Hey, old thread but apparently it's encouraged to post on old threads instead of starting new topics.
I've played Astro Galaxy since 2014, took some month-long breaks here and there. I'm by no means a powerful player yet, because I wasted years trying to stake it out as a pirate (a horribly terrible way to make a living) and barely made any progress.
I just want to say that the game is not really pay to win. At a certain point, you'll find that buying QPs for research points or whatever ... it's ridiculously overpriced and there's no point. This is because modules (equipment on ships) are infinitely scalable and you can keep upgrading into level 100 ... level 1000 ... level 10000 as long as you've researched it and have the necessary minerals/gases to construct the module (level 10000 modules can take half a year to build ...)
While you can pay $10 and get 550000 RPs, also take note that the top players in the game right now produce over 100,000,000 RPs per hour with their massive science modules. I only produce a few million an hour (as I said, I'm pretty shit). But literally nobody at the higher levels ever buys QP for power. Really, $1000 for RPs that you can produce in one hour??
Same goes for other QP-exchangable commodities like solars (in-game money) and action points (a newly-introduced system that lets you speed up tasks like construction, wormhole jump timers etc at 1 hour per action point). The exchange rates are horrific, and while it's a good thing because everyone plays fair and doesn't get unfair advantages from paying, it's also bad because I think the dev has not been making a lot of money and development has been slow over the past year (he says he's working with Artificial Intelligence algorithms in the area of context prediction, English syntax and content generators, but who knows how true that is).
That said, the game is still immense fun and quite sandboxy. Initially the game starts off quite slow, but growth is exponential because you'll be getting many more ships to control (and micromanaging 50+ ships becomes quite tough at higher levels). The stronger you are, the faster you grow.
Feel free to ask me anything else!
Also: some updates that could interest you:
Super Nova Explosaions/Star Life Cycles
The star will destabilize in time and eventually go Super Nova. Captains may deploy special devices to prevent the supernova and stabilize a solar system.
When a star goes super nova, it leaves room for another star to be born somewhere else... some stars may also leave black holes behind.
Mysterious Encounters
+ Black holes can be left behind by exploding stars.
+ Wormholes can form in space between stars and around exploding stars
+ Wormholes lead far away into unknown space, new distant star pockets are discovered. A big wormhole links the distant pockets and shifts around at the edge on the star pocket, opening and closing. Smaller wormholes open and close leading to different parts of the same star pocket.
+ Alien civilization remnants are discovered in the new unexplored areas. Valuable alien artefacts are brought in for study in Sol system.
+ Black holes and wormholes have a lifetime, depending on it's size. For wormholes, size also determines the range of the jump.
+ Monsters lurking and mysterious events may lie between the empty space to distant star pockets...