I'm enjoying the game a lot so far. I tried out worldbuilder and when I previewed the map I realised that actually meant I'd started a game... so I played it out and things went quite well. Not a great starting position, but I managed to get trade alliances with one neighbour, defeated another, got a ceasefire with the first.. then a full alliance. There was a third strong player, but I got a ceasefire and trade deal with him.

The game had some oddities. There was a very large list of players... far more than I ever saw. I thought that I had probably accidentally created a map with more than one star system and carried on playing to see. Around the time I perfected my defenses my ally decided to declare war. All great fun so far.

However during the assault on my former ally's homeworld (thought I'd go for the throat ) the game tried to communicate on the network and was stopped by "Windows Firewall". That's the first issue - what was it doing several hours in to a single-player game trying to transmit for the first time? That looks rather surreptitious and sneaky.

The second issue is that the game shut itself down immediately afterwards. This was the same behaviour I had seen when using the main menu button to go to the SoaSE website to download the extras - but I wasn't at the main menu, I was in the middle of a game.