I played on normal strategic difficulty, normal combat difficulty, version 8.56. Here's a short list of what I felt about the game.
-harassed the Acutians to a ridiculous degree
-mostly befriend and get influence for the burlusts and evucks
-burlusts declare war against lots of people but I've killed the leaders so many times by now I can just buy them off whenever I feel like it
-system-wide war against the acutians for several years, and they somehow don't manage to win
-andors get spacefaring last
-wait what the andors just waged a bloodthirsty genocidal war on the acutians. They're completely wiped out and the andors take their planet.
-looots of waiting
-start the federation, recruit everyone but the thoraxians and burlusts with credits, essentially.
-convince the burlusts by killing the leaders lots of times so I have enough leverage to convince them to join
-everyone declares war on the thoraxians but they can't do much until I assassinate the hive queen. Then they're wiped out.
-the end
-Music is good. Definitely.
-Graphics are excellent.
-Combat feels too easy; you can just kite everything and not be hit. This is especially notable in the burlust leader duels; you can kill them all right from the start with minimal trouble and get essentially infinite leverage.
-Gaining credits/influence/leverage/voting proxies is too easy, with no risk for a huge reward. Bribes seem almost inconsequential; as you can get an effectively infinite amount of influence by doing dispatches for months and months.
-What are raw resources even for? I had tons of them in the endgame but I never really figured out what they were useful for.
-Many options feel like they just don't do anything. It feels like the options that have the most effect have the least effort needed to do (such as assassinating the Thoraxian hive queen), and the options that need lots of effort (anything involving combat) really don't do much.
-Very few events - It just felt like nothing actually happened for long time. I could just park myself on a planet and help build ships continuously without anything really going on.
-I feel that too much time is just spent waiting for things to happen.
Now, don't get me wrong, I definitely had fun playing the game, but several parts of it just felt too easy, time-consuming, and inconsequential.
