The wide variety of buildings made things quite interesting. Then there are buildings that help produce ships while others researched more technology for those ships to arm themselves with. Deciding which planets would evolve in which direction was perhaps the most interesting feature in the game. This of course was par for my trial and error, error, error gaming style. Okay, let's get into the meat of the game.
Alliances uses a real-time combat system.
Each battle starts paused and lets players issue commands and choose a formation before the fighting gets underway. Hit the go button and your ships start blasting. Hit pause, reissue commands and go again. You see, there's a wide variety of ships, weapons, and crud to research and build, but when they fight, it's little more than a slug fest. Tactics don't play nearly as big a part in the fight as raw firepower does.