This game has some of the most intense "Just one more turn" hypnotism I've ever encountered.
That being said it has major issues
Whoever allowed a full decade to pass without the ability to select multiple fleets and merge them, or even tell them to go to the same system, will not see the pearly gates.
More pressingly, combat is tedious. Units are clunky, both in movement and in size, even my longest ranged weapons can't actually reach beyond - max - a two ship deep line. Which makes trying to bring superior numbers to bare an excercise in frustration, and superior numbers are kind of the only deciding factor of a fight. Maybe I'm dogwater at ship design, but no designs I made mattered compared to simply having more mass in the fight compared to the enemy.
This is exascerbated by auto resolve trying to forcefully paint the back of your throat white at every possible opportunity. It will tell you that you have an overwhleming advantage, you press auto resolve, your entire fleet disappears, and they don't lose a single fighter. You play the fight, press "do what you want" and proceed to not lose a single ship. You press auto resolve, win, but it randomly decides that all your utility ships just completely explode. Want to bring an interdictor ship? Get used to playing worhtless fights! Want to not have to press a button to refuel, and just put your supply ships in your fleet? They have declared their belief in the protections of YWWH, and has charged forth ahead of the entire fleet (Despite being godlessly slow) to try to save the soul of the heretic saracens. At least that's auto resolves interpretation of events. Also fleets that have no weapons can fight, pressing auto resolve will result in your fleet, no matter the numbers, completely exploding. So enjoy loading in to press retreat on your twenty stack of troop transports that ran into a single scout accidentally.
The infrastructure behind everything is... really basic? You have three real planet classes, Earth-like, which makes your food, your fleets, your research, your rare materials, your baby blanket, your wife, your happiness, and your liberty. Aquatic, which contributes sometimes to research, and everything else, which exist to make materials and hold territory.
The discrepancy in utiltiy is strange, but not enjoyment breaking. The real oddity, is that all buildings are abstracted to a certain type. like there's just factories, There's just farms. There's just research centres. You're never building a wiblywobbly TARDIS factory that increases planetary output by 9 kilobillion percent, you're just making more factories. This makes the colony management pretty effective, as long as you make a few factories for it so it can actually build things in an appreciable time, but it also means like, there's not really an economy to manage.
That combined with diplomacy being... not really worth talking about, Puts this game in a strange state, where there is clearly indepth systems, I didn't talk about the way research happened but it's honestly a really interesting take on it, and while I talked about ship design, it unquestionably has a very complex system behind it. But like, they're both on top of such simplistic bases that their complexity is completely washed out.
I should stop writing this review before I convince myself to unrec it.
