Planetary Ascension Tiers have been added to the game.Leaders now cost Unity to hire rather than Energy, and have Unity upkeep.Since Factions are no longer producing Influence, a small amount of Influence is now generated by your fleet, based on Power Projection - a comparison of your fleet size and Empire Sprawl.Most Megastructures now cost Unity rather than Influence, with the exception of any related to travel (such as Gateways) or that provide living space (such as Habitats and Ring Worlds).Known Issue: Unity costs for Faction Manipulation are not yet functioning. Suppressing or Promoting factions no longer costs Influence.Abandoning colonies still costs Influence. Resettling pops that previously cost Influence now costs Unity.Several other systems that used to cost Influence are now paid in Unity.Or charge them, other than the actual sacrifices, so these two cancel each other out. Known Issue: Sacrifice Edicts do not show their up-front costs. Unity Ambitions and Campaigns now function like Toggled Edicts and last until cancelled with upkeep rather than costs.Each empire has an Edicts Fund which subsidizes Edict Upkeep, reducing the amount you have to pay each month to maintain them. Toggled Edicts will have monthly Unity Upkeep which is modified by Empire Sprawl. The Edicts Cap system has been removed.Penalties and sprawl generation values have been significantly modified.
While there are ways to reduce the Empire Sprawl generated by various sources, empires will no longer be able to completely mitigate sprawl penalties. All means of increasing Administrative Capacity have been removed.Currently some new localization strings are only in English and there's some placeholders but there's a lot of new features and reworks.
There's still plenty of work to be done to finish the update with it still in active development, however this is your time to get in early and see what's new and report any issues. A new opt-in Beta is available for the 3.3 Unity update.
Paradox Interactive are gearing up ready for the next major update to their space strategy game Stellaris.