Ancient Space isn't necessarily a bad game. Some effort went into this and it does a few things well. But RTS is a really hard genre to get right. IMO Company of Heroes 2 and Starcraft 2 are the only good RTS games released In the past 10 years - and both of those had weak expansions. It's difficult to strike the right balance.

Pro

Ancient Space lets you pause and give orders. I wish every RTS game had this (i don't consider Total War to be RTS). You have a base ship that grows in power with permanent upgrades. You can pick a trio from a group of officers who provide you with their own special abilities. Smaller ships get permanent upgrades too. Some of the ship abilities are nice too. And the game looks pretty nice.

Con

One of the first things that stood out to me was the narration. It's bad. I was shocked to see it was done by bonafide sci-fi actors. I only heard Dina Meyer for a bit though, maybe it gets better later on.

While the graphics are nice, they really should have fixed terrain obstructing your view. At the very least terrain should become transparant. You definitely don't want to make your player constantly having to rotate the camera to get a proper view. It doesn't help that jumping to a group automatically sets the camera to follow them either.

The tutorial is poorly designed. It pauses the game for no reason, which isn't clear at all. I completed the objectives (move the camera, etc.) but the game seemed stuck. You just have to hit space but since there's no logical reason to pause the game while you're just moving the camera all alone i didn't notice it. Bizarre.

While it's nice they have a decent upgrade system and the selection of officers, the actual implementation is weak. Officers give twice-per-level temporary boosts (like extra damage), which is boring and bland. The upgrades for units are worse, only giving you higher numbers (+1 damage to x type, +1 speed). They could have actually been creative here.

The same goes for unit design in general. Everyone sort of has the same range. And there aren't different damage types, instead there are ship size types and you just have to match those. Seriously, you have a game with space ships, why not have weapons targetting armor, shields, crew, weapons, engines, etc.?

This design also leads to boring combat. You just have to assign ships that hurt type S to enemies of that type. And sometimes you get to use an ability, though exactly how those work is often unclear. What's the growing circle for? Do you click left or right?

Because neither side has bases (you spawn units from your flagship) the game is just you attacking an entrenched enemy, fighting simplistic battles against small groups while rebuilding/repairing in between. It just isn't interesting or exciting. The enemy isn't really a threat, winning seems to be just a matter of time. And it just takes too long. Missions can take an hour or so.

Conclusion

Slow, unexciting gameplay means Ancient Space never becomes interesting enough to warrant the time it takes to play through it. The developers should have looked at other sci-fi games and media to see how combat in space can be engaging. A better balance between attacking and defending would have helped a lot too.