It's like Stellaris Lite with some Galactic Civilizations mixed in, overall I'd recommend it but I'd probably be best to wait for a sale. As of right now the game is a start to finish experience, but there are aspects of the game that are poorly explained, tedious, and is very confusing to even experienced 4X players but hopefully while in EA these problems will be fixed.

For example, the way the game handles Tall and Wide playstyles. The game HEAVILY penalizes playing Tall since one of the games objectives is to capture 6 specific planet types and they're very spread out, forcing you to expand quite a bit, and the way the game tries to penalize overextention does so in such a terribly poor way that just taking even more territory completely negates the penalties of taking too much territory and the penalties it does apply nukes any attempt to play tall.

It's done through a system called Happiness, and the way it's implemented is just confusing. There are 2 types of happiness, short term and long term. Short term is what is applied so when it's above 30ish percent you won't take any debuffs. Long term is the happiness rest point and what short term will gravitate towards. But the long term happiness is tied to how much territory you own, so if you have too much territory your long term happiness takes a hit. Makes sense so far, but the natural decay of short term is so slow it's worthless to even bother with long term happiness since all you need to do is take an enemy system and bam you've got 10% extra short term and it takes 5 turns for it to disappear. But for reasons beyond understanding, if you want to change the buildings on a planet you've just captured to better optimize it, or make a new shipyard planet, you lose short term happiness. So if you want to micromanage your colonies and settlements you'll quickly lose all your short term happiness and suffer from rebellions and a 50% decrease to production that takes upwards of 15 turns to stabilize, but only if you have a long term happiness above 25%. This also applies to handing off territory to allies, you lose short term, so it's not even worth trying to manage long term happiness. As it stands you'll end up with a massive clumsy empire, weak allies since giving them territory hurts you to an extreme degree, and in a constant state of war.

If reading that confused you don't worry you're not alone, the happiness system makes no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense. Hopefully the devs are willing to fix this cause the game does have a lot of potential.

It's like Stellaris Lite with some Galactic Civilizations mixed in, overall I'd recommend it but I'd probably be best to wait for a sale. As of right now the game is a start to finish experience, but there are aspects of the game that are poorly explained, tedious, and is very confusing to even experienced 4X players but hopefully while in EA these problems will be fixed. For example, the way the game handles Tall and Wide playstyles. The game HEAVILY penalizes playing Tall since one of the games objectives is to capture 6 specific planet types and they're very spread out, forcing you to expand quite a bit, and the way the game tries to penalize overextention does so in such a terribly poor way that just taking even more territory completely negates the penalties of taking too much territory and the penalties it does apply nukes any attempt to play tall. It's done through a system called Happiness, and the way it's implemented is just confusing. There are 2 types of happiness, short term and long term. Short term is what is applied so when it's above 30ish percent you won't take any debuffs. Long term is the happiness rest point and what short term will gravitate towards. But the long term happiness is tied to how much territory you own, so if you have too much territory your long term happiness takes a hit. Makes sense so far, but the natural decay of short term is so slow it's worthless to even bother with long term happiness since all you need to do is take an enemy system and bam you've got 10% extra short term and it takes 5 turns for it to disappear. But for reasons beyond understanding, if you want to change the buildings on a planet you've just captured to better optimize it, or make a new shipyard planet, you lose short term happiness. So if you want to micromanage your colonies and settlements you'll quickly lose all your short term happiness and suffer from rebellions and a 50% decrease to production that takes upwards of 15 turns to stabilize, but only if you have a long term happiness above 25%. This also applies to handing off territory to allies, you lose short term, so it's not even worth trying to manage long term happiness. As it stands you'll end up with a massive clumsy empire, weak allies since giving them territory hurts you to an extreme degree, and in a constant state of war. If reading that confused you don't worry you're not alone, the happiness system makes no god damn sense. Hopefully the devs are willing to fix this cause the game does have a lot of potential.