First off I would like to say that I have not read any of the forum posts yet, so my impressions of the game would solely be my own.

After dl'ing the game, I went through the first tutorial. It had most of the basics so I skipped the rest since I was eager to play the game. I set up the game with a medium size, on the middle AI setting. I also turned off the option where defeating an opponents last Capital Ship makes them lose the game.

I started out in the middle system of three. I was able to conquer all the planets in the system fairly easily. Having not gone through all the tutorials, I initially did not understand the role of broadcast centers, and seeing the travel lines start becoming one color or another was a little puzzling. I decided to try to conquer the system to the left of me first. I had a vastly superior fleet. But even after I had basically destroyed my opponents infrastructure in the whole system, it took nearly 6 hours to complete my take over of the system, because the broadcast lines took sooooo long to dissipate, even after all of the broadcast satellites were destroyed. Colony after colony reverted back to the enemy. Finally, I was able to gain a foothold, and start building my own broadcasters.

After securing the whole system, I brought my fleets to bear on the system to the right of where I started. Both of the AI's remaining there asked for an alliance. I thought this might end to game, but such was not the case. In the end it took me almost another 6 hours to completely wipe out and gain control of the system.

Pros
1. Beautiful game. The graphics are very nice, and zooming in close to watch the battles was great.
2. Interface. This was fairly intuitive and gave me the vast majority of the information I wanted.
3. Combat. Appears to be farily well balanced. Will be better I imagine, when playing against another human.

Cons
1. Lack of fleet formations. If there is an option to keep a fleet in a certain formation, I did not discover it, and the AI did not utilize it. It was very frustrating to watch a battle group become so strung out during multi-planet travel because they would not wait to all jump together. It was also unclear how one might assign a ship or squadron to guard another.

2. Lack of focus in battle. The default seems to divide a fleets firepower equally among all opponents. I won what should have been close battles by focusing my fleet manually on one ship at a time; which is, btw, the same default strategy the Gal Civ 2 AI has. The AI would be much tougher if it would only focus on one ship at a time. It would be great to be able to designate target priority, and give a move command while keeping a fleet in formation.

3. Difficult to select a specific ship. Even with the bar at the right, it was very difficult to pick out a specific ship. I believe this is because the icons representing the ships are much to similar.

4. Territory control. This was the most frustrating to me. The lines of control did not dissipate quickly enough. And even though I maxed out the broadcast stations in my starting system, they never made any inroads on the neighboring systems even after I had destroyed all of the broadcasters at each planet in the system I was invading. There has to be a better way of handling influence. It makes no sense for a culture with no planets left to have any influence remaining. Yet several times, both to the AI and myself, I saw empires reborn because they still had influence remaining on the jump lines.

5. Summary screens. I would like to see both fleet and planet summary screens. The planet screen should list each controlled planet, its current structures and upgrades, and have the ability to place new structures and order new upgrades if any are remaining. A fleet summary should list and various fleets you had in existence, be able to transfer ships from one fleet to another, designate the default fleet formation.

6. Winning conditions. There need to be more winning conditions, including one for research and one dealing with diplomacy.

Ok, there are some of my initial thoughts. I am sure many have already been discussed at length, but I thought it might be helpful to outline my experience after playing the game once through.

Overall, I really enjoy the potential of this game. However, in its current state it takes much to long to complete.

Vastenio