The game is basically split in two major parts that feel like totally different games in a way: - Earth - Space The Earth part has quite a boardgaming feel to it. The 14 day intervals for your concelours have a seriously round based feel, but the combat action for ground armys is pausable real time. It is a bit tedious to watch the time tick by, if you just want the next round of actions for your agents. The game mechanics are heavily RNG based, but it is manageable. Take opportunities when they arise. If the RNG tells you the chance is 1%, thats not a sign to try it 100 times. It is a sign to look elsewhere for the moment and return when prepared. This boardgamy base feels a bit like some risk or EU4, a lot of knobs to turn. And build the foundation for part two of the game, space. The space part is, where the developers obviously spent a ton of love. Newtonian mechanics for space flight, proper transfer orbits, lagrange points, good delta V mechanics. The tech tree also has a massive amount of small improvments to drive technologies and all popular hard sci fi drive techs included. Space combat is also pretty newtonian, weird but good. This mix has a few down sides. The tech tree is one. The low end drives make no real sense for the earth game mechanics. You basically need something to build a warship to challenge the alien invaders. And slow ion or chemical rockets just don't cut it there. So why have a dozend such technologies in the tech tree? You can develop a technology to deploy new bases/platforms in space. But you can already do that before, with the boost based earth mechanics, and by the time you get the tech, you have so much boost, that it doesn't matter anymore. This feels like it would need some balance pass. Earth based boost is too powerful and does not really fit in with the built ships thing. Let me build probes to send out, instead of just using boost to send them.
