This is a fantastic game. Indeed, it only gets challenging when you’re new and discovering how it works. Then, you quickly find the technique and it’s more about wanting to play through it and “live” it until you finally succeed. It’s still worth it.
The best part is, of course, the beginning until you get developed and you find who else is in the galaxy, make enemies and alliances. Later on, the war gets very slow. The problem is that, in order to remain competitive, your best choice is to never skip a frame if you can exploit it. So when you have hundreds of worlds, it takes a long time to advance a single day.
I have dreamed of a real-time version of this game, ideally, also multiplayer, many times. One game that’s real-time and has some resemblance in Endless Sky (that I sometimes play in my PC on GNU/Linux), but it’s also single player.
I discovered Ascendancy when the game was already some 15 years old. I wish I had known it when it just came up!
