Well, it started out great after i found out it's basically a board game on the pc. During the tutorial in the standard solar system Vega: get your own planet, do some research, invest a little in ships and in research, join an alliance. You can buy ingame credits to speed up manufacturing or research or boost supplies OR you can get them for free after filling in some surveys. But after the tutorial it gets nasty. Players from way up the ranks keep attacking your planet, if you try it back you are outlawed (that means anyone can attack you because you provoked a high ranking player). The way a battle happens isn't quite as honorable as you think it is. The basics are simple: send a few drones to a planet of your opponent, use the outcome of that in an external "approved" simulator -> see how much ships you must send to win -> apply that ingame, and voila you have won the fight. BUT that only applies if you are a high ranking player with enough ships, just because low ranking players don't get the chance to build up a good defense or a good ship yard. Another stupid thing is the gameplay keeps continuing even if you are offline, so anyone can attack you. Therefore you must do a "fleetsave". :) Yes, you can send your entire fleet away for a max of 1-2 days, that depends on your slowest vessel. But it leaves your planet unprotected.
In all other games i play: usually the weak can attack the strong and not the other way around, but here it's the other way around. Btw i did hear there should be a level cap of 100 ranks between players, but hey even 10 ranks is way too much here.
So in the end, be aware: if you want honest play -> stay away from this one. Or do you like cheating AND you get in with a top 10 alliance to back you up if you screw up, please join in.