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[Hanzoku]

Overall, I have to say the game peaks early and becomes boring very rapidly after that. As Nirur Torir says, once you've gotten going and have a trade hub set up, it's mostly seeing where your import shortfalls are and conquering a planet that can provide the correct resources to cover it. If you're all covered, then you can instead take marginal planets and set up ship component construction and shipyard pairs, or infantry equipment and a infantry recruitment world.

Starships seem to be massively underused, probably because they're slow as molasses in winter. I think Jumpships should be faster, and Starships should have the currently speed levels of jumpships, or some way to be carried by jumpship transports. Because as it stands now, there's no reason to use things that you can send flying in the morning, and they might be at their destination the next day. Maybe.

What the game really needs is more screens - a better empire-wide overview of production and shortfalls, a messages screen where you can send, receive and keep messages from other players.

It also needs a lot more depth of gameplay - The game aesthetic is a galaxy collapsing into a dark age, so research probably isn't in the cards, but right now it's very much a play in short bursts game, because there is little to do at any one time.

[se5a]

Speeding up ships would be great if you wanted your empire to fall within the time it took for you to go take a piss, or you know, spend the day at work.

[Hanzoku]

Sieges take 24 hours to resolve, as I'm currently seeing. That's more then enough slowdown on invasions, outside of a massive empire deciding the unrest is worth it and tackling all your systems at once, which couldn't be defended against anyway.

[a1s]

Well, they could break your entire fleet, piece by piece, removing your offensive capability, then siege your systems at their leisure. Theoretically.

Starships seem to be massively underused, probably because they're slow as molasses in winter. I think Jumpships should be faster, and Starships should have the currently speed levels of jumpships

I would say that heavy starships should be a bit faster (like the way heavy jumpships are only 2-3 times as slow as light ones, not 25) while the rest of it is fine. If your Starcruisers can clear the skies above a sieged planet before it resolves, I am happy. With hours (or even just 1 hour per) between attacks, you can be surprised, but not annihilated by starships. And if a jumpfleet annihilates you, you either deserved it (by neglecting your fleet) or are facing a massive enemy and already lost before the start.

[Zangi]

It seems that starships are best used as very slowmoving doomstacks. 
Once blockades are in, preventing defenders from dropping in reinforcements without clearing the skies, you can go straight for capital sieges.  Any other reinforcements to that siege will have to be Gunship types and Jumpships.

Or defense stations that you place at important places way before hand.

[MDFification]

A couple things for y'all:

a) the Era 4 Beta will be starting in about a week. This is a new map - the current map is just used to test new features - so it's a great time to get into the game before other players snowball into unbeatable superpowers!

b) there's a utility called Terminus (which can be found here which lets you easily run scripts to massively reduce the amount of tedious clicking you'd otherwise have to. This kind of scripting is dev-approved, and makes it much, much easier and less time consuming to play the game!

c) if you want to hang out with rest of the players, we have a Discord channel! It's fairly active. Come for the question/answer services the vets provide, stay for the diplomacy and godawful memes!

[MDFification]

Overall, I have to say the game peaks early and becomes boring very rapidly after that. As Nirur Torir says, once you've gotten going and have a trade hub set up, it's mostly seeing where your import shortfalls are and conquering a planet that can provide the correct resources to cover it. If you're all covered, then you can instead take marginal planets and set up ship component construction and shipyard pairs, or infantry equipment and a infantry recruitment world.

The game is based on long term strategic maneuvering and PvP - there's no real PvE challenge at the moment. If you're lucky/aggressive enough to be experiencing border friction with someone else, the game basically becomes a permanent cold war until you can put yourself in a position (through increasing your war production or diplomacy) to win a war against them.

Sieges take 24 hours to resolve, as I'm currently seeing. That's more then enough slowdown on invasions, outside of a massive empire deciding the unrest is worth it and tackling all your systems at once, which couldn't be defended against anyway.

Sieges were introduced to stop players from completely destroying another players empire in a single hour while they were offline (which used to happen). Since it's game over for a player when they don't have any more capitals, it was necessary to slow warfare down so players didn't just capture every capital a player had before they could react.

It seems that starships are best used as very slowmoving doomstacks. 
Once blockades are in, preventing defenders from dropping in reinforcements without clearing the skies, you can go straight for capital sieges.  Any other reinforcements to that siege will have to be Gunship types and Jumpships.

Or defense stations that you place at important places way before hand.

Correct! Starships are mostly used in PVP (which is the main focus of the game). They're slow (although recently buffed in speed - as of this week, none move slower than 1 ly per minute, which is up to 10x faster than they were last week) but they don't need jump beacons, meaning that you can use them to hit enemy worlds that otherwise would be out of range.

Otherwise, your capital ships are mostly useful for defense (they can massacre hordes of lesser ships) or for clearing out your opponents capital stacks so you can siege a planet safely.

[se5a]

I gave up on this after half my empire fell to bits within a single day.
Setting up trade routes is far too complex/buggy/not implemented, to keep things running when a single planet decides to riot because of some unexplained dip in raw materials.

[MDFification]

I gave up on this after half my empire fell to bits within a single day.
Setting up trade routes is far too complex/buggy/not implemented, to keep things running when a single planet decides to riot because of some unexplained dip in raw materials.

Using Terminus (which I liked a few posts back) helps with this a lot. It has a script to automatically set up trade routes - not only does this save you a boatload of clicking, but it manages to make the trade routes more intuitive (as in, worlds will export as much resources to the trade hub as the trade hub needs, as opposed to each of them only exporting a percentage of its needs)