Just finished my first game with all 8 races alive and in the federation, and had quite a bit of fun doing it. I feel the combat mechanics are pretty solid overall, the strategy portion has a few rough spots but the dynamic between races and making the federation all felt pretty good to me. Really other than some balance and UI tweaks everything feels pretty good.
Most of the factions felt decent to work with, but there were a few bits that kind of stood out. For the Burlusts in particular, the dueling for influence/leverage is nice, but I feel the duel itself could use some combat tweaks. Notably the projectile speed of their attack is actually slower than their ship, which means you can simply fly in a straight line with engine ~6 or so and never have to do anything else. I think just speeding up that main projectile so the player has to weave a little might be enough; on hard mode the speed boost probably makes the fight interesting but I haven't gotten around to trying it yet.
On another note of dueling, the fact it's instantly repeatable means you can farm influence/leverage up incredibly fast in actual game time with them. I don't think the reward per victory needs changed much as it would probably just result in a longer farm period, but perhaps just a small timer before you can duel again, or perhaps a diminished reward on repeated dueling (the new warlord hasn't really gotten to establish himself after all); kind of like Evuchs have increased costs if you repeatedly meddle that decays over time.
Bribe items also feel pretty weak overall. Needing 10*100% bribe items to swap a single Evuch to a complete random type for example, or the 100 leverage with Burlust when you can get ~800 from a duel. I don't think it's particularly important for the gameplay for bribe items to be better, but I think it's something that might be worth tweaking.
I also feel the ending could've had a little more to it - maybe some pretty graphs or statistics (ships destroyed, pilots rescued, that kind of stuff), everyone loves numbers. Overall though I really enjoyed my run and will definitely be giving it more playtime, probably on a higher difficulty next time.
