Well, the hi-res images were nice, still not sure about overtly sexual looking people in the ranks.
I went through the tutorials, more or less understood what needs to be done to start. From what I can say the new game is busted. At the very start I can't create a new design. It shouts it needs a reactor and I have one. I don't have the probe (which was present in the tut) so I believe I can't mount a reactor until I get that probe there. Going to research and I have no research points, no production points. No points at all. Going to the administration with the sliders and at the very beginning I have something like 400 research/750000 (or more) cost per month. Clicking on it resets everything and now I have 0/0 in research. Also I have +50 to funds but still +0 Ecu per month and sliders just don't work. I tried both easy and normal to see if it changes anything but no cigar. In tutorial I had the possibility to increase/decrease it. I restarted the game to see if tutorial has any input on it but it stayed the same (btw tutorial does have influence on the main game as I had more money once after starting the tutorial and the speed was x16). Running the simulation increases funds, nothing else so I'm stuck at the very beginning.
Other than that you can click "back" on the tutorial during the designing your new ship, red markings stay, your design is scrapped and you can't progress further as the game expects you to do different operation there.
Witha game like that I kept thinking of Stronghold or Warcraft 3. When you had problems the guy holding your book would say that "this and this is low, please do this to improve it". In W3 you had very simple message "not enough stables to produce units", and you know immediately what to do. Maybe you have something like that in your game (I couldn't progress so I wouldn't know) but if not, it needs it badly.