Greetings,
I was an avid stars player for many years. I was even involved in the Golden age of Stars where the Blitz group tested some of the most devastating race designs. The base standard for a powerful race became 25k production by turn 50, before that became the vogue thing 5-10k production by that point was considered rather slick.
To Clarify the game types and I'm not being pedantic.
Solo - against the AI's is fun and a great way to test out races and race traits.
pbem - the standard version was as a turn based game played every day or 3 times a week if you wanted to have a life, once a game gets going with 16 playsers you can end up spending a few hours on a turn and emails.
Lan, or 1comp based. you and some friends sit around and play for and evening or a weeekend.
Blitz
Blitz games were commonly played on the IRC we had the starsbot set to roll the turns every 5 min and you either had your turn in or you missed it. The games lasted 6-12+ hours and we usually had at least 6 players.
2 player games were done but in the blitz environment race design was the key. If you could build your fleet before the other guy and hit his planet you had the game. More players added the volitility, if you sent your fleet to kill player x then player m could stomp on you while you were killing player x and thus game over. a fleet with no colonists means a slow sad death.
The thing about Stars! is that you need to manage your growth, colonization, technology and production power all at the same time while making sure you don't get outdone by any of your neighbors. Each race has many games of surprises in it.
Stars! is an incredibly complex and graceful game. In many respects it all comes down to race design. If you are going to try stars I think you may wish to do some research on race design, I think there may even be some races available for download.
It really should work just fine on xp as I've run it on xp off a stick numerous times.
this site also still hosts Stars! games,
http://starsautohost.org/