So my friend was kind enough to buy me a copy of the game before it sold out at Gen Con. I got it into my sweaty hands yesterday, cracked it open, and spend the evening poring over it. I've looked through most of it now. I'll be giving a more detailed review if I can spare the time, but I wanted to bring up a couple of things that I noticed that I thought were cool. I also want to start a positive thread to balance out a more negative "gripe" one I'm thinking about making!

Action Card Mini Stories: If you look at the flavor text on some of the AC's, the ones that come in multiples (like Morale Boost, 4 in the deck), you may realize that each card has a unique flavor text, but it also tells a story if you read them all together. The Morale Boosts tell a story about a captain giving a pep-talk to his crew before going into battle. When you get the game, I encourage everybody else to see if they can find any other stories. I thought that was a very nice subtle touch. I don't think all of them do this (I couldn't make sense of the Sabotages, didn't feel cohesive to me) but a lot of them do.

Promissory Notes: Every color of plastic gets a deck of these, and each faction gets their own to add to their deck each game. But what's interesting about the rules is that as far as I can tell, when you give these away to somebody as part of a deal, there's no rule that prohibits them from giving that same card away in turn to somebody else. So you might give a card to somebody who can't really hurt you with it, only to find later on that your biggest threat has just the card to bend you over. I thought that was really cool. Be careful who you make concessions to!

Anybody else have any cool things that they've uncovered while looking through the content yet?

Somewhere I read them specifically saying that promissory notes could be traded along a chain like that.

Another thing I like (without having played yet) is the way they've approached fighters. I think they'll be even more limited (though slightly) than they were in Shattered Empire. I still think they should have made fighters and ground forces 1 resource each (for various reasons I don't feel like arguing about here), but they've taken an unexpected approach to limiting fighter fleets in the early game. Carriers are limited to 4 capacity pre-upgrade, and upgraded carriers take longer to get. It costs the same amount of resources to tech (12), but you need 2 blues and the carrier upgrade rather than starting with full 6 capacity and just needing XRD. Sure, Gravity Drive can be used on 1 carrier, but it will be a little harder to double dock, pump out a nasty fighter fleet on the second or third turn, and pulverize any other fleet comp short of massed ADT Destroyers (which are much harder to do and can't take planets).

1 hour ago, Forgottenlore said:

Somewhere I read them specifically saying that promissory notes could be traded along a chain like that.

Here:

60.5 When resolving a transaction, a player can trade a maximum
of one promissory note from his hand to another player, even if
that card originally belonged to another player.