This game is an interesting take on the 4X genre, most notably in the research department, where all research is researched at once, with the possibility to focus on specific topics to make them go faster. Planets are different in the sense that they have a certain amount of building points, and a certain amount of max building type. Planets can be micromanaged, but has about 8 different kind of ambassador settings. Ships are modular and can be configured in a lot of ways. And it is the ships that has my biggest gripe, modular ships are fine, but the game wants you to edit a new ship instead of editing existing ships, the editor is not the greatest, categories are to few, ehre the "big" ones are: reactor, engine, shield, armor, weapon and miscellaneous. The last category could easily be divided into more categories, like the all important fuel tank. Ships require fuel, but there is no tanker ship blueprint as default, making one is not difficult but would be nice to have at the start, tanker ships require a special module to refuel ships in their group, but building several tanker ships will not share fuel amongst them self, leading you to have empty tankers unable to move and fuelled battle ships being able to move on sector. Ship battles are RTS style, and if you do not have fighters in your group, you will be destroyed. 2 pirate corvettes with 10 groups of fighters (standard pirate group) will take out a group of 10 corvettes without putting them selves in danger.
I backed this game on Kickstarter because it looked to be a fun game, I was wrong. Unfortunately it is boring, Boring with tedious intermissions and some combat. If you find slowpaced games with a lot of downtime doing not much except assigning officers to auto completing events on the ship, then this is the game for you. The game has too many tedious things to do: go to a planet, pick one of 3 options: go on an expedition, go on a mining expedition or use a drone to mine. The drone is automatic, the mining expedition is a avoidance minigame, and the regular expedition is a random chance with 3 options that appear to have the same chance of success and with no explanation of what the picks do. The ship combat is simple to the point of frustrating when you have more than one opponent. You must attack the opponent with 2 weapons on fixed cooldowns and you must avoid the enemies attack. To attack enemies you must choose a weapon colour that is different than the enemies shield in order to penetrate it. And to avoid enemies attack you must choose the same colour shield as the enemies shot to completely negate the damage, or use an avoid ability which makes your ship jump to a 45 degree angle and it then recenters before you can use you own attack, Shield and avoid are also on a cooldown, so with more than 2 opponents you can get royally screwed. Most of your modules on the ship use at least one of 5 ressources, and you must approach planets to mine them for these ressources in order to not loose functionallity of those systems. However you have a total max amount of ressources you can have at a time. And furthermore your ship has an actual city on its back which start with 10.000 population, this city has a lot of problems which must be handled by your crew, which means that there is an incident which require you to pick one of your crew to deal with it in order to stop it negative effect. I would like to write more, but I am out of characters
