Sorry about that, it's been a really hectic week for me. At first I was sick, then I've just been really busy, and this has been sitting on my list of things to look at.
DrFranknfurter: a lot of what you're talking about are things we are very consciously trying to avoid. Whether or not we actually do, we'll see.
But one thing to remember is that we don't really have "quests" in the same sense that Drox does. We do have tons of contracts, which in many ways are like quests, but most of them are always available (or contextually available for a very long time, anyway). So if you don't decide to bomb some planet, or you do decide to gift them an outpost or smuggle stuff for them or whatever, you can do that more or less whenever. There's not a timer ticking away on those contracts, but choosing one over another is where the strategy comes in.
There are other things that are more time-limited of course, and these we call Events. They are often things that you may not care to do anything about at all. Burlusts suffering from a disease? You may be super happy about this! It may be the answer to your prayers. Or you might just be indifferent. Or you might want to help them as quickly as you are able. It depends on your future plans for dealing with them, and if you are trying to manipulate them into doing something specific that will be helped or hindered by the disease, etc.
Same sort of deal if the Andors are celebrating their Freedom Day holiday -- crime is going down on their planet, and you may be happy about this or you might intentionally be trying to push crime up for some reason with them (there are various reasons you might do that). So the event does matter, but it again is not something you have to deal with right away. Just because their holiday lasts for 10 months or so (not all that long in game-time, that's a bit over 3 minutes), that doesn't mean you actually have to deal with it in that timeframe. In fact, quite often with something like that in particular, it's something you might want to hang back and see the results of, then later decide how to deal with the aftermath. Maybe pushing them into a cesspit of crime isn't the way after all, or maybe you redouble your efforts, or whatever else.
Beyond that, the alien races themselves are taking actions, and may be initiating war, retraining soldiers into doctors to fight off a disease, researching technology, breeding like crazy, researching new ship technology, fighting an internal war, or doing whatever else. These are things that happen in realtime, sure, and you can't deal with everything at once. But you also don't really have to. The key stats that matter for your actual victory condition don't go up or down without your direct actions. (That said, if you do nothing or do the wrong thing, conditions can deteriorate to the point that you die or get in a bad way, even though your technical progress towards victory did not go backwards at all).
Overall there are three main groups of things to pay attention to: racial actions, events, and the status of specific planets. It doesn't take long to digest this information, and each can be concisely displayed on its own screen to show you all the actions on one screen, all the events on another, and all the planetary statuses on another. And I do also plan on working in as many overlays as possible to make the use of subscreens less of a requirement as well. Of course if you WANT to delve into more details, we have those, too. A lot of that UI design is still very much in progress, but the underlying gameplay is something we're specifically designing with the idea of having a comprehensible UI for it. If the underlying game isn't compatible with a GUI that easily summarizes, then you just plain are going to have a complex UI, period.
Put another way, I think the comparison to Drox is apt in that there is more going on than you can deal with at any one time. That's also true of SimCity, usually. But we are taking a lot of steps to make sure it's understandable to players, and that there isn't a sense of rush. AND that there is a sense of progression.
When you first start the game, there's only one planet/race doing anything at all. A second planet becomes spacefaring pretty soon after. Depending on your difficulty level, there are no events at all right at first, but there then becomes one event at a time one two planets are online. And then every 2 planets after that until you have 4 events max at one time in the late game. Plus obviously 8 races each with two actions, rather than just a couple of races with two actions. But by then you are more in control of the situation, and you ought to have a federation progressing such that you really only have to pay close attention to the actions of the non-federation races. Of course if you want to make things crazier earlier you can smuggle spacefaring tech to planets early (and this is a valid tactic for advanced play in particular), or you can use the Advanced Start to set up more complex starting scenarios in general if you're to that level of play.
With TLF more than any other game prior to it, one of the things we have been really paying attention to design-wise is not only how complex/fun the game is, but also how to gradually ease the player into that, and how to make it fun right from the start even when the complexity isn't huge yet.
Hope that sets your mind at ease some!
