After playing the gmae for few days on a larger mapssay 3 starts about 9 players FFA. I found the game has a major design problem. This problem is in fleet support and the number of Cap ships being tie into research.

Take this scenario Player 1 was doing really well he had more resource and is bit futher in tech tree. As player 1 expands toward player 2 and 3 they decided to work together to stop player1's advance. With players 2 and 3 combine fleet support 4000 and 32 cap ship against player1 16 cap ships 2000 fleet support you start to have an issue here where player one get attacked even just on 2 planets his fleet would have to split to meet the full force of player 2 and 3. This soon turns the tide on player1 and there is not much he can do about it except get help from possibly player 4. This game design eliminated any posiblity of 1 VS 2 unless plyaer 2 and 3 is retarded. Controlling more planets needs to give bonus to number of cap ships and fleet support other wise expanding a large empire to quickly just a big fat meat waiting to be eaten by others. It becomes harder and harder as the size of the map and number of players increase.

As we all can see this game is more RTS then 4X you really don't want to tie ship cap into research. IF you want to do it right atleast give players the ability to set ship cap for each map. Take SUPCOM for example you can build as much as you have material for and players can set a unit cap for each map. I wouldn't mind if you tie number of fleet you can create into reaserch but unit cap into research is not the way to go. This has been a big turn off for some of us that wants a larger map on grand scale but your game design simply isn't in the interest of large scale. There should be no limit on number of ship you can build but there can be limit on number of fleet you can create. Very interesting game perhaps needed more beta testing before release.