So far 8/10...Review to be updated...

In short, the game is very black and white - it's either fun and easy, or a boring tedious grind. There's no happy middle ground, which exists in more carefully and comprehensively made strategy games. It's not particularly buggy, and the points at which this game diverges from most other 4x games are done well, fun and engaging, but it doesn't help basic enjoyment for the same reasons most other 4x games fail. Beyond the first few hours (10-16, depending how slow you play) going through major factions in their scenarios, it's just a grind of not a fun variety. I tried and tried to make it fun, but it's not working.

Only major factions of each scenario are not frustrating to play, but if you play them - it's easy to snowball without any checks and then steamroll everyone. It's ridiculous. Minor factions are doomed to die to a big blob formed by major faction and their con/federation, or get slowly torn apart, with no resources to rebuild because most neighbors are at war with them or refusing to trade anyway, and keep stealing trades in either case. Small emergent factions that pop up during the game are even worse than minor factions. No fun.

Interface is clunky, with misclicks being severely punishing for no good reasons and no ability to remap some crucial controls to make it at least a little less clunky.

Resource management sucks. You either have nowhere near enough of anything for everything you need to begin having fun, or within 10 turns after you solve that shortage - you have so much, that you'll just click on everything you can spend your resources and snowball. Trade is only worth anything if you're short on something in the first 5-10 turns, or try to appease AI faction with gifts (which will come back to haunt you, with all the units and development they get from it).

Military sucks, as per usual in 4x. Seemingly without any economic consequence, AI will keep sh***ing out units with all the bonuses and wear down whatever few units you manage to raise from the crappy start you were given as any minor faction. Or if your enemy is of slightly easier variety - you'll steamroll them, bump up into a big blob on your borders and then get bent yourself, or get locked into a boring slogfest. No matter how much you stack up your bonuses and morale - you're never on par. You're either completely dominant or destroyed easily, and unlike AI you can't spam units to get by without quality - you won't have trade to support that. You can't besiege cities or try to turn enemy units to your side either - because bigger factions will come after you, as soon as that "dishonest" way of fighting ruins your relations with them.

Diplomacy sucks, par for the course in most 4x games. Pointless cooldowns for diplomatic actions, which exist only to get eaten up by trash offers from AI as soon as the cooldown expires, resetting it, and preventing you from offering anything actually useful. Even then, there's practically no point trying to engage with its mechanisms to play peacefully and develop - which is required if you try to keep up with the blob. Returning back to trade, it's incredibly slow to setup and should go in the same trash bin with cooldowns. Other than military force within your own borders, there's no hard counter to "peaceful" units - generals and emissaries, who will screw your plans over, while heroes and sages are practically useless. And there's nothing you can do about them in foreign courts. Trying to force peace between smaller factions, or getting AI into a war is a worthless endeavor too.

Some common scenarios you'll have to go through: You try to make AI players unite against a big blob that threatens you and everyone else - they'll reveal your emissary efforts instead, ruin your relations with the blob, have it declare war on you and kill you with a 1000 cuts. By some miracle you ally to the blob or otherwise keep them appeased? They either break any alliances and good relations to declare war on you, or drag you into their war with another faction - which will inevitably focus on you instead of your "ally". You try to praise the blob to other factions, to raise relations - peace accepted, another war declared soon after anyway. You're successful and the blob is beaten back? They won't accept peace, and will come back with more units. You beat them properly by destroying them and taking territory? Fun's over - now you're the blob, and the rest of the game goes on easy mode. Capital city and morale mechanics only makes snowballing worse, while countering negatives to that snowballing is too easy to even consider a speedbump. You're lucky and none of that happens? Blob steals your neighboring territory, forcing you to either declare war and lose, or get stuck in slow and pointless peaceful development, before eating you up anyway.

If it's the only 4x you're going to play - it's decent, nothing special against recommending it, especially since it has a very thorough and useful manual. If it's one of a few (2-3) similar 4x games that you'll have in the library and actually play - it will scratch the itch differently, whenever any other one gets boring. But unfortunately it won't be anything special otherwise.