not a fan. the interface is clumsy (seems like its setup for a console!). tutorial gets in the way of information and you cant move it! the 'quest' objectives are pathetic.. honestly not sure what they are trying to achieve with this game.. the constant zooming in on the planets seems like 'show boating' rather than anything useful.. and the tech tree is pathetic.. they've spread colonisation tech of the various planet types all over the place in illogical trees, just so you have to research that tree.. then you have this completely artifical 'resource' the "emperors will"... it's just another gate to prevent you from doing things too quickly and probably something you have research or collect.. no idea yet as they dont explain it!

and the way they've chosen to do 'fleet management' and how to send the ship on the hyperlane.. honestly couldnt get more moronic. once again it appears to be very 'console centric'... then when you 'explore' a curosity it spawns a ship to send something back to your planet.. but it goes through open space and not via the hyperlanes.. then once you colonise one planet in a system you can NOT use a colony ship to colonise another planet in the same system!! why!?! this is utter stupidity.. you should have a choice between using a ship or colonising via the other planet.. I then built ERP&EW and had a 'loyal' empire but it did NOT apply the science bonus (nor the dust bonus) to any planet!! I later found out that when tech that applies empire wide or new infrastructure is built you 'sometimes' have to reload the game in order for the effects to apply!!!! all of this just shows how pathetic these devs are.. no consistency.. and no intelligence whatsoever..

and all this within an hours worth of play, in 'tutorial' mode.. I'd refund if I hadnt bought it over a year ago!!

the battle 'animation' is interesting the first few times.. but just becomes boring.. maybe later when you actually have 'huge' fleet battles ir might be a little more interesing.. but then how long would it take to load!?! with just a few ships it sometimes takes over a minute to load the battle.. and the last time the game hung while 'loading' the battle.. but the worst part is that I installed torpedos and beam weapons but the battle animation shows projectiles! just more of an indication that these devs are USELESS!

I 'ran' into some pirates and their ships were named 'sneaky pirates'.. for some reason (no doubt a bug).. my ships started being named 'ferocious pirates' after that..where it was originally called 'patriots navy'.. but its the combat that is utter stupidity itself! their idea of 'tactics' is selecting a card to apply to the impending battle. I couldnt see a way to reform the fleet into the different 'lanes'.. or tell one to stay at long range while the others with short range weapons should charge in.. nothing to control the battle whatsoever! and of course they dont explain anything!!! but all this is just further reinforcement of these clueless devs

then you have the 'common' infrastructure which 'applies' across all planets in the system, which makes NO sense whatsoever.. the 'economy' infrastructure that you can build is utter rubbish. you have infrastructure that you can only build once in the empire but it only affects the system its built in! there are just too many issues with the tech trees, the bulding, the exploring, the combat! nothing in this game is any good.

the final straw was when a quest popped to colonise a planet before anyone else.. I had a system one 'hop' away, built a colony ship in 1 turn, sent it and by the time I arrived in two turns the quest completed claiming it had already been colonised.. with the hover over stating 'this will become another empires colony in one tunr'! so they resort to cheating to complete tasks/'quests' as well.. this game is not worth playing

honestly... this is a REALLY poorly designed game and certainly not fun. not even worth buying for a few bucks

FINAL REVIEW: I CAN NOT RECOMMEND THIS GAME NOW. A 9 YEAR OLD LATE GAME BREAKING BUG LOOP IS UNACCEPTABLE. It's a bait-and-switch tactic to get your money and then, since you've sunk hours up to that point, you can't complete a run or get money back. PLUS the apparent data harvesting on the Corporate end marks this company as another BS scammer. See that 29hrs? That's how long you can maybe stretch gameplay before the game breaks irrevocably. I'm tired of spending hours of my time fixing broken products from scummy corporations. Avoid this company at all cost. Just Google "End Turn" when you look up the game. Now ignore the weirdly corporate-fanboys that will insist that it's "just the way things are now" and that "Companies just DO that".

EDIT: Jeebus. Ok, so there is a LATE game breaking bug that's been around for almost a decade since launch, where your Turn just will not end. Took me over an hour to troubleshoot every solution from the multitudes of threads regarding this bug. Finally figured it out. Insane. So my review is dependent on how lucky you feel:
Will this game breaking bug scrap your 200-300+ turn campaign or will you manage to fix it after an hour or so of screwing around to fix a decade-old bug?
EDIT 2: This exact bug resurfaced 30 turns later, only this time nothing is working to skip past it.


Really digging the first steps into the game. As a Civ fan, this is basically a reskin of that series- right down to the color-schemes of instlations (pink for culture/approval, blue for science, red for military, gold for economy etc).
There are some gorgeous landscape animations when setting on planet types and I really love the emersion of the quests and goals needed to hit.
Love the marriage of production trends directly affecting the governance of your factions. That really takes it a hair above Civ in that regard.
Much like Stellaris, I feel like I would really enjoy a Star Trek overhaul mod...but the workshop mods seem to have stalled and become stagnant for this game, which is a shame. Many of them haven't been updated im a number of years.

Sweeping graphics, strange alien cultures and deadly battles that rage across the galaxy and the faces of many planets in the galaxy-damn fine piece of work all around. Love it, going to go play now....