FTL advanced edition has been coming "soon" for a while now, but the wait isn't making the details about it any less enticing. There's a new alien race called the Lanius to look out for (and potentially recruit crew members from), a new ship, new layouts for the classic spacecraft, new drones and refinements to gameplay.
Obviously the Lanius are the biggest addition but along with their ship, individually they're quite unique. They have the unfortunate (or fortunate if they're a boarding party) effect of sapping oxygen from a room and don't require it to survive. Send them over to the O2 room on an enemy ship and have them punch that thing to death and watch how quickly the rest of your enemies follow suit.
The new drones sound quite interesting too, with a shield drone that generates a super shield for your ship, an anti-combat drone that shoots down approaching enemy drones (replacing that function in the anti-missile drone) and an ion intruder drone, which gatecrashes the enemy ship and starts firing off ion blasts at random rooms.
In terms of gameplay tweaks, doors and sensors will be mannable to increase effectiveness, giving your entire crew something to do when maxed out and you can rename themmid-game; perhaps to reflect some brave deed they accomplished.
The best part about the whole thing though? It's going to be free for anyone that owns the original on Windows, Mac and/or Linux.
No word yet on a release date, but it's coming in early 2014.