First a confession: I downloaded this game three weeks ago.  For free.  A week and a half of it was fun enough that I plumped the $59.95 even though I'm not getting anything "extra" (the Metaverse doesn't really excite me).  It's a great game, so I figure the torrent was just a really, really big demo .  I'm happy to pay for it.

So I've played through two full games now, one on a small map and one on medium.  The small one was against "Beginner" NPCs and I was Terran.  It was pretty easy, but fun, and I never ever got into a fight in a culture win.

The medium map I just finished in TA, Terran against 4 "Normal" NPCs and the Lantzlandians.  Again the CPU didn't put up much of a challenge.  I threw out a ton of colony ships early and stayed on morale/economics research until all the planets were settled.  Every other race except the Thalans ended up with three planets, the Thalans with 8 or 9, and me with about the same. The Thalans started in the middle and had the entire SE corner to themselves, except that I did manage to settle one 14 planet way down almost in the corner.  I never got so much as a bad look from any of the other races, even when I set up influence starbases beside the Thalan planets -- I ended up taking over 6 or 7 total planets and a ton of mines and never went under "Friendly" with the Thalans.  Is this a human thing?  I went quite high on diplomacy research skills so was it even possible to annoy them short of blowing them up?

Speaking of which, I blew up the Lantzlanians because I didn't want to get through two full games without shooting something.  I took two Large size destroyers and found that the combat was a bit weird.  I clicked to attack and got the usual 4X pew pew pew and units losing HP and dying, but at one point in the fight I got an EXCITING NEW screen that simulated the battle.  This was kewl and fun, and I'm hoping someone can tell me why I didn't get this every time.  My two destroyers were joined in a fleet vs. a stack of about a dozen LL 8hp ships, so it was a slaughter but it was a lot of clicking to attack over and over and over -- I wanted simulated carnage and destruction!

Got two events near the end -- had spies enter every one of my planets, which was highly annoying.  Then Dread Lords showed up and took over some planet, so luckily I'd researched up into invasion a bit for the LL.  I put everything into researching all the way up invasion and cranked out a couple landers.  Arrived at the planet to find they'd only built a scout and a transport of their own, blew them up, threw tides down and a billion pixels gave their lives so I could have a level 39 Heavy Gravity planet.  I went out of war mode and threw everything into Heavy Gravity Colonization but by the time I was up and running, I got the "You win in 10 turns" cultural message as all the races had been pushed back into little bubbles around their homeworlds from my influency onslaught.

Again, was the ease of this game because of the humans?  The diplomacy thing seems like a huge deal, because the garrisons I put on all my planets after colonizing was over just seemed like a waste as nobody even looked funny at me. 

Also cash was a huge problem.  I was clearly doing something wrong (! ) because at the end I was bleeding 500-700bc a turn -- granted this was with spies everywhere!  I did have a ton of research down everywhere and I was up to Invention Matrix and Manufacturing Centre, so those were costing a doinkton of dosh.  I was also wasting too much cash supporting my old garrison ships -- I probably should have just decommissioned them all.  I had one "cash planet", with lots of stock markets and Economic Capital, and then Earth was making me ~150 a turn, but it seemed nowhere near enough.  I survived to the end only because there was an economic boom event for like 3-4 months giving everyone a ton of cash, and then when the Dread Lords showed up I traded a ton of crap techs to the other races if they still had money, getting a pile of loot.  Maybe I did everything wrong and would have died horribly if this boom hadn't showed up .

Well, happy to hear any comments.  Sure would be nice as well if there was a way to go and review a game afterwards, like some log... is there any way to get the game to save one, or do you need to take notes (I won't ).