This game is absolutely beautiful. My only gripe has nothing to do with the games design at all I ordered it used and received it in a scratched up broken jewel case I would really have liked to have the box art and booklets and whatnot but these are small complaints.
The gameplay itself is a truly sublime experience I started out on a small little planet in a little solar system against one easy opponent. With some tweaking of the camera controls they became quite intuitive. One of the first things I noticed is that you can zoom way in and look at all the little bits of your star fleet and watch space cars zip around your planet. I spent about 20 minutes just drinking in the beauty of my own planet. That's really an intoxicating thought isn't it?
Anyhow I began building a fleet to go get me some other planets. Before I could finish I was attacked by space pirates!!! How cool is that? They just jumped out of cyberspace or hyperdrive or whatever and started blowing up my shiny little ships. It was like that one scene in serenity... "Target The Reavers! " Is what I seem to remember shouting.
Dealt with that and noticed that the pirates are activated by a sort of blind auction anyone can bid for the pirates to attack any other player and whoever has the highest bounty when the reavers get in a pillaging mood gets some of their crews flayed. So I just started paying crazies to do the man work and got to work developing my planet.
That was really cool you can do things like build bigger cities to get more people who can pay more taxes very exciting. This allowed me to develop a massive star fleet with giant expensive capital ships and teeny tiny space fighters to ride in them like battlestars!! And I took over my solar system wiped the bad guys off of every world spinning with a series of nuclear holocaust type attacks from the big guns. That was so awesome I decided to keep playing alone in a lonely star system filled with people in the same grey uniforms which was soul crushing.... buy it now! Spring for a new one!