Just gonna vomit my opinions about the game in no real order.
Early game is fun. Exploring, smuggling, fighting. Lots to do, nothing holding you back besides the size/power of your "fleet". I use the quotation marks because, at best, you only ever control a relatively minor and inconsequential amount of ships. Even in the late game, how much you can directly control/deploy is unsatisfying. And impractical.
Finally got to the point of setting up colonies and.... this is where the game completely falls apart. At this point, you do nothing but defend your colonies. No matter your standing with other factions, they will non-stop attack you. Tried to start another new colony, instantly attacked by about 30 capital ships +100 other assorted ships. 0 chance of me ever defending against it. And this is from the 'pirates'. With this kind of power and these amounts of resources, how do they not own the entire sector? And they are attacking from a system 35 light years away. Basically half the sector. And this is endless at this point. Pirates and Luddic path mostly, but the other factions send fleets endlessly as well. And the fact that they can send 3 Armadas when you can only control your own single fleet is annoying as well. Why do the AI factions have the ability to field such drastically larger forces? Why can't I created multiple fleets and order them to follow/support my main fleet?
Your standing with any given faction means nothing. They still attack. Worst is the Hegemony. For some reason they have the right to inspect any system/colony they want and take what you have. I know you can order your ships to fight them, or bribe them. But why can they do this in the first place? As far as I understand, the sector is every man for himself. Why does this faction get special privileges to act as a centralized government/police force when they are more or less on equal footing with everyone else?
Not to mention the suicidal attacks. Once the pirates target a system they will attack it endlessly until you destroy their base. But, I thought pirates were in it for profit? In some cases they turn into suicidal zealots, willing to die for nothing. I'm referring to having a system with 2 or more colonies with fully upgraded spacestations/patrol buildings. The pirate raids never win as far as I can tell, yet they still have unlimited resources to endlessly send armadas full of capital ships. I could understand this from actual zealots, the Luddics and whatnot, but the pirates, I would think, should be less willing to mindlessly throw their lives away with 0 chance at any profit to be had.
Forget trying to do the story quest. I'll spend weeks traveling to and destroying outlying pirate/luddic bases, only to have more pop up elsewhere.
Can't remember how many times I had to restart because I ran out of supplies flying in tiny circles trying to catch a bounty target. As far as I can tell, interdiction is useless for these scenarios. By the time the pulse goes off the target is either out of range, or, if they do the caught by it, too far away to catch even if they can't burn.
Probably the most annoying aspect of this game is the lack of an auto save feature. When you can instantly lose everything you have just by jumping into a system, there should be some kind of auto save going on. Also, saving in general is annoying. Why not just allow the creation of save files instead of using this goofy 'create copy' or whatever?
The lack of a respec option is also highly annoying. With the use of alpha cores, the colony management skills are 100% useless. This along with a few other minor issues basically guarantee that you will have to restart at some point, which is just poor game design.
All in all, early game is fun - aside from the constant possibility of losing everything with 0 recourse. Late game is an endless, unfun, repetitive slog of whack-a-mole.
I'm sure some of this has to do with the limitations of PC's, especially when the development first started. But it's 2020 now. If you want to keep the game accessible to any budget system, fine. But at least put options to enable/disable autosave, and to have it so the player can actually create/control fleets of equal size that get thrown at them endlessly.
