Read the manual, "never" I'm great at these type games. LoL Took me a bit of forum reading to get my head around the economy and interface.

Economy if I get it .. big IF... your building factories and research centers like a "motor" , with the slider, 0 to 100% (default 50%) as the gas pedal to pump your "credits" "cash" through it as fast or slow as you like? Which is different from you buy a factory it produces x production.

Interface is good once you get used to all the small things they put in to make it work... Like in the trade window you trade this tech for that then use the sliders to add cash to make the deal green (good) or red (bad) there is a little up down arrow that adds 10 credits per click that helped alot here... beats 100 single clicks on the slider bar.

Another one that finally I saw was the little + sign by the ships in a fleet so you can disband a single ship from the fleet.

I know I know read the manual right.

Another feature I found I like was put the mouse cursor over either the mini map or main map and roll the mouse wheel to zoom .. knew it worked on the main map but used the + - in the mini for 2 days before figuring that out.

Now if someone could explain if what i'm reading in the combat log is correct ... what does one of the defensive icons lighting up mean and if a weapon is lit does it mean it used that weapon to do that damage?

In the late game on a huge map I have a reproducable bug.... I have 2 saves that I normally overwrite.... If I save over both of those or even create a new save the game CDT's on loading ... BUT I happened to do a quick save at the same time ....
That FILE is GOOD.......I have quit 3 times now saving "named games" that CDT on loading but the quick save works....
It's bailed me out 3 times now. So basically I am unable to save a named game and continue at this point....It was working normally until I got up to about Phaser II in the tech tree... I know that dosent mean much but about MID game I guess.

But I wasn't sure I liked this game better then the GalCiv at first but after playing for 3 days I'm convinced.... Great Job guys..
Could use a spell checker, I'm afraid to spell anything anymore.