Hey Andy, welcome to the forums!
The reason why the game is so easy is because the game
doesn't play against you; the AI (Artificial Intelligence) hasn't yet been implemented, so the other empires and races quite literally don't know how to even feed themselves, let alone know how to build stuff or wage war against you.
The AI will likely be the single most complicated-to-program part of the game, and Mike (The developer) hasn't even started to program it yet. It will be several months (At least) before Mike will be able to release even a early version of the AI, and it will take a lot of tweaking to get it working right, and the only way we can ensure that it does what it is supposed to is for people to playtest the game. Otherwise we could end up with the Terran Empire instead of the United Federation of Planets, and Klingons that run at the first sign of battle.
I'm sorry that this probably isn't what you wanted to hear, especially the time scale that i'm talking about. Mike has other concerns at the moment though, such as bug fixing, getting the game ready so he can actually create the AI, and, most importantly, he's living his life; we're all volunteers here, even Mike. None of us are being paid to make the game, so we have to fit the development of the game around our lives. Sometimes we have tons of free time, sometimes we don't. But we're doing the best we can. The AI will be implemented as soon as is possible, you'll just have to wait.
...That doesn't mean you can't play against a game though. BotE - Birth of the Empires - is a rival project to Supremacy that we are also supporting. BotE is a different game to Supremacy, and has been under development for a longer time - and it already has an AI. A particularly tough one by all accounts. If you want to test it out, we have the download available on our portal page. Unfortunately, the portal requires users to log in before they can download files. The portal also has a separate log in system to these forums becaue we haven't yet figured out how to bridge the two database systems - so you'll need to sign up to the site portal first.
Click
This Link and fill in the details to create an account. You *should* be able to use the same account login details as you use on this forum, as long as someone hasn't already created an account called deadlyandy.
Once you've signed up, click
This Link and it will ask you to log into your account. Do so, then click the blue "Download" link that is near the top of the page that loads to download BotE.
_________________"Anyone without a sense of humour is truly at the mercy of the rest of us."