DLC 7 rewards
+ Navigation Center is now a Galactic Wonder
+ Eliminated ship moves going up based on the level of certain planetary improvements
+ Galactic Navigation Center global moves decreased from 3 to 1 (yeeesh!) ...and it now longer provides an additional 0.5 points per level! (double yeesh!)
+ Galactic Navigator's Guild benefit reduced from providing 4 moves per turn to 1!...and it no longer provides an additional 0.5 points per level in moves!

Crusade
+ Galactic Mainframe research bonus increased from 0.3 to 0.5
+ Starport level benefit increased from 0.5 to 1
+ Synthetic Race population increase Promethion cost reduced from 10 to 1
+ Synthetic Race population increase Duranitum cost reduced from 5 to 1
+ Synthetic Race population increase improvement increases by 0.5 instead of 1

Anyone else experiencing severe performance issues with this? Mostly upon saving/loading.

I have not noticed any differences.  You might want to supply your machine specs to see if anything sticks out.

I have, but I also have a lot running in the background.. though GC3 normally only uses between 4-6 gig of ram. I'm on an 8 core 16GB ram rig with a GFX 960

Saving gets sluggish and will sometimes cause UI issues with the ship/planet panel oh so slowly rendering. And they may have nerfed DLC 7 but yet again they have NOT nerfed the original text to match.

Perhaps I should point out that I might not be seeing any slowdown because I'm only playing on a large galaxy, and am saving/loading from an SSD.

That's possible, I like the really big maps. But may also have something to do with the amount of modded files too. Use GRM and GIM plus a few of my own fixed items.

So looking over a lot of the changes (being a programmer has its perks and so does git)

One of the big ones I see is the Fusion Plant cost tripled. Not sure they will be worth it anymore except for the hub bonus... but even that isn't much considering...

Oh, my machine is old enough that it's right about ready to blow up (hell, the game doesn't even allow me to play the largest due to lack of memory). I opted out of the beta and now the load times are the same as before, hopefully the release version doesn't have this issue.

On another note, what are these "DLC 7 rewards"?

DLC 7 is Lost Treasues which includes a number of precusor items

Looks like an update today.