I really enjoyed the long-term story that this game has potential for. Upon starting, I was recommended by the game for spending more money on some DLC to complete a specific story with Machine pops I was interested in that had custom civ skins, ships, and events. I felt like this was a little pay-to-play right out the gate, but I had tried a free weekend of several months ago and felt I owed a little more now for the sneak peak then. I had the idea to RP the Machine content by consulting and making decisions with an AI irl. It was funny to see it make decisions that it couldn't look up online. AI and I got had lots of fun, and the strategy was assimilate first, build infrastructure later, so I focused a conquest victory. The civ simulation is great, with lots of different resources to manage with different benefits. Problem solving resource drops and maintaining awareness of how much scaling up affects the resource income was fun. However, there are a lot of UI quality of life stats that would have helped, like having a cumulative negative warning when building. I would scale up or upgrade, and I needed to keep track outside of the game how many new resources the buildings/upgrades were going to use against my resource income after they were built so I didn't have a steep drop in production seemingly out of nowhere, when it was a bunch of new buildings/upgrades that I queued up a half-hour before. Or, the building would have an estimate of resource production income from the building being at maximum functioning levels. But the buildings did not have a current functioning level production amount, showing more resources in the estimate than pops were working and producing. As you scale up, you have to guess where income or dips in resources are coming from. Starship fleets had their own resource draw, but you have to guess how much each fleet is using if you need to scale down to save energy. The starship battles are no strategy, just who has the bigger power number and newest tech. You can prep for invasions with positioning, but you have no control of the fleets once the battle starts and the AI just runs at each other. I think not having controllable action is a huge waste of potential, as just adding the battle strategy aspect would have been such a long-term, replay-ability sticking point. But, the civ management and resource strategy are fun for a 1 time go for 180 hours in my first campaign. As AI and I completed the game, I scaled up to maximum resources, populations, fleets, planets, and anything else I could max out. The different planets had building slots, I built the building slots, cycled through each planet, and min/maxed each planet's starting buffs or filled a resource need. This became a repetitive cycle, as the planet menu had basic upgrade icons if a planet was ready to build, but only for certain upgrades and omitting others. I ended up just hitting the cycle next button 140 times and eyeing each planet over and over for what is needed to be built. The fleet weight capped at 9999, with a small ship counting as 5 weight and the largest ship I could build end game with my 1 DLC at 15 weight. The game's engine could not calculate all of the pops, fleets, and ship movements at more than normal speed, so the end game was really slow after I assimilated all of the organic/machine factions. I just waited for my game to end, and it was pleasantly satisfactory. I had a total map conquer victory screen first, prior to my final win, and then my special extra-funded DLC ending victory screen (the same victory screen with some extra wording). You get a score for winning, and you can click continue to keep playing. However, I broke the reality of the game's engine with my second ending and you can see in my screenshots the game let me break it so badly that the resources and menus went blank. If you like civ and resource management AND space science fiction, then this is really fun. It is not a warhammer-like with battle control, and the DLC seems a little greedy.
