Firstly, I never said I required anything, or that you were wrong. I said your argumentation was iffy. I even said that Civ is a rather shallow franchise, but I have played it for an obscene number of hours, so 'depth' isnt always needed. Anyway, to answer your first question: yes, it is far more than a ship buying simulator. Simply put, I've about 1500 hours or so in, and never cared about getting more money about getting more ships. If its nothing more than that to you I am sorry to hear that.
As for whether or not it is deep, I am not sure how meaningful that is without comparing it with anything. But I have played with 'newbies' reasonably often, so let me present two situations.
1) When in combat once, my wingmate had his canopy blown out. As a result emergency oxygen was activated, which depends on the quality of your life support systems. Your choice in life support is not only decided by how much credits you can spend, but also by how much added weight and power consumption you can spare. After getting back to SC, it became apparant there was no station with a repair function in the system, and with an D-rated life support time was running out fast. So I recommended him to go to the station without repair function. At this point he was getting a bit panicky and started to doubt that would help much, but I convinced him to hurry up anyway. After he landed he was indeed unable to repair his ship. However, in the secured hangar he was able to re-fill his emergency oxygen, giving him another 7.5 minutes to reach safey. Meanwhile I used the galaxy map to buy system data, and found a station within one jump close to the primary star. He survived with two minutes to spare.
2) When helping a budding trader, I was asked why narcotics were illegal in that system. The player thought that commodity was legal, he had traded it a fair few times before there. I explained that different governments have different laws, and that there had been a war that resulted in a different faction assuming control. He asked how he could contribute to a war if it broke out. I explained you could obviously join the war zones, but you could also supply them with commodities (weapons and armor often paying very well then), or blow up civilian ships of the opposing faction. This would be considered a crime, but it was up to the player if you wanted to be a supplier, combat pilot or war criminal. Later the commodity became legal again, but the same faction was still ruling. It turned out that the region had been taken over by Delaine, who legalised narcotics (among other things), and opened black markets for stolen commodities.
You can call it shallow or deep, but when you compare this with any modern spacegame, either released or in development, this is relatively deep. And if you would have said that in a year of release this would actually be in-game, noone would have dared to believe it during the kickstarter. But we take everything we get for granted and just set the bar a bit higher after every new update. The game isnt finished, there is LOADS of stuff they can add or improve on, but the whole 'ED is shallow just grind and credits" complaints are really quite untrue.
. What I am worried about is that a) further depth is somehow impossible due to architectural/financial/other constraints, b) the damage regarding the franchise's financial viability being done with the perception that Horizons was overpriced, and has under delivered, c) that in extending the franchise to include things like "walking about and interacting with 3D NPCs in the game", we get into the Star Citizen situation with feature creep, or shallow and repetitive/reused features, by diluting focus, and d) for a franchise that was built on a groundbreaking reputation for innovation, we seem to be accepting a lack thereof.
