Disclaimer: I played the game for about 30h now, but I did not play the original games. It's a nice game so far, which reminds me of lots of fun hours with FreeCiv and Ascendancy. I especially like that can win through either of combat, research, economy or diplomacy. This seems to be well balanced. The only exception is the diplomacy condition, which requires you to gather 2/3 of the votes in the galactic council. However, why would any of the other players vote for you, since it would mean he lost the game? E.g. I tried to force an AI player to vote for me by offering him a peace contract, while having my fleets at his borders.. I had 5 times the military power, still the player voted for himself. The only way to win this is by having 2/3 of the galactic population? What you should know before buying this game is that, sadly, it feels like a early Alpha-Version. I don't know why other people review (not just on GOG) this as an extraordinary polished game. The game is playable and fun, but there are lots of minor bugs. The most serious issue I found so far is that savegames do not work (sometimes?) when the tutorial is played. I was able to save once, but when I tried a second time the button was simply disabled. I have reported all of the about 20 issues I found with the in-game bug reporter. Most of them are UI glitches like the wrong research shown in the research results screen, not sorting planets correctly in the empire view, etc. There was a patch released on 1. Septemper, which fixes some more serious sounding issues I thankfully did not encounter so far. At least they are working on it :)
