So, I've just come across the reason why Astro Empires can ultimately fail to remain fun in the end: there are no real restrictions on attacking other players. By this I mean that in the most extreme case, a player who joined on day one can attack a player whose account isn't even a day old. (The whole "Fleet movements from F00-59 to F60-69 are not allowed until 15-03-2009" thing, to use the current "limit," doesn't count because it's possible for a player to start in one of the F6- galaxies on the 15th and be completely defenseless when players from higher galaxies start pouring in, and the limited amount of time they give isn't going to be enough to build a sufficient defense.)
The reason this has come up is because I just got a message from a day-one player (he's also 10.65 levels higher than I am, and probably has multiple fleets of tens or even hundreds of thousands of units to send at my budding fleet of 1730) saying that his (day-one) guild was going to slaughter everyone in our guild except the first five to confirm they would act as spies. (Keep in mind that none of the players in our guild have accounts older than a month.) Now, I know this game is all about PvP, but you'd think there would be level bounds for attackers or something so that having signed up for the game months earlier isn't an utterly unstoppable and unavoidable advantage.
All I know is that if my base gets decimated by some punk who started playing back in November because of this, I'm not logging in again - though it's not like I'll really have a choice in the matter, since I won't be able to do anything whatsoever for some time if my base is occupied.
EDIT: The slashed-out parts of this post are wrong. Apparently there are level bounds (in which players cannot attack other players that are ten levels lower) and the guy who sent this message to everyone in my guild didn't realize this.