This game does fall into the trap other 4x strategy games do, but it's not bad. The most fun part of the game is probably from early until mid game, when you're out exploring, where decisions you make are meaningful, and skirmishes and wars are short and sweet. Also pet peeve on loading up the game and wasting unnecessary time for things to load before you can click single player, then continue.
Later on though, the game becomes like a work, except you don't get paid. I personally think it's a bad idea that every single planet can be colonized, even gas giants and asteroids can be turned into planets, and if you DON'T colonize everything in sight and try to play small (quality over quantity), you will absolutely fall behind and get crushed by the AI except on the easiest modes.
The micromanagement in this game is a bit of a chore and you really need to go through literally hundreds of planets to ensure things are building, your people aren't starving, and pollution isn't killing your planet. There isn't a good auto management system in this game, so I literally mean hundreds of wasted hours just click click click and doing no actual playing. Might as well go on my spreadsheet like I'm at a j*b. By the time you're ready to win, you realize wars are a chore at this point with how fortified everyone is and you just want to go to bed.
Some things that can be improved are the cost and maintenance of some buildings. For example, you have no time to build cloning centers early game when you actually need them and weather controller cost too much and has too high of a maintenance to be worth it - or worse, you end up demolishing them once your planet is near full. Any 4x game that has you demolish something you built is just bad design. Can be said the same about some ship building modules, especially the specials, where it takes up too much space for what it does. I mean, you literally get ONE SINGLE DRONE (despite description saying drones plural) for the automated repair unit, and space increases by percentage of the ship hull so it only gets worse. They need to put a cap on some of these space used increases, because despite there seemingly being countless choices, you end up using one or two same builds every game. My very first playthrough I figured out you might as well just spam missile and switch to energy weapons late game, just stack them and ignore everything else because of how much space even a displacement drive or a shield capacitor uses. Boring! Give me real choices instead of forcing me to min-max. But this is every 4x game and at least the micromanaging isn't quite as painful as Stellaris. A shame, because the races in this game are actually well fleshed out and would love to explore them more in a story mode. Devs for 4x games generally spend way too much on the formulas and science of how things work, but fails to invest in letting players explore the world they've built.
Lastly, the battles have potential, but you can't quite move the ships like you want them to, can't make them go in formation quite like you want them to, and not sure if it's a bug or what, but can't seem to adjust the range quite like you want to because the sliders go back to default or goes haywire. Battles are the only time when microing is fun, but you can't really do it effectively in this game. There also seems to be odd bugs here and there, such as your ship warping to an AI's military outpost and being unable to cross a way point that isn't occupied.
Anyway, I just want to find a good 4x game that keeps all the fun parts (the choices and dynamic rushes of early game), the endless picture book spreadsheet micromanagement to a minimum, and maybe even has a real, meaty, and interesting campaign mode, yk without being a real-time strategy game like Starcraft. I think this game will keep me busy for awhile while I multitask with other things in my life, but it has a lot of untapped potential, which will unfortunately likely remain so.
