So far so good in an overall sense. I'm learning more about the solar map things, but some things remain extremely unclear.
Probably the biggest problem with the solar map stuff is that 95% of the time, the "friendly actions" options are JUST "stop pirates" and such. There's pretty much never any others, so you only really have hostile actions, and whatever political stuff is available to you.... can definitely make things tough when you're trying to help out as opposed to attack someone.
Also the Burlusts could do with more, well, STUFF in their political menus.... that one I went into detail on mantis.
And the combat, while good, is an explosion of balance issues.... alot to work out here. Allies rarely accomplish anything, enemies manage to wreck allies but then are amazingly stupid about attacking the player (often leading to the easily crushed "clump of failure"), enemy ships should probably have longer attack ranges overall (more stuff to dodge!), abilities are too weak, though a couple are too powerful (afterburner, cloak). Player weapons also are mostly underwhelming.... I've mentioned the minigun before, which I still dont like much, but then I got the mass driver, and.... ahhh, I only used it once, wont do THAT again. It'd take forever to do much with that thing.
As a whole though the fights remain entertaining though some of them take a bit too long, mostly due to the underpowered weapons/abilities. Current playthrough being done in Hard mode, I've yet to come anywhere near dying, though that doesnt really say too much. I'll up it to the next one with the next playthrough.
Combat system overall is fun though.
There's also a good number of exploits that can be easily done on the solar map, but I'll go into that in detail later.