Tap to pick to pick your land, slide your finger/thumb to move your character during the plot the management phase.
The auction has plus/minus symbols that control the bartering at the auction.  Overall it works well, the bartering can be kind of trick, but i'm playing on the iPhone i'm sure its easier on the Ipad.

The AI isn't very strong.  They seem to focus on mining and forget about energy. I've played several games and was able to focus only on energy and at each auction sell the energy to the bot for 200+ each time.  LOL
Even when I tried to help them by selling cheap to benefit the colony it doesn't seem to help. They don't seem to have the ability to reprioritize their goals based on the colony activities.
Also there is no MP yet.

PROS:
All classic species with that have their original bonus or handicaps.
The Plot development phase is done at once, so everyone is able to get their mules at once.  This makes the game faster, but no one is every deprived of their mule.  Since the AI always produces Smithore, there's never a shortage of mules, if there were more Humans i'm sure this would change. 

CONS:
No MP (yet) they said its coming soon.
Weak AI  (they say it emulates the original games coding but I don't remember the commodore AI to be this weak, they always would produce energy and there more of a balanced economy.)

Over all its a good game, its was only 2.00. Hopefully the next rounds of patches resolves some of these issues.

What if you we added the concept of pollution to the planet and instead of adding a new minable resource to the game we could add recycling centers? The recycling centers would absorb the amount of pollution that the player’s smithore mines would create; in exchange the player could produce a recycled luxury good that could be sold off world at the store.

To further expand, the mining restrictions could be removed from the river valley, players could mine for crystite but this would slowly poison the water supply and make it harder for food to be produced. Eventually the soil and terra would degrade to the point where it would lead to planet quakes that’s could disrupt the mining on the colony. If the player was using as “slash and burn” mining operation the colony would eventually fail because food could no longer be produced. If a player waited until the late game to try this then it would lower the total colony score.

This would prevent players from strip mining land and would allow for more of a more interesting end game strategy to play for.  It would also may even the playing field for the player who chose to only go into smithore and ignore crystite because they would have the ability to produce luxury goods through recycling. The trade off with recycling is that they would have to forfeit extra mining operation, food or energy because the recycling center would take up a whole plot. The player could even have the option to recycle all smithore into luxury goods, the cost would have to be either 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 to prevent players from simply cornering the market by creating a cash sink that would be safe from other players tampering. The luxury good price would also have to rise and fall per turn similar to crystite. But, it too many players were producing luxury goods the price could be set to stay low since the good would be so widely available in the intergalactic market place. Crystite could be modified the same way for balancing purposes.

The pirates would never be interested in luxury goods, but other random events could be setup to only affect the recycling centers. These way players would have to weigh the risks of producing the good for either luxury resources or crystite. If you produce crystite, pirates may rob you. If you produce luxury goods you run the risk of other specific random effects.

The pollution could be even setup up as a trade able commodity called “Toxic Waste” it would never be sold to the store but could be sold in the auction to another player for cash. So if you were running a smithore operation and were sitting on your toxic waste to cut costs, eventually you would have to pay a higher disposal fee or risk killing your entire production or even the rest of the colony. This would also players to have a “go green” strategy in the rare instance where all 4 players actually worked together to make a healthy, balanced colony and economy.

Any thoughts?

How do you change your character? I'm stuck being the human.