Ladies and gentlemen, here are the planned round 20 setup details:

- Galaxies are buddy packs of 2x2 or 1x3 as a base, allocation of paid and free planets allocated randomly on top of that
- Clusters get -2 defence eta advantage
- Clusters get -1 attack eta advantage
- Alliances are a maximum size of 60 members up to tick 168 (1 week in), then they're allowed to accept up to 10 members that are below half their alliance's average value
- All planets count towards the alliance limit
- Alliance rankings is now in terms of value. The alliance ranking page and alliance dumps will be updated to reflect this.
- JGPs can be launched if you have a free fleet without having to actually launch it at the target first (they will still work on planets that a fleet is traveling to)
- Commas are stripped from the production, mining and alliance fund page, so data can be pasted in from other areas of the game

- Significant portions of the code have been rewritten to allow faster and more reliable operation. This includes:
-- Ticker streamlining
-- Admin tools simplification and recoding
-- Increased configuration options
-- Removal of code duplication to reduce the chance of future bugs when adding new features

- The skinning system has been rewritten to allow much more flexible skin designs

- The differences between paid and free accounts have changed dramatically. Paid accounts will have benefits including:
-- Greater choice of skins, (free accounts will only get a core set of 3-4)
-- Engineering/journal/history pages
-- All information on the universe misc page
-- Ability to change fleet names
-- Ability to see outgoing fleets on galaxy status
-- No annoying ad banner
-- Ability to be in a buddy pack
-- A full tech tree - free accounts will be limited in some areas such as the covert operations and scan tree (but NOT the traveltime tree).

More changes will be announced before signups open early next year. Round 20 will last for 7 weeks with 1 hour ticks, and hopefully commence on Friday, 19th January.
The changes announced here are only the currently planned changes, and are in no way final.