You know, if you like 4X games and don't mind spending maybe 20 minutes browsing player-made guides and learning the stuff that the game won't tell you but that you really need to know to succeed, it's quite good. The translations are idiosyncratic, and strange, but understandable. The AI isn't too challenging until you get near the top end of the difficulty ladder, and once you know all the rules, it's clear what you should do. There's a little more micro than strictly necessary, but it's a matter of a couple minutes per session, not even near a tenth of your time. And there's a lot of variety, and a lot of ways you can tweak and optimize your playthrough to keep things different. The various factions are nice, some of them play very differently from others. Power creep is probably the worst thing about the game - by the time you're solidly on top, nothing can pull you back down so there's not a lot of incentive to finish a game once you've already seen the endgame with that faction.

On sale it's well worth the price for fans of 4X, imo.