TherilAlPenn

So far, it seems to me like culture never goes over 50 (in the statistics shown after a game), even if you cover the whole galaxy.

I noticed this too. In my end game statistics, it showed my culture hit and stayed at 50, even though the whole galaxy was my color and I had multiple broadcast centers at every colonizable planet except the pirate base and the last enemy asteroid colony, and had all culture related techs researched.

but I now find myself going straight to the empire control panel on the left I find that panel to be almost totally useless in its current state for controlling my empire once I have more than about 10 planets or so, which is where a little help starts getting useful. It takes too long to click every planet to see which one it is, and expanding one of them takes up about half my vertical screen real estate if it has any decent amount of things in it, so

Actually, I like having the pirates to slow down colonization a bit in the beginning, especially for the more valuable planets (terran planets seem to have really big pirate fleets). Makes you somewhat safe for a bit from the rush and makes cranking out colonizers to just grab everything in sight not viable.

Hmm, there should be a little white plus sign on the ship's icon and around its mesh view should have a big glowy white particle effect. I've seen a big glowy white particle effect when it levels up, but it only lasts a few seconds, and so that doesn't help if I'm managing things in another system (darn CPUs won't just take turns fighting me ). Haven't noticed a

I'm going to ramble a bit about the production/economic aspects, since that seems to be what takes most of my concentration, and not in a good way. Also, I hate making comparisons to other games, but I will anyway. Blair asked specifically to post my opinion on this, since I guess you guys disagree about it a lot... Now, a lot of this could be alleviated by some UI improvements, which I don't think we're supposed to provide feedback on yet, so I'll shove those comments to the bottom.