Well, just ran into the turn limit for the demo. All in all, I was looking for an excuse to stop playing. I'd finally managed to get the upper hand over the local minor races, and I was destroying their fleets with extreme prejudice. It was mildly satisfying, but there's still this tiny niggling annoyance that creeps into the back of my head whenever you've cornered an entire species on their home planet, blockaded all airspace and then threatened with scorched earth-style orbital bombardment, and they STILL tell you to give them eighteen thousand mineral units as a peace fee.
Still though, makes nuking the buggers all the more entertaining.
Yeah, the only thing that kind of caught my attention with this game were the precalculated 3D battles. It's a very nice idea, allowing you to have very pretty and interesting battles in a 4x game, one of the main weak points with that genre (plus, since it's AI controlled, I don't have to baby every single ship in every single encounter). However, due to the dreadful implementation in this particular title, the idea fell flat on its face with such force that its nose exploded out its arse.
And yes, the diplomacy and trading aspects were weak as hell. Somewhat annoying, as that's precisely what I was looking for. Not more micromanagement (and even with just a few systems under my control, I started to see what an insane amount of that there would be).
So, yeah... Not really my deal. Anybody know of a game that focuses more on diplomacy and trading, and not so much on the rampant micro (seriously, why the hell should the prime ruler of a race attend to every freakin' matter of business in the known universe? Isn't that what ministries are for?)?