I have played the game through many many times and I have a bit of feedback and see if others agree. Hopefully, the Devs will read these posts as well...

First off, the game is great overall, with 2 things that need to be looked at in my opinion:

1) Strategic resources are completely useless. It only took about 3 games for me to completely disable these. Maybe I'm missing something, but the investment required (in the form of CONSTANT constructor production) isn't even close to the payoff. Sure, I can build a cool manufacturing/research building, or I can get a slightly better gun/engine, but it's unsatisfying and seems useless. It also will make the AI spam starbases in my borders, which is just annoying. I notice zero difference when playing without the strategic resources, and seems like a feature that sounded great on the development board, but just fails to pan out.

On a side note, I know it's been discussed repeatedly, but the way starbase upgrades/constructors work really needs to be addressed. Even when I'm able to fit 3 module's on a constructor, I STILL have to dedicate a planet and a whole shipyard to do nothing but constructor spam THE WHOLE GAME, and this is without strategic resources on. It's tedious and anti-fun. Which leads me to...

2) Defense upgrades for starbases. It's ridiculously imbalanced as starbases go from completely unkillable early game to laughably weak mid/late game. It doesn't matter how many upgrades you throw on them (which again, leads to constructor spam) around midgame they become so easy to bulldoze that I wonder why they even have offensive/defensive capabilities. 

I didn't see the problem with this until I noticed a very annoying trend of the AI. At Genius level and above whenever you go to war, they will continually send forces to kill your starbases, even as I'm conquering their world every turn. The AI will forego defending and attack economic starbases, as if to just be annoying. I understand how to counter this, (isn't it fun having to keep whole fleets back to defend against this? /sarcasm) but there should be an option to dump resources into the starbase and have it stand a chance. 

What are you guys thoughts?

Thanks for reading.