I just passed to give a thumb up. After Update 1 the game needed a lot of changes, and they ve come.

I was pleased with my first playtrought, and was a bit overhelmed at the start.

I feel this it is an interesting game now.

What i observed during my play:

Some messages and some writing display "%blah blah blah failure something%" so it must be looked into, was playing in english.

The science tree was improved a lot... 

It still a bit enigmatic in the vocabulary.

And is butt ugly.

I liked a lot how you tried to jam a bit some stuff so it is not totally straightforward.

But i still feel its not enought not to be mainstream. 

I also feel that some tree skill should block some others "areas" so the  rush to complete a tree isn t that obvious and require a bit of thinking.

I liked the "challenges" but i feel thats a feature that might die early. I hope your planning a pool with diferent ones or diferent rewards to be pulled at random.

The missions: Some missions get criptic because of vocabulary employed is sometime a bit muddy. Like the sophon mission to hagar 2 ships at the same time, but the button is "dismiss" must be pressed. 

Dismiss/Hangar would work or a tool tip should be present.

There are others that fall in this principle.

I don t know if there s an option, i didn t found it, soforgive me if i m wrong. There should have an option to offer to empire to ally itself/submit whatever. So you don t obliterate it, but it wouldn t hamper you anymore with his circle of influence nor would it try to stupidly and uselessly attack you.

In the UI i liked some option like a fast load the last save. Now i think an image with a general scheme of the kind of galaxy you ll encounter, all is so criptyc. OTOH i loved the caotic feature and ramdomic expansion. 

Overall i liked a lot my playtrought. Althought i felt the military solution might be too easy to get there as main solution.