My apologies, I should have been a bit more specific about the shielded warships, beams, and bombs...
Gameplay-wise, beams don't go through shields anymore, due to the 'no pierce shields' flag. The GTVA modified their bombs to do very high shield damage (through a strong electromagnetic pulse and a far more strrongly ionized wave of plasma), and as such, can take down a shield quadrant on a destroyer with ease, and still do significant damage to the hull. This was largely done as a return to FS1-style gameplay - back when bombers were the main source of anti-warship firepower.
This means that being close to an armed, exploding bomb is a really bad idea - and to make bomb interception still work, their warheads only arm once they get within a hundred meters of the target. Shockwave size has gone down too.
Beams don't work very well on Shivan warships, because of their shields. They aren't particularly strong, but they do recharge very quickly. This is done to avoid a slow grind to attrition against an enemy shield, while Shivan beams tear apart GTVA vessels.
Another cool addition is the EMP missile, reconfigured to be a heavy anti-shield missile, in much the same fashion as a heavy bomb (without the nuclear fusion or antimatter warhead). This weapon gives virtually any fighter the ability to take down Shivan shields - so in this regard, the Shivans are still just as sensitive to surgical disarmament strikes. This also means that warship-to-warship combat is still viable, though dependent on fighters keeping Shivan shields down. Even better, just about any fighter can carry the EMP missiles.
The Shivans are also intricately familiar with shielded warships - and they have fighter weaponry built to counter it as well. This is quite useful - as stated above, the player does get to fly the Shivans' own technology against them.
However, I'm still undecided about fighter beams piercing shields. Presently, the only truly shield-piercing weapon is a Shivan FTL railgun. No-shield-penetrating fighterbeams means that warships can't slowly win via attrition once bombers get within range.
Plot-wise, there's a pretty cool piece of technology the Shivans use for transit, outside of the conventional bounds of subspace nodes:
A subspace gate, capable of establishing an artificial, temporary link to another gate, or to an endpoint of a jump node, or even to a selected point out in empty space. They have one of these in Capella. Technology derived from Ancient Knossos portals. (It's a Shivan reskin.)
Oh...and there will be cutscenes. And a teaser trailer coming out sometime, maybe in the next few days. :drevil: