Many features now commonplace in science-fiction 4X games – Master of Orion, Pax Imperia, Galactic Civilizations – can be found, arguably, originally in Anacreon.

The game also includes a resource called "ambrosia", a performance-enhancing drug used to both boost planetary production and produce higher quality soldiers.

[citation needed] Jerry Pournelle of BYTE stated in January 1989 that Anacreon "is filled with excellent ideas, mostly well implemented, and then spoiled by inattention to some vital detail".

While admitting that he had "just spent the last 2 days (and nights) playing" the game—"really a darned good implementation of the Stellar Conquest idea"—Pournelle cited the "annoyingly buggy [and] incomplete" user interface, inability to easily select a planet, need to micromanage units unlike Empire: Wargame of the Century, and other issues that he stated showed a lack of proper playtesting and were common to products from small startup companies.

He nonetheless named Anacreon as his game of the month, concluding that "despite its problems, it's playable and the flavor is good, much like Beam Piper's old Space Viking series.

But one change radically altered the gameplay, namely the ability to store more than 9999 of a given ship or resource type in a single fleet or planet, something not allowed by the mechanics of the original 1987 release and its patches.

In late 2012 George Moromisato revealed that he would be revamping his oldest game and releasing a beta-test version of Anacreon 3 written for web browsers making it accessible from mobile devices and tablets.