My First Fours Hours of SOSE

What I liked:

Large zoom range gave a real feeling of being in control of a huge solar empire!
Exploration is well done - ships charging before jump, gravity wells, asteroids and planets, relics to be found.
The interface is very intuitive. Mainly mouse driven and very simple to understand.
The trade system is great, i especially liked the little freighters moving around of their own accord.
Marauders ensured that the game did not get dull without becoming repetitive and annoying.
The graphics really are top.

What I didn't like:

Combat is not nearly as visceral as it should be. There is no need to zoom into see any of the ship models at all. Even then, The icons come in too soon after zooming out slighty and quite often obscure the action. And I would have liked to see some scope for manuvering and targeting, especially with the larger ships and structures.
The research tree contained alot of un-nessasary items which I played the whole game without researching. Additionally, the research screen could use some improvement as i often couldn't find what I needed, even if I had found it once before! The icons are too small and the layout is cramped.
Yes, marauders make sure game ain't dull, but where are they coming from?? Endless streams of them seemingly from nowhere...

Flame on. =P