I've played this through basically the end of available content - 1-3 days' worth of play. It's tremendously impressive, rich with endless detail, but at times feels like it's held back by balance issues and a hostile UI.

It does a good job slowly escalating the things that you've got to manage. Early game is just about scrambling to bootstrap your station up, expanding your resources to keep up with a relentlessly growing population, and along the way you start slowly unlocking new gameplay elements. The core loop remains in that incremental-like bootstrap mode for a while, right up until you start dealing with upgrades that require credits -- at which point it shifts into something that feels more like a full-fledged colony sim. By then, you're juggling a handful of tabs, including research, diplomacy, defense and a stock market simulator.

Unfortunately, that's also when the game gets extremely bottlenecked on credits, to the point where nothing else is relevant. It's good incentive to dive into the stock market, but that ends up slowly taking you from famine to feast: after a few hostile corporate takeovers (buying over 50% of the stock of a corporation), you start getting more credit income than you know how to spend, and your new bottleneck becomes the slow, grindy rate at which your scientists can research the large number of costly tech upgrades that allow you to build ships and start exploring and/or fighting other factions. Then the bottleneck becomes your rate of exploration (you will unlock literally hundreds of planets LONG before you can build scouts to visit them and unlock all of their hand-crafted world entries), and/or acquisition of the He3 that fuels your fleet.

In summary, there is plenty here to enjoy, just be prepared to get stuck behind a succession of specific bottlenecks, and be prepared to explore every corner of the interface because the game does very little hand-holding about where crucial gameplay elements are.