I play a great many strategy games and I consider myself to be a fairly decent player, though not great by any means. On the one hand, I truly enjoy playing IG2.  The mechanisms of planet building and support, the ship design, the research tree, and the general interface are all excellent and make the game a pleasure to play.  Or would if the difficulties (easy, normal, hard) were actually indicative of anything. When I play a game on easy, I expect to learn how to play and very likely win on my first try.  In IG2, the easy was so easy, I won before I really felt I had a handle on the game. Normal level should be a challenge.  I should need to play well, and in the end, I should still only win about half the time.  I've lost count of how many times on "normal" (as the Solarians) I have not even come close to winning.  I get wiped out every time by a Kra'Hen fleet so large I can't even conceive of what I would need to do to make one half its size.  Sometimes I die even sooner. Goodness forbid that I even try to play on "hard" difficulty. For any normal game, I have come to expect that the "hard" difficulty to really be "nearly impossible".  In IG2, normal mode does this, and I feel the game is hardly worth the trouble as a result. I have tried as the Shinarians as well, with similar results. In conclusion, while I truly liked the game architecture, I cannot recommend this to anyone.  I found this to be one of the most frustrating games I have played in quite some time.