I've started several games as different races to see how things looked.  I haven't seen any tiles too close to the poles, and the visual improvements are noticeable.

There are two things in the update that aren't mentioned in the Change Log.  They are mentioned in this post by Brad.

If you don't want to click on the link, they are:

• An Industrial Center is available to all races but Synthetic Life and those with the Zealots ability.
• All races start with a shipyard.

The shipyard change also applies to the pirates that exist at the start of the game.  Before this update there were always 1 or 2 pirate ships somewhere in the galaxy.  They weren't together if there were two.  I checked several immense galaxies with pirates set to abundant and always found 2 next to each other and next to a shipyard.  The pirates were not very close to the starting location for any of the races, but some location in the galaxy will have an early pirate problem.

What does this mean?

Its a time paradox thing.

More seriously, 'under the covers' we removed special code handling situations that never could happen. 

Updates 11/04/2019

• Reverted Earth to use previous textures.
• City lights on the dark side of some planets (e.g. earth) get will get to max bright brightness when the population is 15 (was 30).
• Jupiter has been told to "stay in its lane" and use its own gradient colors instead of Mars'
• Updated the Planet window so the Build Queue buttons don't break out of their frame in Normal UI scale.

I have a small request. Disable the ability of colony ships to keep an empire alive when an empire has no colonies. Its really annoying. You can't find colony ships as easily as colonized planets.

The only reason I think colony ships can do this is because it was needed to make the tutorials and campaigns to work. At least that is what I remember.

The AI changes in this should be pretty noticeable in their effect.