Hiya, best place to look is the egosoft forums (they're the developers), it's a pretty good community and has a lot of info: http://forum.egosoft.com/index.php
The games are pretty good fun, I've been playing the series for a while now, haven't got TC yet but will do at some point. Generally the main appeal is that there are a very wide range of things you can do, the combat and flight physics were tightened up a lot in the last game with a little bit of drift added, fairly intuitive but a lot easier if you have a joystick.
The economy is fairly simple but it at least responds to your actions and varies depending on sectors so you can run around in a trading ship making money that way without feeling like you could do the same thing with a copy+paste button. You can build your own space stations and factories that will run for you and make money and you can pilot a wide range of ships up to capital ships. You can pick up X3 (the previous one) for about a fiver so that might be worth a look.
You can also mine asteroids or do side missions (mainly transport or kill things) which are a good way to make cash at the start. The graphics are very good if you have the computer to run them but the game is very resource heavy (there is no limit to how many ships you can own and as you can have them flying with you computer controlled you can always just keep building the size of your fleets until your computer can't handle it)
After sales support is very good, patches for a fair while and bonus content afterwards as well as a big scripting and modding community but they have had a fair few issues with bugs in release versions so i'd get an idea of how stable this one is first.
Bad side in the previous games the plot hasn't been great, quite often people don't even bother with it and the difficulty curve is pretty high as you have a lot of things to pick up fairly quickly. There isn't any hurry though (usually the main plot can be activated/ignored by the player without and effects) so you can slow down and get the hang of something/practice/get a bigger ship.
I would recommend if you like space/sandbox games with a lot of freedom but I am just going by the previous games here so I can't really comment on the new one (I understand it was made using the same engine from X3 though so the basic gameplay mechanics should be similar)
Hope that helps
Lee
