(Played this game a lot in offline so my playtime on record is low)
I love grand sci-fi strategies, and seeing the trailers I just had to play this. Game had me hooked in really hard for first roughly 40hours, and then slowly my motivation to play just disappeared and my general feeling of the game was just getting worse and worse. There is awesome potential in this game, the idea is just top notch and I see a possibility to fix it and even expand this game further into another stage where you take control of the solar system as a unified civilization (or start from scratch in another system) and just continue outwards to conquer the galaxy. But some systems need a redesign for me to be satisfied with it enough that I would recommend it to someone else. Games should be fun and this game started feeling like chore pretty soon and mind that I am pretty resilient to chore gameplay and If I get anoyed by it you know it is too much. I stopped playing after researching antimatter tech which is pretty far into the game and had Earth and Mars under control. My motivation is just gone and I just don't want to open the game anymore because I know what is waiting for me there, just more chores like it is some work I have to do and no fun. In its current state it is not engaging enough for an avarage player to even finish the game once. Also I have a feeling like this game was made by somone who had ultra crazy fetish on engines because that is not a normal game design choice that was made here :D

Theese are my biggest problems with the game
-this one is easily fixable> SOUNDTRACK, as a sound producer I beg you to invest into better soundtrack for the game. I had to turn it off after 20 hours because I was going nuts from it. There are elements in the music that are easiliy distinguishable so you know when the loop starts and when it ends so your brain just knows that you listen to the same track over and over and over... After quick search I used some random dark ambient video from YT (Hats off to the author it is awesome: "Sub Zero: Dark Sci Fi Music For Winter Relaxation (Deep And Relaxing)") and played it in the background, it improved the experience so much that I am sure it prolonged my motivation to play.
-the satisfaction you get from unification of states is destroyed in late game by watching it going into constant unrest because of low cohesion caused by... unification. It is a game and you destroy the biggest pleasure of the game mechanic you created which I understand is for the realism but you dont know what would happen in reality and this is fiction scenario so it was not necesseary to destroy your game for it. Also you can't slowly unify entire planet or at least solve the entire Earth stage so you can concentrate only on space where you still have more than enough to do. It is simply not interesting enough to keep you going so many hours doing the same thing and in the late game you just have to micromanage to keep control of your countries and I hate is so much... You should be able to at least stop completely the alien influence/fauna/whatever spreading when you have the orbit under control, and you should be able to have some event of purificating your planet and uniting the entire planet under one faction. Just solving this one problem somehow would switch my rating from not recommended to recomended. Also the ground battles are not very enyojable, and sometimes you have trouble knowing where your armies are especially when you have more countries with a lot of armies.
-combat in space is super unintuitive and unsatisfactory at least for me, I hated this part of the game and started to always autoresolve. Why people try to find new ways of something that was brought to perfection with original Homeworld games is beyond me, just copy that combat system for players sake. Even the developers of HW3 were dumb enough to not copy it wtf :D
-the engine bloat is really bad, I guess the developer had a reason for so many engines but for an avarage person that will play this game because of the lenghty gamplay maybe once, it is just super anoying. You don't even know which engines you should head for and you MUST use the internet or you are just screwed with wasting your reasearch on them and eventually you loose because of that.
- you find out mid game you made horrible choices and you are too much in to fix it and that is just wasting someones time which is bad game design period. For example it was not clear which stat is benefit for which ability and I build ESP for agent that did not have purge and realized I am pretty much screwed too late in the game while some other abilities are just usless or unusable in comparison. Same with research, you have too much options to just waste your precious research points and loose entire game because of bad research choices or bad priorities in State management. I only prevented this by looking things up online, new player is almost guaranteed to be screwed by using only info provided by the game. Also I couldn't even count how many times I had to reload a save
-game did not explain state management enough, understood it to the point I felt I knew what I was doing and for what purpose 30 hours in which is too late when you want to min/max from start

These are some small issues I had
-I think there is still a lot of room for UI optimization and making it less a chore.
-it is not clear what activities angers the aliens, so you can't reliably control the meter (again you need to use internet to get the info)
-in the upper UI research panel where all the info should be aggregated, you dont see where are the bonuses for reasearch from specifically by percentage, so it is difficult to tell if you can still build research centers that don't have diminishing returns.
-new research project does not show you details of what it does, you have to open the reasearch tree that is such a huge waste of time for a new player that doesnt know the tech
-in the fleet screen you dont see the class of ships you have in the fleet and all the ships look the same in size so you have trouble orienting which fleet is which.
-if you make custom fleet name you have to be carefull to not merge it the other way around or you loose the fleet name, the game should prioritaze the player named fleets to the game generated ones.
-sharing propelant is unintuitive if you want to do anything else then delta V EQ
-when rearranging the habs and stations priorities in filter when then scrolling in hubs menu the order of stations is not changed based on the custom order of stations.
-Neural engeneering and other implants for admins research lacks description of what the implants actually do and you can't make a decision if you need it based on it
-no warning that your fleet will be stranded.
-the purge is broken when fighting with 3 factions at once for control point you never get to purge fisrt (even if you crackdown at the same time) it just cancels your mission.
-you cant even recon the other councilmen because they teleport all over the world.
-purging is super anoying when you try to purge a point where AI is purgin as well you always only get message that there is nothing to purge. When you fight with 3 factions to get one country this is just super anoying.
-ship building not explained AT ALL and you get flooded with useless engines and combinatios which stems into unusable ships, made over 15 ship designs before I realized what to do to not get blown to bits and also had to look it up online. Ship refit blocked in a game with such problems is a HORRIBLE design choice.
-techtree UI is horrible for finding out what you need to research to get what, I really think this can be made much better
-social resarch for states keeps bloating social research choices, only solution is mark them obsolete even if you may need it later and forget it
-a lot of time it is not clear what to reaserch and do so you can unify states, had to use internet too.

I don't think devs want people to play this game.
This game is not even a game, but a horribly boring and long texts written on pretty UI and extremely obnoxious AI factions which won't die out like fungi.
If a seasoned strategy game player can't play the game after the so-called 'tutorial' and has to search through player community for the most basic information, it means the game and the tutorial is broke from its very foundation.

I love 4x games. This is sickening perversion of its definition. There is no diplomatic solution, there is no extermination. Where's strategy when there's no real choice but frustration? Enemy won't die, can't be reasoned with.

Bloody well done game.

The game is polished and made with love. I strongly suggest if you ever start playing this to:

1. Play on the easiest difficulty. It isn't easy and don't be ashamed, It will be a long campaign and you need this. Unless you are unemployed and have nothing better to do than play this 8 hours a day for a couple of weeks.
2. Don't think of it as a campaign to only defeat the aliens. Think of it more as a sandbox. Build up and colonize. Defend your stuff, etc.
3. Why wage guerilla war early with aliens? Because when they do surveillance they get significant advantage over time. And it really really really hurts them in the long run. Building up a missile fleet until you have MK3 weapons like railguns, lasers and coilguns. Where you can use something more... sustainable for long term fighting
5. save scum :)
6. Profit
It's a long ass campaign.