I’d say Microing is mitigated here to a good degree through automation aspects the developers put in: the actual “grunts” that perform resource collecting/distributing/building/repairing/etc are all automatically built as resources/population levels permit, so all you really have to do is worry about what buildings and defenses you want around your planet. So once you build the actual resource buildings and upgrade your planet (all on one menu, see below), resource collection is all internal, so you can concentrate on building up planets.
In terms of creating battle fleets, it tends to be easy. Each planet has an individual menu that you can use to select all aspect of building and/or upgrading. If it’s a building, you choose where to place it: units are qued up like typical RTS’ and sent to designated waypoints as they’re built. I do not recall having to select individual buildings in order to build that building’s specific units, only the planet itself.
Controlling fleets: hit and miss. On the one hand, it’s possible to set capital ships to auto-use any of their special weapons, so you don’t have to micro manage them if you don’t want to. On the other hand, this can lead to them blowing through their “mana” (“antimatter” in the game) before they use the abillities you actually want them to, and there’s no way to set up macros or such to give them instructions. So if a particular ability you want them to use takes more antimatter, you have to deselect the individual ships’ other abilities or else it will probably never hit the big guns (probably because each ability has a cooldown timer, and sometimes smaller abilities take a while to cooldown, so the ship can possibly hit bigger abilities when the timing’s right).
Upgrading ships: hit and miss. Hit because when a cap ship levels up (yes, actual leveling with XP and everything), if you here the (very distinctive) audio queue and are keeping track of incoming messages like you should, you can locate the ship and upgrade it rather quickly. Miss because, unfortunately, you have to individually select the ship you want to upgrade. If you have a battle fleet of 20 ships of the same type, this amounts to individually selecting each ship until you find the one you wanted (there are other small things that help you find it, but the fact remains that it can be a pain sometimes). Then again, since leveling auto-upgrades power/defense/hp/etc of the ship, and all you really choose is the special ability you want upgraded, if you have 20 cap ships, you can usually ignore the other ships upgrading and focus on your “flag ships” (each unique ship in the fleet with the highest level.
Other aspects (technology tree, pirates, diplomacy, etc): Easy peasy. You click, you wait for the “ding”, you revel in the benefits, you click the next one. Repeat to your desire.
Again, overall: micromanaging fleets before and after fighting can be mild to moderate, same as during fighting. Micromanaging planets can be near non-existant if they’re fully upgraded and built out, mild if they’re not and you want to keep developing them.

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I didnt like it that much, seeing as how I dislike micro’ (which was also the reason I didnt like Homeworld as much as I could have) but SoaSE’s macromanagement scheme makes my brain go WOO!

To recap, NEXUS is micro, this looks awesome.

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If I had any coding skills I try to do a Homeworld 2 mod, but my thing is art and design not coding.

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I also have been looking for a space game RTS where you control only one ship, with a lot of micromanagment.

Hmm interesting, I’m not sure about the RTS part though… My vision is more a 3D Escape Velocity, thus an RPG of sorts. Although the point is you basically are the ship (whichever ship you are flying) as you have no real existence outside of flying, so it’s kinda the same.

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Bring on the Space Opera baby

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KG

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We aren’t too worried as it’s available as a digital download for around £23 or so but it’s just suprising that such an obviously high quality title hasn’t got any distribution deals over here.

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