Calling you back to the ship frequently so that you have the ability to change planets or change systems. The entire map of the game is basically real time and dynamic with a game master occasionally coming in to fuck with things.

You're supposed to tug of war fight with the AI over different planet systems and objectives. A lot of people are just basically sticking to One Planet their entire gaming session and it's currently causing super Earth to not really gain much ground because they will simply hard liberate a planet say from the automatons but then rush over to the bugs who have taken over a planet in the meantime. You're supposed to try to spread your effort out like it's an actual Active war

And there is so much design language in the game that shows this, did you know that if you are looking out at the ships while you're at a planet that those are fairly real time? Not perfectly obviously but when you see ships out your window shooting down orbitals sending down drop pods or exploding that's all something that was caused by an active gameplay session on that planet.

When people call down supplies you see that, if their ship explodes it means they just lost the mission, it helps you gauge how well a planet is currently going with the idea being you can now decide whether or not this planet is in need of more help or you should go elsewhere.

You also may want to change your loadout, you may have gotten enough metals to unlock a new weapon enough samples to unlock a new strategym or a ship module. So if you weren't frequently going back to the ship to spend them you would be stuck on an equipment set for quite a while which could easily kill the pace of the game.

Literally everyone I know is currently playing the game and I did a little bit of a pole in my group and most of them don't even remember that there is a store for spending real money and not a single one of us ever has spent any real money the game really isn't pushing it hard you can ignore it completely very easily