There is a third forum you could visit, the Slitherine one (but I cannot post links). Not a lot of activity there, but it is the "native" Polaris Sector forum to me. I never dare to check the Steam forum.

I think you're absolutely right when you say that Polaris is not for everyone. Polaris is a Good New Game for Good Old Players. I whish it has a more complete manual, like the beautiful big manuals of the "Civ" series or the "Master of" series.

Thanks for mentioning the Slitherine forum.

Yes here: http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=404

I've completed several games at this point. My experience has been that the game suffers from the runaway lead problem. If you've got a bigger empire it lets you support a bigger military and a bigger tech advantage, which in turn lets you conquer rivals and expand your empire further, which in turn leads to an even bigger military and tech lead. So far I've yet to even see the second half of the tech tree, find out what the artifacts do, or encounter the "external threat", and I've put more hours into this game than I suspect most casual players would. The game simply ends before you reach the high-tech stuff because someone gets a runaway lead and that's that.

Isn't this a general issue with all 4X (and probably all strategy) games? Better economy wins, based on colony rushing or whatever. And it makes sense, too - and places a high demand on the AI: In order to be better than the human player, it must either develop its economy faster, or hinder the economic development of the human player, for example by military actions. Other methods to counter or limit the high relevance of economy are scarcity of resources, random events, other victory conditions (not so heavily influencable by economy), or outright cheating (more resources, more information, ...).
Do you think Polaris Sector is worse with respect to what you call the runaway lead problem than other 4X games? Do you think it's a balancing or an AI issue?

It's not so much a problem that it happens (after all, we do expect an avenue for victory) but rather that there seem to be no counter-measures built into the game, and that the pace at which that "critical mass" is reached isn't proportionate to the size of the tech tree.

A common solution is to have some kind of size or sprawl penalty, so that big empires are less efficient than small ones. Otherwise an empire that is twice as big just ends up being twice as good at everything. Twice as many resources, twice as much production, twice as much tech. This ends up making you more than twice as powerful overall, since having twice as many units that are of a higher tech level is more than twice as powerful. There also tends to be an efficiency of scale with big empires.

So you're saying that you don't really need to explore the tech tree to win a match, that to build up a powerful economy is enough, and that the AI is not really strong in using the game's features to put up a decent fight.
Like I said, I haven't progressed far enough in Polaris Sector to be able to form my own opinion. All I know is that I like the game so far, and this is enough for me to continue playing. And there is always the possibility to define your own game rules, for example to try to win without using certain game features (like trying to survive in an RPG world without using certain powerful weapons, armours or spells - can be fun!) or to play handicapped races.

It's not even that you don't need to, it's that you'll never get an opportunity because you've already won. To be clear these are interesting and advantageous technologies, but the game-winning advantage is determined very early when empires are young, and the initial land-grab can make the rest of the game a forgone conclusion if someone ends up with too big of an advantage.

As for the AI, it mostly seems to cheat. This is especially obvious in the early-game where it amasses completely mind-boggling defenses on top of huge offensive fleets. I started a new game on challenge difficulty last night as the Sharatar and ended up at war with the humans. I had a fleet consisting of two Corvettes, while at the time (to the best of my intel, based on subsequent invasions) the humans seven corvettes, a troop carrier, about a hundred fighters, and about a dozen orbital satellites. Due to my racial advantage I was still able to beat them, but it was comically obvious that they'd cheated to build such a massive military so quickly.

Speaking of which, the Fireball Accelerator is a really weird military technology. Many factions (Magellan, Sharatar, Vagalar) get it extremely early, and it completely outclasses all other early-game weapons with its massive attack range. Factions that don't get, like the Drill or Humans, are basically just target practice and may as well not bother building satellites or combat corvettes since they can't get into range to shoot back. This weapon just seems so out of place to me, and leads to a real "have" and "have-not" discrepancy between the races in terms of their early-game power just based on whether they have this weapon.

I do like the game as well, but it definitely has a lot of rough edges. It's not a deal-breaker, and at this point I've gotten enough enjoyment out of the game that it'd take something really toxic to mar my overall impression of the game.

Have you tried turning off the domination victory condition?

That only makes things worse. By the time you're triggering domination victory, the other empires are so thoroughly and utterly beaten that they're not interesting challenges anymore. So instead of being awarded victory, you have to play through several centuries of boring wars against enemies who really can't fight back. If anything, domination victory takes too long to occur.

As a rule of thumb, I find the game is basically over once you're twice as big as the second-biggest empire. Domination victory takes much longer than that to occur, and it's actually rather boring to have to play out this long stretch where you're the sole remaining superpower and you just need to pick off the other races one by one until the game finally admits that yes, you've won.