Still needs 6-months to a year of development imo, but it's playable if you REALLY like the space 4x genre. Everyone else should just give it some time I think.
I would like some more backing up this statement. It's easy to just toss that out there, but why?
From playing about a week ago (unless he fixed ALL these issues in 1 patch, which I highly doubt)
1. Game still not working on multicore machines. So horrible framerates into the lategame...in a 4X. Not acceptable.
2. No graphical options whatsoever. Not even anti-anialising or any kind of options for people with better cards.
3. Tutorial system extremely inept. A couple small videos and then a bunch of text explanations for what you're supposed to do.
4. Random events that can end the game instantly for you, based on when you hit them (and how lucky you are).
5. Ship building feature is nice, but lacks any kind of streamlined process, so you'll spend hours making even basic designs for most of your ships. Some people might like this, I certainly don't.
6. Bombardment/Colonization feature is very whacky, needs a lot of work. It's about a 7-8 step process than should probably happen in 2 steps.
7. Research System is very vague. Doesn't tell you what you unlock or how it helps you. Isn't helpful at all about what you should research or when.
8. Individual planet economies are handled pretty, but the "global economy" feature is non-existent. For example, if you're maxed out on a certain resource (like agriculture or production), the game won't actually tell you that. You may just keep researching better agriculture or production buildings, and you would never know your citizens are becoming fat Americans.
9. Diplomacy system needs some work. Specifically you can't buy or sell planets/technologies for money. Also the "statistics" for every empire are very vague. All it tells you is how they "rank" compared to other empires. There is no way to see what technologies they've unlocked, or what their army consists of, etc.
10. As has been said, the AI isn't particularly bright.
It does have some things going for it. The combat system is neat, and could be really cool if you made some awesome ship designs, and the AI made some awesome ship designs, and then you had an all-out war. Unfortunately it would probably take...10 hours or more to get familiar enough with the game to do something like this, and from my experience, there's no guarantee the AI can keep up with you.
Also, the game on the 1x speed setting is PAINFULLY slow. PAINFULLY. Like it makes AI War on epic mode look fast. I usually keep it at 4x speed as a default, which is kind of annoying when battles start happening because then I have to slow down to 1x again...I don't know the whole thing is kind of clunky to me.
