Yes, some dialogue is funny.
There are 2 or 3 phases to the game:
In single player there is a section on your base ship where you can switch to different rooms and talk to NPCs (generals, councillors, a princess and an engineer) and make political decisions (or skip that and let the majority decide).
The world map is turn based, and is where you produce and move units around, build structures that give certain bonuses, play cards to give bonuses to your countries or penalties to an opponent, etc. After you make your moves, the map shows the results and gives an overview of where combat will occur, if applicable. Combat can be auto-resolved, or handled in RTS. The default is to allow only one RTS combat per turn (the rest being auto-resolved), but in multi-player or a custom single player campaign that can be changed in the advanced options (the other settings being always or never).
The RTS sections are of course real time combat. There are 4 difficulty levels and the advanced options allow you to change the combat dynamics (make strategy map units more important by increasing the build cost during RTS, etc). There are 5 speed settings you can switch between during combat with the numpad + and - keys.
If you wanted to you could skip the RTS portions entirely, though the dragon can allow you to win battles that you would probably loose if auto-resolved (on the easiest 2 difficulty levels, the dragon should let you win regardless of the odds, as long as you can spawn before being overwhelmed, which is pretty much guaranteed on the easiest setting).
