This was an interesting concept with gameplay basis that looks deep and promising ! The art style and music were also good. As you asked for some ideas, here are some ideas I thought of while playing the game.
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Von Neumann probesis a very intersting theme for a strategy game, may be you could a message describing the concept at the begining of the for the players that don’t now what is it.
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Adding more visual hints in addition to the text, like different color for a start system depending on its temperature, illumination,…
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Making the gameplay rules more explicit. It is a little hard to understand when and how the mutation happens. Some genetype features are also difficult to understant.
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Adding some kind of purpose to the gameplay loop. For exemple, you can let the player see that there is a very strange star system somewhere but to access the start system the player need to colonise other start systems first or to build a very specific probe genotype.
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Making the game a little more dynamic, for example by adding different animation depending on how many probes there are on a system. I am also wandering if real time with a pause button could not work with this gameplay.