[Cainehill]

Not sure I'd want it for MP - too many turns where one person wouldn't be doing anything, while the other player may be adjusting his economy, designing ships, and taking forever, so it wouldn't be all that good for LAN party style games.

And given the number of turns where you're just waiting for some research to complete (in, say, 14 turns) and a ship to be built (in, for instance, 27 turns), it'd be boring and disappointing as a PBEM or even server style game, imo

But it's quite good - the interface has some very irritating quirks* - but the gameplay is pretty cool, with the best diplomacy I've seen in 4X style SP games. And what you can do with the ship designer is amazing - people have made ships that look like transformer style robots and more. (In fact, Stardock already addressed some performance issues related to people going to such extremes in designing ships.)

* Example 1 : No consistent way of going to the next ship that has movement left.

Example 2 : As documented, Esc and Return keys are supposed to close windows. They don't - I've found a grand total of one window that Esc closes, and Return simply, always, ends the turn, which does match documentation in that "will close the current window _or_ end the turn" (emphasis mine). It just always ends the turn - even if you're in a ship designer screen, world production screen, etc. Very dumb design.