Overall, incredibly good, especially for a developer's first game. Starts out with Earth geopolitics, expands into space, ends with total domination of the solar system.

The seven different factions each have different endgame goals, although there's a fair bit of overlap between some of them, such that their gameplay is similar and they can get along to some degree. I've only played the Resistance so far, and I've got 200+ hours in the game now. It's deep, and it's fun.

There's still some rough edges, like the battle formations system being a bit crap (please, let us preview and edit formations), and the semi-monthly "assign councillors" phase can get a bit tedious by endgame when you're waiting months for ships to travel around the solar system.

The endgame also lasts a bit too long, and could be sped up if the aliens would work harder to defend their colonies. Without going into spoilers, one of the Resistance endgame goals involves reducing the alien presence in the solar system down below a critical threshold, and in my game, the aliens made that difficult by being cowards. Whenever they saw one of my doom fleets coming towards one of their colonies, instead of choosing to stay and fight and go down with their space station -- which would have probably done some damage to my fleet -- they conveniently decided to pick that exact moment to go strike at my nearest colony instead (and thus not be there when I arrived). The gesture was pretty futile and just served to slow down the game.

That said, it's still in Early Access and is receiving regular updates. I really want to dive back in immediately, but I'm resolved to wait until the next major update before I go again -- just because I want to see more of what's to come, rather than burning out on the current build.

Overall, incredibly good, especially for a developer's first game. Starts out with Earth geopolitics, expands into space, ends with total domination of the solar system. The seven different factions each have different endgame goals, although there's a fair bit of overlap between some of them, such that their gameplay is similar and they can get along to some degree. I've only played the Resistance so far, and I've got 200+ hours in the game now. It's deep, and it's fun. There's still some rough edges, like the battle formations system being a bit crap (please, let us preview and edit formations), and the semi-monthly "assign councillors" phase can get a bit tedious by endgame when you're waiting months for ships to travel around the solar system. The endgame also lasts a bit too long, and could be sped up if the aliens would work harder to defend their colonies. Without going into spoilers, one of the Resistance endgame goals involves reducing the alien presence in the solar system down below a critical threshold, and in my game, the aliens made that difficult by being cowards. Whenever they saw one of my doom fleets coming towards one of their colonies, instead of choosing to stay and fight and go down with their space station -- which would have probably done some damage to my fleet -- they [b]conveniently[/b] decided to pick that exact moment to go strike at [b]my[/b] nearest colony instead (and thus not be there when I arrived). The gesture was pretty futile and just served to slow down the game. That said, it's still in Early Access and is receiving regular updates. I really want to dive back in immediately, but I'm resolved to wait until the next major update before I go again -- just because I want to see more of what's to come, rather than burning out on the current build.