It's similar now. Fragile Allegiance is a typical trading strategy. So at the beginning we have a tiny colony, which we will develop over time. We will populate more asteroids, establish contacts with aliens, take offense at them and ... see above. Everything looks great on the cover. There are many options. Several types of ships and weapons for them. Various equipment for both the colony and space gold (among other things, the asteroid can be fitted with engines to avoid a collision with another celestial body). Very extensive diplomacy and negotiation with other races. Agents and spy satellites can be sent. In addition, an intuitive interface that facilitates contact with the game. It all sounds so beautiful it can't be real. And is not.
After the first hour, the game is so boring that you can only fire up the Chessmaster 48762322 and 1/2, because then more interesting fun is guaranteed. Thanks to the unintuitive interface, ie the "annoying" set of oval keys with meaningless drawings, we can contract chronic indigestion and neurosis. Time passes either too fast (everything starts simultaneously) or too slow, and for half an hour we sit bluntly pressing successive buttons on the intuitive interface, waiting for the Federation ship, which, in the indefinite future, is to arrive at three tons of some material named after a poor sf movie from the 60s. Pathetic. What about the fact that we have the opportunity to develop diplomacy, since for three hours of playing (in a fairly populated system) I did not manage to find any traces of intelligence, except for an asteroid gliding towards my brow in the sweat of the colony that was being established and flying within 10 seconds what I was creating for half the evening. I want to howl. Or maybe I don't know how to play? Maybe this is a good game, I'm just a dumb, goofy 3D shooting games freak? Hmmm .... Then why did I finish Civilization four times and Ascendancy twice? Maybe because they were just really good games.
My rate: 2/10.