While I've said much of what I think already in my stream, I want to summarize and expand on my thoughts here for more people to benefit from. The game is in a fairly solid state right now and I enjoy a lot of aspects of it; however, there are definitely improvements and changes I would like to see.

I will admit that I'll most likely improve at the game with more familiarity of its mechanics and the ships, stations, etc., that are currently available, but so far I've only been able to win on the absolutely easiest difficulty level because the AI is so insanely aggressive. Though I understand that the developers' intentions are for the game to be very fast-paced, I found it to be incredibly overwhelming even as a veteran player of Civilization for the past 20+ years.

In my opinion, a big source of the difficulty lies in that it's incredibly easy for a faction to snowball but it's incredibly hard for a faction to recover once it's been kicked down. This inevitably leads to one AI taking out the other because it got better techs, ships, resources, and/or planets due to the randomized nature of the tech upgrades and map generation, then coming after the human player as hard as they can. (In most of my experiences so far, it was the Yimono Union AI that died, with one exception when the Santri were taken out early by the Raiders.)

Don't get me wrong, some RNG is a good thing. It can provide a lot of re-playability value to a game. However, too much RNG can feel unfair, especially when it causes the human player to lose or quit the game due to a sense of inevitable defeat. This is why Stellaris weights certain technologies to be discovered at certain points of the game, as without some of the key technologies in the game, a run simply becomes unwinnable.

Returning to the issue of snowballing, this is magnified by the lack of any mechanic in the game to punish a faction for expanding too large. While there is a degree of punishment for expanding too quickly from limited resources, it's easily bypassed by building more stations and stockpiling resources. This issue is compounded further by the way the difficulty settings work, giving the AI disproportionate resource bonuses compared to the human player, meaning even that simple punishment isn't even a factor for them either.

This problem would be less of an issue in a multiplayer game but this is a single-player-only experience at the time of this writing. Given there are no population mechanics or any way to make a smaller empire more viable over a larger empire other than pure luck on where resources have spawned and which technologies roll availability (with no option to re-roll, I should add), this really needs to change.

I think a simple answer is to add some kind of happiness mechanic for empires. The more an empire expands its network or the more planets it colonizes, for example, the more unhappy its people become (represented by the happiness resource), causing the empire to receive debuffs when in a negative value. A new kind of station that provides happiness or luxury resources/terrain (perhaps expanding on stars and why they come in different colors) could be implemented as part of this system to add more depth to the game.

As it stands now, I'm being swarmed so quickly by the AI (regardless of faction) on anything other than the lowest difficulty that I don't even have the time to research the more advanced stations that are available in the current build. Sometimes I'm not even able to unlock any new ships beyond the starting explorer unit. The pacing of the game is simply too fast and the technology availability is too random. How you can have plans to add more content to the game when it's nearly impossible to experience the content that's already there is frankly beyond me.

Regarding the issue of recovery being difficult, one of my biggest gripes is how incredibly easy it is to destroy another faction's colony. Just move any ship with at least one action point over an undefended planet and boom, colony destroyed, just like that. However, to restore that colony, the defending faction in the war would need to move a ship onto said planet and then sacrifice it (unless they can manage to get the special colonizing ship) to colonize the planet again. I think the game would be well served by either requiring a special ship to destroy colonies or by adding a timer before the colony is fully destroyed so that the defending faction has time to respond and save the colony. Or at the very least, require a ship to need its full action points to do it!

There should also be some way for planets to defend themselves for at least a limited time. In Civilization V and VI, for example, cities can bombard nearby units to damage them and have a defense value that engages the enemy units until depleted. Not having any way to defend the planet beyond stationing a unit on it when there's a limit of one unit per tile is not an ideal system and it's easy to see why Civilization didn't go that route when they switched away from deathstacks.

On this topic and the victory points system, captured stations absolutely should NOT count toward the stations needed to achieve victory points unless they are also inside the faction's network. It is way too easy for the AI to just send a bunch of units on a Genghis Khan-style map painting campaign across the galaxy and capture dozens of stations. Combined with the ease at which they can snowball, those captured stations will never be lost and there's no incentive for the AI to expand its network to secure them better.

Additionally, God help you if the AI allies with the Surveyors as they'll then see the entire map and beeline you like there's no tomorrow (if they're not already from finding you on their own). With no ability to engage in diplomacy of any kind (no peace treaties, no ceasefires, no alliances, nothing), the game lacks depth and seems to be trying to hide it behind a difficulty that's inflated by AI resource bonuses that are cranked up way too high, as well as AI that is so insanely aggressive it makes the AI in Civilization 2 look reasonable.

Expanding further on why I take issue with the extreme aggressiveness of the AI, the game does present a victory condition that isn't merely exterminating all of the enemies, i.e., the victory points. While exterminating your enemies or keeping them down through war can certainly help you to reach the required points, it's not actually required and it makes the lack of diplomacy options all the more puzzling to me. I'd really like to see the game changed so that it isn't a constant state of war or at least have an alternate mode like that, such as teams.

All of this said, I really enjoy the art, animations, theme, music, and many of the gameplay mechanics outside of those I've raised issues with. I particularly enjoy the anomalies and I was glad to read there are plans to add more. I just wish there was more time to enjoy the experience of exploration and discovering things about the galaxy before I'm fighting for my life with everything I've got. I'm looking forward to seeing the direction this game will go, as well as what the other three factions will be like and how their mechanics will impact the game as a whole.

I'm sorry if this all seems overly negative but I promise I would not have taken the time to write all of these paragraphs if I didn't think you had the workings of an amazing game here. I would really love to play it multiplayer with my partner and friends so that we can team up against the AI or even versus each other as well. Thank you so much to the dev who came by my stream and for the opportunity to showcase your game to my audience!