A game that looks exactly like what you've been waiting for since MoO2. Sadly first impressions don't always hold up.
A private industry fills your space with automatic freighters and passenger ships that trade their cargo and make a profit without your interference, while your empire taxes their operations. It all comes together seamlessly, forming something that should be a great experience, never before seen in any strategy game. But sadly it just doesn't deliver.
It doesn't deliver for many different reasons. First of all, making such an epic game in real time actually makes it a lot slower. Turn based games essentially hold still until you decide to pass the time, but that's exactly what makes the dull time where you just have to wait for something to be finished pass real fast. You simply "turn,turn,turn" your way to the exciting part. But in games such as this, you actually have to wait 'till the good parts come. If you want to build a new mine on a distant planet you have to wait for that construction ship to refuel, than wait for it to make it's way there, wait the x minutes for the mine to be built and then wait again for the ship to return to the nearest refueling point before you can build something else. Refueling a fleet of warships can actually take several minutes and you haven't even given them an attack order yet.
The other thing is the resources. There are literally dozens of different raw materials that you can mine from planets. Building any ship or base requires a certain mix of these things depending on your designs. This sounds good in theory, but the problem is that you never seem to lack anything. There was never a time when I ran out of Gold, Steel, or even Caslon fuel. A great aspect of any strategy game is the competition for resources. Imagine if in Starcraft you would always have enough Minerals and Gas for everything. The game probably wouldn't be so popular right now.
I simply am not under any pressure for conquest. There is no actual reason to invade enemy space besides wanting something interesting to happen already.
The game boasts a wide range of automation options, which do come in handy, as in the later stages there really are too many things to do on your own, but I could never strike a good balance and it was always either like doing taxes or watching the ceiling having nothing to do.
Controls are often difficult to get your head around. Fleets seem to have no inclination whatsoever to stay together, and sometimes not all of the ships react to a command.
The cashflow is too complex for a mere human to understand as you simply don't have the amount of money that it says you do. I have no idea what determines your income and how.
The game has received numerous patches since it's release and I'm still holding up hope for it, but I'm afraid it would take more than some fixes to hammer out the gameplay issues that plague it.
This game could well be a milestone in grand strategy games, but the many small nuisances and bad design choices accumulate into a real hurdle.