Infinite Lagrange

So this game is not for everyone. It takes long long long time to get what you need/want...or if you get lucky then you will get everything early! I do not recommend spending too much money on this game, sure getting battlepass is worth! BUT beside that no...if you once start you wont be able stop either playing or spending money or even make second account...or more of them. Its fun game as soon as you get some friends there and in some decend community!

Very grindy, but the community is really supportive. Finding good people is very easy. The politics in the game can be somewhat discouraging though but I guess that is part of why this game is so appealing to adults and militarymen

(I played the mobile version six months before I tried the steam version)
It's a fun game... as long as you go into it knowing full well that it's a port of a mobile game.
It's based on what I find to be a really fun mobile game, that has a lot of mechanics that I like and that I don't feel is *too* pay-to-win (at least when compared to other mobile games), but... it's still a port of a mobile game.
This is a 4x game played on a galactic map. You can see other players around you, and you're competing for the same resources. Build up your base, build up your fleets, join a guild, and try to conquer the star system.
When you begin, you are placed in a beginner only server. You will be among players on the same level (theoretically). Playing through this server will give you several helpful ship blueprints and teach you how to play the game.
Servers only last a couple of months or so before they end, whereupon you and your guild have a few days off before you can all go in your next server. All your building and mining progress will be reset, but you can keep any ship blueprints you acquire.
On that note... ships can only be built after you have acquired their blueprints. But once you've acquired it, it's yours forever through every single server you go on from then on. Ship blueprints are acquired through a gacha system (or "research boxes") and these aren't actually guaranteed to have blueprints every single time. But they will always have helpful items and the game is generally quite generous with them, especially shortly after a server begins.
On a final note... this game sucks solo. You are an easy target. You NEED to join a guild if you want to enjoy this game. But once you do... find a good guild and this game is great.
Just... keep in mind it's a mobile port and don't set your expectations too high.

Its a nice game if you like base-building style game-play not much to say.

Its also a pc port of a mobile game.

Venturing into the vast unknown of space strategy games, Infinite Lagrange offers an intriguing blend of expansive exploration and intricate warfare. However, it falls short compared to genre leaders like EVE Online in terms of depth and community engagement.

Graphic: Extremely good for a free game. It's like playing a modern, strategy version of EVE.
Interface: Needlessly confusing UI, way too much info is hidden under layers and layers of sub-menus.Very hard to navigate and find the info you need.
Gameplay: It gets better after around 10-20 hours in, you start to get the hang of which building does what job, and some basic ships to build. Kinda fun and peaceful in the 1st phase of your star-system (your server). Expect some pirates here and there but if you manage your ships well you can beat them. Lots of things to learn, lucky most folks are friendly enough if you ask them.
The Bads: As expected of a F2P, you start slowing down significantly after you get your base to level 5 or 6, after you have received all the "free blueprints", which are mediocre, sub-par ships anyway.
Then if you need new ships you can only rely on the daily free box, which has ALMOST no chance of blueprints, only trash. Or you can spend money to buy the better boxes, which has a TINY chance of getting blueprints.
Once you finish Phase 1 of your star system, you have to migrate to another new star-system and lost everything you've built: your base, your platforms, your ships, your resources etc. The only thing you can keep are the blueprints you found and the things you bought with real money.
* Worth trying for free if you like a good graphic capital ships management.

Honestly this game is quite large, considering the mobile heritage it comes from.
First off, yes, there are P2W mechanics in the game. You can spend truly silly amounts here if you are inclined. That said, many people play the game for free quite effectively, and the actual amount of money one should budget for the game, in my opinion, is reasonable: The Dawn Funding Scheme is a battle pass that lasts for about six weeks and gives you rewards for playing the game, and the Dawn Financial Plan is a weird currency investment option that takes a certain amount of in-game currency and triples it, over the course of several weeks. If I am correct, it was about $20 for the six weeks of gameplay for the basics.
Secondly, this is a strategy MMO. It's mildly similar to some games like Age of Empires (which I didn't play) and Game of Thrones: Conquest (which I did play, and is substantially worse than Infinite Lagrange.) You can consider it a little bit like a multiplayer Civ-like, where you have a base that you upgrade over the course of the season, with resources you mine using spaceships. There's both PvP and PvE, and you build fleets to deal with both. Unlike a lot of games in this genre, collective action is stressed much more, and the game expects you to find a good group to play with.
The game proceeds in seasons: while you're waiting for your next season to start, the game places you in a "hub" station in the Pioneer system. Spending too much time in the hub station is a bad idea, but generally you also can't/shouldn't jump into an actively running season. Instead, wait for a season to start that has the criteria you're looking for, and start the season at the beginning rather than in the middle. The in-game chat can be used to find a community to play with while you're waiting.
Seasons are one of the hardest things to explain to new players. Everyone who joins a server does so with a fresh base - you need to build up your ability to build ships, collect resources, perform side quests. This base expansion is one of the several focuses of play during the game. At the end of the season, each player is ranked according to several possible metrics - were you part of a faction that was militarily dominant? That's extra kudos. Did you have a side agreement to scan every rock in the system? If you did, that's extra benefits. And at the end, all your base progress gets reset for you to jump into a new system and do it again.
What does NOT reset are which ships you know how to build (expressed as Blueprints), and permanent upgrades allocated to those ships (expressed as Technical Points). So the second season, you will have more ships, and they will be more impressive than your first season. One of the big reasons to get the battlepass is a relatively stable stream of Tech Files, which are full of both technical points and new blueprints.
And in terms of the feeling of progression, Infinite Lagrange delivers. Each ship has half a dozen systems of interlocking components to advance. Even when you're not getting permanent tech points for your ship, if you're using the ships, they're getting temporary tech points for use during that season. As the season goes on, your ships will be getting stronger, and you'll be building bigger ships as your base gets more mature. Unfortunately, you won't always have access to the blueprints you want - the game uses a gacha-esque system where you open tech files boxes and you get what you get. There's a pity system that rewards you with "research points" and you can spend those to narrow down the options, but on some level, you are always at the whim of the game's RNG.
Having acquired a LOT of blueprints, I can tell you the game simulation is quite in-depth. Where you put upgrades matters, and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your ships matters. Building a good fleet can be hard, but the community as a whole tend to be relatively welcoming and willing to suggest improvements. I think of this very similarly to a tabletop war game like Warhammer 40k. A bit of the game is about thinking about the pieces and how they can best be used together.
There's a bunch of things there's no room to cover here - there's different kinds of game modes for a season to be in, from mining Trojite, to simply being about who can take the most cities, to data recovery. There's different personal objectives one can have, from collecting war victories, to prospecting for science, to even allying with pirates. There's a whole other game that's meant to run in tandem with the base game called Angulum. For a F2P game, it has a LOT going on.
And to be fair, it equally has a lot of weird buggy stuff - sometimes textures get screwed up and ships might not render as you expect, sometimes there's latency and ships will seem to glitch forward, sometimes the fact that the company that produces the game is based in China produces hilariously bad Engrish translations. But there are precious few games that are trying to do what Infinite Lagrange does, especially in the sci-fi genre. Many people will be turned off by the pace of the game or by the monetization. But if those are NOT turn-offs, then IL might be exactly the speed you want it to be.
And hey, it's free to find out.