Great, now I have the paranoid feeling someone is watching me...
I joined (Draco galaxy) but I'm not sure if I want to stick with it or not. The sphere limitation doesn't really concern me too much. But there's a bunch of things that are just sorta... meh. I can't say why they in any way affect game fun, but for some reason they turn me off.
The big guys are BIG. As far as I can tell, they've got orders of magnitude more power then minnows, not just many times more. I think it's really cool that they limited the size of the galaxy to mean that people can't just infinitely expand out and dwarf you. But the existing big dogs have built a massive infrastructure on my starting world, despite being nowhere near me. They're nice enough to give me some room to grow, but there's no reason for me to be there. I'm not the lord of my own small world. I'm a twelve year old who set up a lemonaide stand in front of the Emperor States Building.
The game isn't very feudal either. In fact, it's very capitalistic. Feudalism requires wealth to be equal to land (usually farmland but sometimes mines, very occasionally trading concessions.) The feudalism emerges when a bunch of local strongmen control a bunch of patches of land to support themselves as warriors. Dress it up in chivalry if you want, codify it in bushido or just proudly declare yourself a bastard, but in the end you are just a thug guarding a patch of land. It's all very petty, but the pettiness is where the fun come in; you want to be richer? Get more land! Without this feudalism, there's no point to war, everyone can grow fat together. There's conflicts at the top, but they look to be pissing matches brought on by too much money. There's no conflicts at the bottom because no one could afford it, which is darn backwards. A fight is the petty thugs chance to hit it big!
Then there's the whole user interface thing. I'm trying to be a mercantile house but am having an impossible time doing price comparisons. I know there's some very lucrative opportunities locally, too, if I can find them. But I have to use one window to select two different planets on the galaxy map to compare prices, which takes forever and I haven't even started setting up my ports yet!
Still, there are some cool points. They broke the 4X mold which so many browser MMORPGs have copied with no inspiration. You can actually matter to your fellow players and vice versa. And there looks like there's some actual politicking going on, even if that is pissing matches.
Edit: Oh Jeezus, I just found out about tech pyramids. I... don't think this game is for me.