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Notes -
Agreed on most things here.
It's not that bad visually. Planets look nice. Ships, well, I like how busy core worlds can get, no need to zoom in.
Writing is bad, but the race-from-beyond-galaxy total war scripting/framing surprised me positively - they are so far ahead on tech that native empires joining them can actually be catastrophic (but shame you have so little diplo tools available). But again, could do so, so much more.
Teekans talk a bit like Skaven, it's cute.
Many glaring issues, but even at 150 planets, I did not find it too bad. Only maybe a dozen are core. Character and army management is the worst.
I had all state ships on manual design, since you can do a lot better than automatic. Shame you can't do guided auto-design (exclude this, always include that; or did I miss that in the UI?). Components going V1->V2 etc do update automatically now even on manual designs, but what a pain when you get something new, only "Copy as new" then obsolete the previous version works since "Upgrade" treats too many components as same family, pain.
They should open the game source code, it can all be fixed.
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