It's definitely a grand strategy game (with the attendant effort required to get into it), but if you're used to playing Paradox GSGs I found it wasn't too bad. I got it…maybe two or three years ago, and while I didn't end up actually completing a full campaign because the end game dragged a bit at that stage of development, I enjoyed it and have been meaning to get back into it to see what updates they've released since then. The 1.0 release is as good a time as any, I suppose!

I did really like the whole seven factions idea, and how they all have different goals and win conditions (some of them completely antithetical to each other – you can play as the faction that only wins by killing all the aliens, or the one that wins by helping the aliens take over Earth, to various flavors of "keep Earth safe", to the wildcard "let's figure out how to evacuate Earth's population somewhere else!" faction).