1. How challenging is the AI? On the hardest setting, is it difficult to win or can you do the same strategy over and over again and just steamroll it? Is strategy necessary to be successful?

2. Concerning ship-design: Do you need to build different kinds of ships in order to win or do you just build your one or two best designs and spam them over the galaxy?

3. Is this a glitchy game? How is the support? And most important: Are there any community-updates/unofficial patches to fix the games´ remaining issues?

1. hard setting = you lose... normal setting will test you
strategy comes down to race, area and teams but in general you can follow a basic strategy for most the games
2. I tend to use my own ship designs to work with my strategy for the early-med game I have about 6 ship types but I don't push a battle... its mostly dip. explore and collect at that stage in my games
3. the game is solid, support isn't much but their is a lot of custom ship builds to try once you get the first few games finished and understand what you need... I recommend team play while you learn the ropes i.e, you + computer race A = team 1 against race B as team 2 and race C as team 3 etc

Unfortunately development studio that made the game has closed it doors/gone inactive:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/282590/discussions/1/517142253864833842/ So at best we're getting bug fixes made in developers spare time. Some of the developers also still frequents game's Steam forums.

Well, that sounds... bad... :-S I heard it is a realy good game. What a pity!

It's unfortunate, especially with so few similar games on GOG. It was a good game so it's a shame we won't be seeing a sequel. At least they did not go bankrupt and continued support as long as they could, with last patch released in february, this year.

Any hidden glitches left like stats that actually don´t do anything?

Someone with more recent experience should answer that (or you could browse the steam forum). Last I played was before release of the expansion and subsequent patches, sometimes last year. But unless expansion or more recent patches broke something I don't expect there to be major issues, at least I did not encounter anything major during my playthrus of the base game.

Base game and expansion will probably be discounted during the coming GOG Summer Sale so you probably should wait a bit anyway (base game has been previously sold at 75% off and expansion at 60% off previously so you should expect discounts to be at least that level so around 10€ for both).

Ok, I think i´ll give it a try when it´s discounted. Thanks for the tip. ;)