My first impressions are quite good. The game is fun, graphics and sound are good (except the 12 year old girl voice of the Advent) but the Empire tree isn't quite as intuitive as you guys made it sound. Figuring out what should/shouldn't be pinned is quite a pain, all the various unit options don't seemt to do anything (I wish there were more auto expanding options instead, like "only expand the grav well you are in").

Also Fleet tactics seem more trouble than they are worth if you have any interest in micro. When more units start autofollowing them around and they drag units from gravwells I wanted them to stay in and any sense of order feels lost.

And after playing for most of the afternoon/evening I can really see the need some of those Gamma people mentioned for buy/sell resources and some form of bounty monitoring on the main screen. I find myself opening those screens at least a dozen times a minute.

I am not as big a fan of siege/colonizing units as I was expecting. Both are nearly useless in battle and must be babysitted constantly, and since they both are only used on planets (and one after another) it feels like a one unit split into two.

There are very few bugs, most of my problems seem to be just due to hard to understand systems than errors. But my Vulkoras keeps dropping Siege turrets too far from attackable targets, and they just sit there doing nothing. Maybe 1/3 will be dropped close enough to a planet to work.

I have a few questions about systems that are confusing me too. My asteroids, even when fully infrastructured, still look barren. Shouldn't there be some little buildings or something to show a colony is there?

It is very hard to keep track of upgrades and research queued up too. Say I want to build a ship, well that needs a new ressearch, which needs a new lab, which needs a planet upgrade first. I tend to have a half dozen things in queue at once and can never tell which is up next/ how many are left (which just makes me add more onto the end until the queue gets ridiculously sized). With all the buttons for us to track things it seems like there should be a way to see our research queues.

Also are resource asteroids considered planets or structures? Becasue I can't seem to get my ships to attack them. Even when the well is empty of all enemy fighters and buildings my ships just sit there and ignore the enemy controlled resource asteroids.

And while everything runs super smooth on highest settings on my 8600gt any AA settings are giving me some stray white pixels around objects. Luckily I can run it on a high enough res to tun AA off, but still kind of irksome.

So good work overall. I'm highly critical of games, and most of these are minor gripes (just snags that kept hanging me up on more than one occasion so far). Perhpas the Empire Tree will grow on me, but I might have to just turn most of it off until a better guide is put up.