Simply not very good. I've played many strategy games and this is amoung my least favorite.
everything from Moral balacing to effectiveness of certain armies needs to be relooked that.
then there is the merchant issue- they are useless, I have never been able to use the merchant market- it seems that your merchants are the first to be cast out, often even if I send 5 at once, i will only get 1 or 2nd teir and i'll be removed from market before i get my next merchant- utterly useless and horrible micromanagement (there is fun micromanagement and then there is just tedious nonsense, sending a new merchant out every few seconds is boring as hell and needs to be automated plus the entire market needs to be rebalaced so the player stands a chance to get in and hold it atleast for a few year streach, plus makets that belong to you should give you a bonus in ablity to work in them- they are your markets after all)
then there is the general micromanagment in the game. Its not as bad in quantity as most strategy games like civilization, but most strategy games give you good city, colony interfaces to manage your empire. There is next to none here, so its a real pain to scroll around to various terretories to build stuff on them when in most games its simply done off a sub-screen.
all in all, it just fails to amuse. Some people obviously like it and its not a terrible game, but its certainly not a "good" one.