A solid entry in the RTS genre, but not without its flaws.
The maps themselves consist of a star surrounded by colonizable planets, asteroids, and other special areas. Areas are connected by phase lanes which require your ships to undertake a rather tedious phase jump to travel to the next area. Depending on the size of the map, they can contain up to 4-5 star systems.
The gameplay focuses on fleet combat. You build up fleets consisting of smaller frigates and a few large and highly impressive capital ship. The frigates come in a variety of flavors - carriers loaded with strike craft, crafts laden with buffs and debuffs, defensive crafts, and attack frigates. Each civ also has its own types of capital ships complete with their set of abilities. As you win more battles with your capital ships they can level up. This gives them stronger abilities and more customization.
The battles themselves are very impressive. Often times two large fleets will unload on each other in an epic battle. You can zoom in and watch the fireworks or stay zoomed out and get a broader sense of the battle. I loved zooming in to see the individual strike craft make bombing runs or watch the fly of ordinance back and forth.
In terms of the downsides, there weren't that many, but they were annoying. Phase jumping takes forever. That wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the maps are enormous and it can take forever to move your fleet from one area to another. The larger the map, the longer the transit times. This ends up affecting the strategy. The game does not support a defensive strategy. It's almost impossible to try and sit back and defend your territories because your fleets can't be everywhere at once. You'll find yourself frequently conquering an area then backtracking to reconquer another area that an opportunistic opponent attacked. Even this wouldn't be too bad if your fleets travelled at a reasonable speed. I found myself literally taking hours to travel from one star system to another. Battles were fun when they occurred, but they were a long time in between. Another annoying issue is that the opposing fleet often flees when outmatched. You can give chase - but it takes forever when you have to wait from phase jump to phase jump.
The game opens up with a fairly impressive cinematic, but it never develops upon that. There is no campaign in the game despite this introduction. I certainly would have welcomed some kind of campaign to add meaning to the games. The developers seem to have spent time in building up this conflict between races, but nothing comes of it in the actual gameplay.
The graphics, while not overwhelming, are more than adequate to impress. Similarly, the music scores are very appropriate and help add to the epic feeling of the game.
Overall the game is quite good, and you can certainly lose hours of your time playing through each set. I just wish they made it a little more streamlined to play.