Not for the faint of heart.

If you played Stellaris, but wished there was infinitely more micromanagement, this might be the game for you.

First off the game definitely show's it's age in a lot of area's. If you are playing a W10 machine checked the pinned thread in discussions for how to configure the game. For me I had to install DX9 to get it to run. I also had to reduce my resolution to 1680x1040 to see the game icon's which don't scale well to modern resolutions.

The game let's you automate or micromanage pretty much anything you like. Fleet, colonies, bases, construction, exploration, mining, construction, trade, technology, pirates, ship/base design, diplomacy, internal civics, wonders. And neglecting one area can really harm your empire's growth. The fun IMO comes in micro-ing the early game to get an edge against your AI rivals, and then automating tasks as they get repetitive and you look to expand your empire and plan more large scale projects.

Despite your empire eventually getting to the size of 1000+ ships+bases, you can fine tune the management of everything down to the component level. On each technology advancement you need to retrofit most of your ships so there's tons of micro-ing, but you can choose which one's interest you the most and automate the rest.

Pirates are such an annoyance; they are way more advanced then you early on, so you'll need to pay their protection money. Even later when you get the military power to crush them the map can be so large that their colonies will be incredibly difficult to find despite hours of searching.

I think the game's biggest weakness is the built in tutorial, which is incredibly shallow.
Instead I'd recommend watching the 4 hour tutorial series by TortugaPower to get the basics.
Even that doesn't cover the mechanics of war, just to give you an idea of the scale of the game's mechanics.
One last recommendation don't set the galaxy size larger then normal, the bigger sizes just make finding anything feel like finding a needle in the haystack.

I'll say this game is a big commitment, but it's fairly forgiving if you set it to Easy. The multiple autosaves have saved me a few times. It's definitely got that classic 4X, one more turn addiction as I played more and more. Recommended if you are looking for an old school super challenging 4X game.