Allegiance is primarily a team game, and that fact alone makes it pretty unique from other space action games. The main game style we call Conquest, where a team's sole objective is to capture or destroy all the enemy bases on variously complex maps. To accomplish this objective a team will organize itself into Command and Pilot roles. In Command mode, players are concerned with giving the team strategic objectives from a RTS like view of the battlefield and spending the teams income on new and better technologies such as better weapons, new and better spacecraft and additional technologies to give your team the winning edge.
Text chats are exactly what they sound like.
Unlike most games, ships do not have to face in the direction they are moving. Instead, your ship moves along using, more or less, Newton's laws of motion. You have a velocity which changes over time based on how your ship is accelerating. Since a ship's acceleration tends to be low compared to its maximum velocity, it may take 5 or more seconds to accomplish that, leading to a lot of sliding sideways. There can literally be many hundreds of objects flying around in a sector at one time.