Hey guys. We've all been waiting to have a peek at the UI, even though it's in the early phases, and it's shown off quite promintently in some new screenies over at GameSpot (see the external link at the bottom of this post). So let's hear the reaction you've been waiting so long to deliver.

Looks pretty nifty as far as I'm concerned. Some of the unit stats that pop up might not be especially useful for players in-game... but they might just be in there for debugging. Some of the graphics look like they aren't fully polished yet, but that's not really surprising... you don't exactly polish the graphics first, now do you.

Of course, being the media hungry being that I am, I'd really like to see a gameplay preview showing the UI in action, namely how it can be used to manage combat across multiple theaters/systems, whatever you want to call them. It's pretty obvious that the mechanics of the Empire Tree are going to be the meat and potatos of this game, so I am (and I suspect others are ) really interested in how this is going to work.

So, I'd like to add in a question to go with your reaction: How do you think it's going to feel to manage your empire?