I thought it had incredibly poor pacing, exemplified by the fact that the 'intended' route to pass the third stage of the mission is to build and retire ships until you gain enough commander xp to hit a certain rank so that you have access to frigates, which takes the better part of at least an hour while you do nothing. And you can't even do "productive nothing", ie. move your carrier towards the objective, because the objective is surrounded by a radiation cloud and it will slowly eat you. And no, you don't start with harvester repair tech or get access to an anti-radiation module, because ♥♥♥♥ you.

Like, I cannot emphasize enough just how stupid that is. I encourage everyone to try it themselves as a prime example of how not to structure an RTS mission. There are smart ways to use "downtime" to affect a player's mood and hype them up for the next crescendo, but starting the game by creating a no-win scenario for following the objective as quickly as possible instead of sitting around is not it.