My impression was that it's decent but not great (I initially bought most of the bits mainly because I love B5 but ended up unloading the whole set). There is a decent amount of good stuff, but I personally find that it's undone by all the things that usually sink a game of this type for me - too fiddly, too much downtime, and eliminated players. The cards are interesting but some are awfully powerful and building your deck would be interesting if you could actually get a decent number of cards without paying through the nose.

While I also agree in principle that the combat system was interesting, for me it failed somehow. It just didn't seem right, with two monster cruisers bashing away at each other, but unable to actually do any damage. The almost entirely deterministic nature of the combat didn't win me over. The torturous and anti-intuitive nature the movement system, of bringing in a ship and turning it around to dock with a planet or station, is insane. I also think the new races are either unbalancing (Shadows, Vorlons - good in a 5-6 player game but should be left out with fewer), too weak (Non-Aligned Worlds) or too pointless (Psi-Corps). The "collectible" nature of the game was really only minimally offensive to me, since this is hardly a game people are going to be building "play sets" for. You just take the cards you got and deal them out or the owner can pre-construct some reasonable decks. Or you can play with just one draw pile.

The positive features of the game include the tiles (well done, although some of the ones in the Reinforcement Pack are really too weird to use - Slipstream), the relatively streamlined nature of the system (reas onable counter density and lack of extraneous junk in the "simulation"), and semi-reasonable playing time. The cards and votes are a big win for me over random events and special rules, and the new victory condition in the 1.1 rulebook are a huge improvement.

I personally enjoyed the game more than I have enjoyed any other empire-building space-conquest game (Throneworld, Stellar Conquest, etc. - I have Sword in the Stars but haven't played it, maybe I should), but that's not saying a lot. In the end it's not a bad game, but like I've said in the past, I now own and have access to so many games these days that "not bad" isn't what it used to be.

(I haven't actually seen or played Twilight Imperium, but I'm told that it is a surprisingly similar system. It's interesting, B5CGS and TI are made by different companies; the B5CGS people have been pushing their new, fantasy hex-tile based CGS, Xena; I went to Origins, and what did the TI people have? Their own new fantasy, hex-tile based game, Battlemist (which by all accounts ... has some problems). Possibly rushed out to beat Xena? Gotta get at that important hex-tile-based-fantasy-boardgamer market segment, lest they buy one but not the other. What's the deal? Don't these guys have any new ideas?