Against my better judgement I impulse bought this last week. I'm regretting it only because I couldn't really afford it, and I shouldn't be playing it because I have urgent study to attend to. The game is pretty awesome.
Coming from an incredibly skewed dwarf fortress perspective, I do have unreasonable wishes as to the level of detail that the game tracks. I probably should be playing Aurora instead (but don't like the idea of having to use a scrolling desktop... I'll probably try it eventually anyway). I'm also playing it on its minimum requirements, so I'm sort of stuck with the smallest galaxy sizes, and it seems mainly orientated to macro scales. I often find myself wondering how cool it would be if the game tracked important individual figures or if the history of each galaxy was actually generated from the ground up. (the galaxies are procedurally generated, but the all the ancient ruins/derelict ships you find are simply plonked on the map, and, as far as I can tell, don't actually have a procedural history). Damn you dwarf fortress for giving me impossible standards!
I'm on my 4th game so far, eager to try out different set ups. I recommend everyone who tries the game to turn off the automation of everything and change it to suggestions, I actually started to learn what was going on a lot faster that way. The AI also currently builds far too many units to maintain. Keeping your economy from crashing is actually quite fun at the moment. I hope they don't over-balance it in the opposite direction (because there are quite a few complaints about the economy).
For the turn based enthusiasts out there, this definitely isn't a RTS kind of clicking game. For starters the time element is completely controllable, and even when playing at 1x speed, it's not a chaotic 'build! build! attack! attack!' sort of game. You get punished pretty hard for over-expanding when your current colonies can't support it, so I find myself spending most of my time looking after one or two main fleets, keeping them up to the current technology, making sure that they don't run out of fuel while they're protecting my systems (annoying), and making sure I'm supplying my colonies with what they need.
If anything, the real time aspect makes the universe seem more alive and breathing.