Just a few things on the AI - it's rather easy to fool them on the medium difficulty.. I haven't tried hardest yet though. Also, the end-game seems to consist of lightning land grabs taking the planets that they're producing ships on and then slowly taking down their fortresses with coordinated and massed assaults.
A lot better than I thought it would.. wish it didn't run on automatically after the end of a level, I was checking another tab and came back to find I'd lost.. bit irritating