It had so many strategic choices, giving it a depth that would surprise most modern gamers seeing it for the first time. Starting with the race design, where your choices can make or break your game. Choose wisely! Then there's ship design, which is a whole other layer of possibilities.

Plus, the fact that you can fly anywhere through space, not just through artificially-constrained wormholes, means that the strategy of attacking another player can involve a lot of subtlety and bluffing. Fly a medium-sized fleet into deep space, skirting the edge of his scanner range, while you fly a big fleet directly towards his key production worlds. Then on the turn when he is expecting you to reach his worlds and start bombing (and when you think he's going to send his ships to intercept yours), turn your big fleet around and fly it home. Meanwhile, fly your smaller, pre-positioned fleet in from the other side of his empire. His ships will be caught out of position as they'll follow their orders to chase your fleet, a lot farther than he thought they would in one turn, and they won't get back to the other side of his empire in time to prevent you doing a lot of damage. Then, when he's not paying attention to your big fleet, turn it around AGAIN and do even more damage.

There are ways to counter that, of course, but it's easy to catch people off-guard if they haven't noticed yet that you can send ships anywhere, not just between two planets.

What an excellent game that was. I'm so glad it's possible to play it again.