The 1.3 builds of Galactic Civilizations II will be in beta for longer than some of the previous versions. It's not so much that we think it's buggy but the fact that we don't want to do a 1.3, 1.31, 1.32, 1.33 and so on. Plus, if there ARE bugs in these builds, we can say "Well it's a beta". After all, weaseling is what sets us apart from the animals...well...you know..except the weasel.
The 1.3 builds are designed to extend the playable lifespan of the game. To eliminate annoyances and pet peeves that players might have that would eventually turn them off. That includes things like UI annoyances being eliminated based on player feedback, amping up the computer AI further, and adding more difficulty levels so that players can fine-tune things.
If I were a better game designer, I'd just have the difficulty levels be a slider with a 1 to 100. Dark Avatar will have that (ironically the original OS/2 version of GalCiv back in 1993 had this but what did I know then?). But for 1.3, we added 3 more difficulty levels and just generally cleaned up that area.
Below is the change log of BETA 1 of 1.3. It will be available via Stardock Central tomorrow or Friday unless there's some disaster.
It should be fine to run. Most of the embedded spyware, hard drive formatting, and other malicious code that all our software includes has been reduced by over 14%. Just ignore the hard drive crunching... 
+ fixed first turn after load zero production behavior!
+ AI better at managing colonies
+ More difficulty levels: Dunce at the lower end, Godlike and Ultimate at the higher end.
+ AI intelligence levels above and below "Intelligent" adjusted in difficulty (so i.e. Normal will be tougher than it was because there's a new easier difficulty level and Incredible will be easier because there's two higher difficulty levels).
+ The overall difficulty levels have now bee tweaked to have a 1 to 1 relationshipo with the AI intelligence levels so "Challenging" means all AI intelligences set to "Bright" rather than a weighted overall value. Many higher level players would find that they set the difficultly level to Crippling only to find that 2 or 3 of the players would be set to "Fool" (and do very little) while the others played very well.
+ Difficulty setup screen tweaked to work better.
+ changed size of TriStrontium so that it's bigger than TriStrontium2; previously the definitions were identical.
+ fixed error in translation code for raceconfig (homeworld)
+ fixed error in translation code for UP issues.
+ fixed bug that reset the cheater's flag, allowing cheater games to be submitted normally.
+ fixed some exploits in raceconfigs for metaverse games
+ fixed missing image in Rename Ship dialog
+ fixed error in AbilitiesBonus.xml file that didn't show 20% bonus to Loyalty
+ reduced the Custom Race's default value of Loyalty to 15% so that it would not cause negative ability points
+ added code to clear the planet/shiplist between games so that it wouldn't keep old pointers (should prevent a memory leak and potential crashes due to bad pointers)
+ made it so that you can select a race by clicking on its icon on the Foreign Treaties screen
+ made it so that the seleted planet or ship in the planet/ship list is saved so that changing the sort variable or filters will still keep the selection.
+ added code to let you right click on a tech to bring up the tech description dialog when the tech tree window is maximized
+ fixed error where fleets of ships could still attack freighters protected by galactic privateer
+ Reversed direction of the moon revolution (yes, Earth's moon now rotates around the Earth the right way)
+ added a check in the Direct 3D code for vertex and pixel shader versions
+ added code to make foreign policy window try to select a non-dead civ
+ made sure that the civ manager only has to parse the entry definitions once
+ made planet screens refresh after removing or adding troops
+ fixed numerous typos and spelling errors in various files
+ changed it so that the difficulty on the OpponentWnd slider changes all of the selected races' intelligences
+ changed it so that when you enable a race, it automatically sets its intelligence to be at the level of the difficulty
+ Fixed bug where lines on Treaties screen would point off-screen if you were a custom race playing against 10 enemies
+ D and T buttons will now toggle the details and rally point screens on/off instead of queuing up multiple instances of them
+ Kills some battle related processes as soon as they are finished so they don’t stay in memory when no longer needed
+ When running in full screen mode (Release build), the mouse will be clipped to the game window to prevent accidentally clicking outside of the window. You can still use ALT+TAB to activate other windows.
+ added function IsProtectedMiniFreighter to check for valid target
+ added code to clear selected rallypoint from minimap to prevent crashing when the rallypoint is deleted
+ added code to clear rallypoint destination when rallypoint is destroyed
+ Added a debug assert if the required technology for a ship type is not found
+ Fixed bug where ships on auto-explore that were put in a planet would immediately start auto-exploring once launched from the planet
+ Fixed a graphical bug where if you had 1 ship with moves and it attacked a planet with a fleet manager, the fleet would remain on top of the planet if the attacking ship was killed.
+ fixed memory leak caused by too many references to ship design listbox entries
+ fixed possible crash when saving std::strings in save game
+ cleaned up code in PropertyBucket class to make it more efficient.
+ Fixed a crash in the scene graph
+ Added ref counts to scene nodes in battle processes to prevent “random battle crashes”
+ Kills some battle related processes as soon as they are finished so they don’t stay in memory when no longer needed