Just kind of spitballing here, but I've been playing this since the Zone 2 release and I gotta say, this really doesn't feel like something I should have paid $50 for. It really feels like Civ5 GOTY in space, there just isn't a lot of new stuff and, to be perfectly honest, I expected more from the backstory and voiceover work... something closer to the quality we got in SMAC. The tech descriptions are pithy, and don't really lend anything to the backstory, it's just random quotations about stuff. It feels like the people who made this didn't even really pay lip service to SMAC and kind of phoned in the flavor.

Other than that though, there just really doesn't seem to be anything compelling about the game... it's really just Civ5, you can play it just like Civ5 and mostly ignore the differences. The only thing that really made me say "neat" was the upgrade system, but even that's not really a big deal? I like the orbital layer but all I really use it for is clearing miasma. They also only give each faction one small bonus and leave out things like unique units, buildings and interesting perks... i've played 4 factions and I can't say I handled one different than another because the perks were so small that it didn't matter much which I picked.

Anyway, these are just some of the things that stuck out, but tbh I'm really not feeling it with this game. This seems like "official mod" territory as opposed to a AAA game. Meh.

Edit: Windowed mode is terrible as well... No borderless mode, and if you alt-tab enough, the menu dialogs stop rendering and you need to restart the game. Seems like QA was asleep on this one too.