Good solid strategy, much improved from original release.
Pros: The graphics are stunning for this kind of game and the strategy challenging. You have to make sure you place defensive fleets in all your system to protect yourself from surprise attacks from things like pirates, specters and other civilizations. Still, no matter what you do, you should be prepared to lose a system or two to rogue attacks from enemies you're not technologically able to defend against. Hey, that's life in the universe. The positive side of that is colonies are extremely easy to reestablish.
I thought the research trees were fairly easy to follow and made sense within the context of the game. Ship customization is a snap as is ship construction. The other races look amazing and the ship styles imaginative and distinctly different. Unlike some of the reviews, I found the interface fairly easy to use, perhaps the result of all the patching that was done.
Cons: Like they say, nothing is perfect and this game is no exception. The big baddie is that the game occasionally crashed. The screen would go totally black or white and I had to use the task manager to get out of it. This MIGHT be a graphics card issue. Luckily for me a friend of mine tests computer graphics cards for ATI/AMD so I brought the issue to his attention to evaluate. The saving grace is that you can pick up where you left off by pressing the "continue" button.
Then there were the little things. Often, after you've completed researching something, those techs showed as not researched even though you had now had access to them. When you test fire a weapon, you also have an option to fire missiles at yourself to check your armor. I did this but was then surprised to find out (in the middle of combat) that my armor damaged during testing was still damaged. Kinda assumed that it would have been automatically repaired. Also the little chart that compares one weapons system to another really isn't clear, although I am beginning to figure it out. One thing that really bugs me is, often, when you have ships defending a system that is attacked and you are zoomed in for battle, you find out your big guns are on the OTHER side of the system making it impossible for them to reach the enemy to protect your planets or stations from destruction. There should be some way to place ships exactly where you want them to be. If there is, I haven't discovered it yet.
Despite these bugs, on the whole, it's a decent game that I hope keeps getting improved. If they can manage to do that, it will be a great game.