Whoa whoa whoa, hold up. You can only build one spaceship?
Yep. When your 'rank' increases, you can recruit allied ships, but you basically only can control one ship. And you can't land invasion forces, and despite the fact that my planets are all crawling with armed units, none of them will try to fight off enemy invaders.
And everyone asks for your help, no matter where you currently are of what you're currently doing. You're halfway across the galaxy? I don't care. Come help us kill a few infected creatures on our planet.
Help Captain! We're a T3 fully developed colony with a full turret defense, a deployed Mega-Turret and 50 modern, armed and completely useless fighters AND we're being attacked by 2 small pirate ships. Come quick!
Not to mention that early in the space stage, when you're ship still isn't upgraded, you can get attacked by HUGE alien forces that even with 2-3 allies you can't hope to beat, since the enemy ships have 2700HP (+escorts) while your fighter has 100 (7500 fully upgraded).
Oh yeah, and once you finally have a 50+ planet empire and start to feel powerful and confident, you'll be sent on a mission to the Galactic Core. THEN you'll realise just how tiny and insignificant your empire is. Even better, the star clusters can be spread a bit, so you can't jump towards the core with the current drive tech. And the only way to unlock a better drive tech is GRINDING. Do delivery missions and travel around till you visit 1000 stars.
Heck, a game that is tedious even with CHEATS just screams BAD DESIGN.