Update on this one after 8 hours or so:
The game is quite fun, but it's well hidden under a pretty terrible UI. So many little things could make it flow, but aren't there - leaving it as kind of a confusing mess. One of the big problems is scale - everything is at semi realistic proportions, which means to do anything near a planet, like select ships or whatnot, you need to zoom waaaaay in. Then to move them anywhere you need to zoom waaaaaaaay out and scroll around, and then zoom waaaaay in on the destination system so you can see the planet you want to send your ships to.
It seems trivial but makes playing it frustrating. The worst example of this is probably colonising new planets - if you send a few scouts out on explore, it populates your list of planets as they explore them, but if you want to pick one to colonise, the planet list screen has no indication of how close the planet is to you, what direction it is in, or whether it's surrounded by an army of alien drones or whatnot - you can double click on it for info, but that gives you a tight zoom of the planet, which also doesn't help with either of those things - and also doesn't tell you how many 'slots' are available for building on that planet - the most important information you need to know about it ! ;p
It's also pretty hard to work out what's going on, and what you should be doing at times. Some more useful prompts like 'alien drones blew up your colony ship' would help a lot.
On the upside - the shipbuilding combined with the fleet command interface is great fun. You can build up specialised ships, like one that has huge ammo stores and shuttles that carry missiles/ammo to other ships in your fleet, and specify it to hang back in the fleet design - you can set up a bunch of cap ships in the middle with anti missile/ecm escorts and swarms of fighters out to either side with orders to swing in and attack from behind. It's really fun watching it play out the orders and tactics in real time.
Spies are entertaining though, high level seem pretty overpowered, the 'shitty at spying' trait ( honest I think ? ) should be worth -8 points not -2 ;p I made the Kulrathi (shitty at spying) my bitch last game, all their planets were on like a 200 turn production shutdown from constant sabotage and I stole all their money and tech. The free spy levels from running roughshod all over them gave me a bunch of super spies that were very effective against everyone else too.
The races and race attributes are nicely mixed - the way the ship designer works means they end up with quite different ships as well ( you start with a hull that has a certain number of slots in different locations, and they are of a specific type, i.e. (I)nside, (O)outside, I/O, (E)ngine etc - with specific modules only going in the right type of slot. The race leaders have quite different personalities and the visuals of the ships are different enough, with a common racial theme, that you can easily identify race and keep track of which side is which in mass engagements.
Overall I think it could be a really good game given a lot of UI improvement - it's fairly close to release though so it's possible that won't improve much, and it will end up very niche.
