@Spock it probably went by so quickly because there was a lot of me hitting next turn towards the end. I agree it would be a decent intro to the genre. While the outliner is okay, I wish there was something closer to an expansion planner screen that some other games have. It would also be nice if you select an outpost ship or colony ship and select the target instead of moving it to the system and then having to build outpost, or colonize (maybe I’m just an idiot and missed that you can do this?). Or give me a a reminder when they arrive, otherwise it can be easy to forget them when there is a lot going on later in the game. So some annoying things, but overall I had about 12 hours of fun with it today. Just picked up an alliance victory in my second game. I don’t know if I accidentally clicked something, but an early ally colonized a planet and killed off a minor civ which appeared to result in us going to war. So I was labelled a backstabber by some other races. Of course after this started, the former ally could never let it go, and would keep starting wars with me until I finally put them out of their misery. A second empire decided to try and take advantage while these fights were going on, so they were removed from the galaxy as well. They also made the mistake of the other empire of not letting it go after getting a good beatdown the first time they started a war. Most of the other empires didn’t give us any trouble besides sniping some planets right before we would get to them, or beating us to some good outpost spots.
I had a strange thing where some planets decided to be 100% devoted to production, the center button was greyed out, and colony automation was disabled. Not sure what was going on there. My goal next game is to get a better grip on the workings of that and the ecology/terraforming parts.