An excellent game with a lot of depth.

I agree with the people who describe it as a single-player version of Eve online. You can do any of the following activities:

1) Fly a fighter pilot around shooting pirates to earn commission from your police license (bonus $$ if the abandon ship and you can claim it and sell it)

2) Fly a cargo ship around -- buy low, sell high. Maybe you'll have a good route set up where you take energy cells from a solar plant to a bio-gas plant, trade bo-gas to a bofu farm, trade bofu to a crystal factory, and then take the crystals to a solar power plant. But hope you weren't going to use that route again because now the bio-gas plant has plenty of energy cells and temporarily ran out of bo-gas to sell.

3) Fly a transport ship around, look for missions from passengers willing to pay $$$$$ for you to take them somewhere else

4) Collect enough money to build your own stations, such as perhaps a silicon mine on that asteroid you found

5) Shoot smaller asteroids with a mining laser and scoop them up

6) Why not all of the above at once? Get a fleet of ships, set up a satellite network, and command them remotely.

7) Become a pirate -- terrorise the cargo ships, seize their cargo, force the pilot to eject, capture him too, and sell him as a slave at a pirate base

8) Oh, and there's a series of plot missions as well


I do need to give a warning: With this many different things to do, there's a learning curve. And a long setup time before you can do the major empire-building complex thing. And a need/desire for quite a bit of reference material. This game came from an era when gamers were expected to read the manual, and in this case the manual is hefty (61 pages in the PDF version -- and still lacking information about complex construction, Sector/Universe traders, ...) I'm willing to do that for a game with this much depth and variety but not everyone is.