I'm a die-hard strategy game junky, and have been playing these games for decades, even before PCs had them (in the olden days you had to play them on mainframes). I have been tracking this particular game for about a year before it came out, and had extremely high hopes.

My problem with the game is the horrible gameplay mechanic, which I belive is a crappy synergy of a few bad balance decisions these guys made. It breaks the game, and makes it unplayable from any sort of enjoyability or fun standbpoint.

1) All you have to do to either win the game, or make it so unfun for your human opponents that they don't want to play anymore, is go straight for the siege frigate technology, then spam some planetary siege frigates and start going from planet to planet taking out the populations on those planets. This strategy can't really be stopped - EVEN WITH the newest patch which claimed to mitigate it to a certain degree. I just finished a game against the computer (set only on average difficulty). I purposefully went with the advent FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE of trying to stop this bullcrap strategy that I knew the computer would employ. My strategy was to use fighters against these siege frigates, so the first thing I did was bring in the carrier cap ship, and equip it with fighters, and also extra fighters for each group. Then, I researched the hanger tech as quickly as possible, and upgraded it so that each hanger would have additional fighters. After I took a few planets, I put down 3 hangers on two of my outlying systems where I knew attacking forces would have to come through. I filled the upgraded hangers with fighters, and also built a fleet to support my cap ship.

Bottom line, this strat failed at all to stop the "siege frigate" strategy. At all. In one instance, all the computer needed was 7 of these siege frigates to take out my planet's population (in the other instance, he sent 19, LOL). Even in the case of just 7 siege frigates, against 3 fully upgraded hangers stocked with fighters, AND ALSO the civilian bomb shelters I had built on the planet, he successfully removed the entire population, and then moved on. Someone might say "well you should have built more hangers." Well sure, my intention was to eventually max out hangers at as many planets as I could, however don't I also have a fleet to build? Don't I have other things to spend money on besides hangers? Also, do you think 6 or 7 hangers would have stopped the 19 ships the guy sent in the next attack?

Anyone can employ this bullcrap strategy (not just the computer). Are there defenses? Perhaps. But the defenses are so extreme as to make the game a crappy experience. For instance, you could build your own force of siege frigates and play "siege frigate tag" with your opponent, and forever be prepared to blow up his worlds too, complete with colony ships which then place your own colonies down as his are eliminated. You can then play "planetary musical chairs" with your opponent - keep blowing up each other's planets and switching colonies back and forth until one guy gets sick of it and quits.

You could try to build ships and defenses which counter his siege frigates, and hunt down all of his siege frigates, but it won't work (I tried - see above). He can take your planets out before you can take his ships out, and then he can run. Oh, you can chase him (and I did, through star system after star system after star system), but you won't catch him (or, if you did, you'd spend so much time chasing him around that you'd still lose because you'd be neglecting all the other aspects of the game).

2) The first problem might not be so bad if it weren't for this problem: You can't control or lock down phase lanes strategically, which is just plain weird considering that this is a strategy game, and it just seems obvious that a space strategy game should allow the strategic use of star systems and phase lanes (otherwise the only strategy you are employing is what sorts of ships to build and what sorts of techs to research).

At any rate, this severe game weakness combined with the first one just makes for an unplayable game condition from the way I look at it. Systems are undefendable, phase lanes and star systems are uncontrollable from a strategic standpoint, and the game is an endless game of "phase lane tag" at the very best.

What's weird is, the underlying game itself seems to be a great game. The engine handles a lot of micromanagement for you, the graphics are good, the concept of the game is great, on and on. Yet they made these totally BIZARRE choices on gameplay mechanics and balance, and there really is no excuse for it at all. Why make it so siege frigates can take down a planet so easily which even has defenses and a fleet in place? Why make it so the PJI sucks? The only guess I have is that the developers (who seem very capable and talented) strongly catered to the feedback of their beta tester audience, which I'm guessing represented a poor sample for what most strategy gamers want as far as gameplay mechanics in a game like this. Either that, or they just had bizzare ideas on their own for what constituted a good gameplay mechanic.

At any rate, this pretty much ends my participation in this game, and I won't be playing it anymore, or recommending it to anyone else, which is too bad, because like I said the game had serious potential, and the developers seem extremely competent in the work they did on the game from a technical standpoint. It's quite strange - the game has so much promise and potential. It was the "game that could have been"... but I suppose in the end, it sadly wasn't.