I always try to give my impressions of a game so that if the developers do read the forums they just might get some feed back.

Disclaimer: This is MY opinion only. I'm not interested in how much of a fanboi you are or how much this game sucks. I am trying to give a frank post on MY impressions. Thess are based off my first few days. Which means i have Not by any strech of the imagination discovered or know everything about the game. Now that that unpleasantness is over lets get started.

I like the interface and while there is a learning curve to remembering where everthing is and exactly where i can do x. It is for the most part intuitive and provides massive amounts of info on various aspects of your empire. The ships models are nice and the customability is great.

The stars and planets also look great. The actual blow up of the planet and tiles are bland not ugly.

The ethical choices are limited in imagination. For example good - leave pre-industrial peoples alone (Very star trek) neutral - gather them up and move them to free up land. Evil - inslave them. What about an option to educate them and welcome them into the galatic community in a generation or two? Point is the ethical choices lack imagination and got repetative just after two games.

The map is so small so as to make speed and range techs less valuable. 18x18 isn't large enough. What the maps need is more SPACE keep the same numer of systems and anomilies and resources but make the maps 36x36 or 72x72. Make it feel Like the galaxy is a large place. I am really disapointed at how quickly you can reach a point where the whole map is in range. This lack of scale is a killer for me. I quickly see myself putting this game on the self and not revisiting it because of the small map. I understand the need for limiting the number of elements on the maps to speed the game but i'm not asking for anything more that more empty space!!! Whats a major disapointment for me is that you can't even MOD a larger map. And it appears that I can't mod the speed and range of ships to give the illussion of a larger map. This could be a game breaker for me.

Techs come way too fast for me even on very slow BUT its moddable and thats what I have done making them 6 times more expensive. The principle behind this is to create era's in the game. Right now by the time you actually build a ship its obsolete. What i want is the feeling that my tech advancements actually are major. With them happening so quickly they feel insignificant. The fact I can mod this has at least provided me with some hope.

All in all the game looks great and has some nice dynamics to it but is a major disapointment in that the devs have no concept of delayed gratification everything in this game is Instant gratification based. Small maps huge ranges in proportion to the maps super fast speeds in relationship to the map super fast tech advancement. its like this game was designed for a crack addict.

The whole concept of different map sizes and tech advancement rates are so people can choose the type of game they want. Right now the game has varrious versions of FAST and small. There is no slow and LARGE option. And the danger to catoring to the instant gratification crowd is that the game lacks legs. I think there is a reason why i've only just found this game and only because I play Europa Universalis by paradox and they do some kind of third party support for this game. The reason I see is that because everything happens so fast and then people lose intrest except a small core of players. Once people have moved on with games you no longer get word of mouth advertising.

This game has so much going for it that it is a MAJOR disapointment that I am looking elsewhere now for a game that is similar but will give me a sense of a large galaxy.