This makes ship design so much more interesting. You get to decide if you want more weapons, or fewer, more powerful weapons. Spies can sabotage and lay the blame on other empires, you can make deals for technology and systems, and you can enter in several levels of treaties, from simple trading, to full alliances. Well, the problem with this type of game is its lack of actual game variety. The general play can get so repetitive.
Battlefields are empty space, so there's little change there.
Sometimes you fight near a planet, sometimes you don't. Ground combat is automatic, a little like Deadlock, so you can't give orders like you can to your starships. Once you beat this game on the higher difficulty rating against several foes, there's not much else to look forward to. Such was the case with my final game. Unfortunately, his fleet outnumbered mine by about 5 to 3, and while my ships were technologically superior, I still couldn't beat those odds.