A big improvement over the usual "same old shit with a new coat of paint" which is often seen in 4X space games. Tech system is nothing special, but everything else is good. The best part is the core expand/exploit empire management, which manages to be engaging both in the early game with a dozen planets and in the late game with hundreds. Instead of micromanaging every office block, you focus on colonizing new planets and establishing interstellar trade networks to supply your planets with the resources they need to grow. There are still buildings, but all of the basic "+1 to X stat" buildings are made automatically based on the direction you have chosen for the planet. You are left to focus on the cool buildings like artificial moons, stargates, and giant orbital shipyards. Each race has a unique play style ranging from classic surface colonies to giant hive ships to living robots which are build, not bred. You can mix and match these races with different FTL techs such as the classic hyperdrive and stargate options. This provides an additional layer of replay-ability in addition to the randomly generated galaxies. The next best feature is the combat system, which is simple but engaging with giant fights to watch. You can build giant super-ships to solo entire fleets or deploy mega-carriers to ferry swarms of smaller ships into combat. Ship design is easy to learn and hard to master, with a variety of good designs available on the workshop if you prefer to skip straight to the action. Diplomacy is not the focus, but SR2 keeps it fun using a deceptively simple card system. It's a little different, but allows a wide variety of options without the risk of cheesy exploits or boring rep-farming. The modding system is incredibly flexible, and there are a number of quality mods. Almost everything is moddable, but the limited size of the community inhibits the full realization of this potential.
