Ok...I have had a read though this a couple of times. I think it is an incredibly interesting rule set and I am looking forward to seeing how a game plays out and giving it a try myself. It does indeed have incredibly strong board game vibe to it.
Things that I really like / especially stood out to me:
-Starting map exploration and the scanning of tiles and picking of claims.
-Different colony types for different play-styles/variety
-Building adjacency bonuses.
-The hacker array sound incredible. Deliberate planned manipulation of the player economy? Awesome.
-Takeovers of other players
A few questions:
-I am not sure I understand the difference between claims and tiles. Am I over-thinking this and a claim is just a player owned tile or is it something different (a group of tiles of specific size perhaps?)
-I read that the adjacency of your claim to other tiles impacts the shipment of your goods, does the elevation of the terrain do the same or is that just a factor for the certain types of production?
-When you talk about a colony stretching across multiple tiles do you mean the initial colony takes over space and the other tiles are used as more storage or do you mean the colony just expands (as in you build your other buildings) from that initial tile.
- I am (maybe?) gathering there is something of a 'race' at the start to found a colony? Obviously you don't want to spend a crazy amount without building while still revealing enough of the map to find a suitable spot to put your claim. Is that a fair assessment?
- With shipping do we have control over the rail layout or is is something that generates automatically according to tile layout? Are the three methods of shipping different in terms of the speed to get resources to their destination? (I am assuming a blimp will take longer than a train).
Apologies for the somewhat rambling reply. Can't wait to see more.