I'm new to ES and Amplitude games in general, but I started playing EL in earnest lately and was really won over: when I saw that ES2 was taking a lot of lessons from EL, it really sold me on it - that was the biggest reason I picked up ES2 even at this stage.

After finishing a game of ES2 (at least insofar as it is currently possible), I'm liking where this is going but I think it could use some tweaks. (For what it's worth, I lost on score to the Lumeris, because I got in a war with them at turn 110 where it turned out that I couldn't take any territory without sending my empire into an unhappiness/bankruptcy death spiral just like the one that eliminated the Cravers on like turn 120). 

It took me three tries to even get Sophons off the ground, and in general iit feels like the early game is very...constraining? High pressure? Not sure how to put it, exactly, except to say that there seems to be a very narrow band of viable early game play, for several reasons (some of which I know will change, some I feel I might need to pipe up about).

First, there are way more "must research" technologies than in EL, since not only do you have to unlock crucial gameplay mechanics alongside all the FIDSI upgrades, you also have to unlock colonizable planet types (one by one).

Further, various upgrades (and their related techs) are a lot more important and necessary here than they were in EL, particularly:

-Approval upgrades so you can grow tall or expand wide without immediately tanking your economy due to overpopulation or overcolonization penalties (or both at once!) killing FIDSI generation
-Influence generation so some neighbour AI doesn't overwhelm your influence sphere and lock you out of your own planets with a Close Borders
-Dust generation because improvement upkeep seems a lot more expensive. Maybe this is because instead of allocating workers like you did in EL, you're supposed to specialise systems/planets via your choice of improvements, but of course that means that you can't do the "everybody on X" laser-focus as quickly as you could in EL so improvement upkeep ends up being a lot harder to deal with.

Further, the AI will DOW you very quickly after meeting, especially if they're Cravers, so you ALSO need to tech up weapons/combat ships, and build enough ships so they don't roll over you when they do. I'm told that both this and the forced truces are mainly intended to give EA/Alpha players a chance to see war mechanics and they won't stay this way, perhaps this change will help when it happens.

All this means that, at least in Era 1, you'll never get away with only researching the ten techs you need to upgrade eras, which means you'll be overpaying on the escalating research costs from the beginning. Sophons being able to era-jump may help with this for them, but a) it depends on the Scientists staying in power past turn 20 and they NEVER DO, and b) a lot of Era I techs aren't obsoleted by this because they unlock gameplay features or colonizable planet types, or stuff you'll simply need to be able to access early as part of your expansion push.

Meanwhile, you only have one tech queue EVER, and only one improvement queue per system now (and the high expansion penalties put a brake on adding more systems), . So that means a lot of plate juggling and prioritization problems, which yeah, does make a good challenge, but right now it borders on being frustrating and I feel like the devs should keep an eye on that feeling as they tune mechanics (and also as they introduce stuff to explain the mechanics that currently exist). Unless I've missed something?

Can you elaborate on "only one tech queue EVER, and only one improvement queue per system now", please? How many queues you expected and why?..

I was playing on Normal, for the record, but iit was hard to tell in that game because even before the setup screen with its difficulty option, there was ANOTHER difficulty screen where the only working option was "expert" (though that might have been to control the tutorial or something else?) so it's not immediately clear which choice controlled the situation here. I will assume the one on the setup screen, so normal.

It's not that I was expecting more than one tech queue or more than one production queue per colony (well, I wasn't expecting multi-colony systems to share a production queue but there's nothing directly wrong with that and it makes for some interesting decisionmaking because different planets are benefitted by different improvements so you have to decide which planet in a system you care about improving most), I was just highlighting it to get my point across: that in the early game as currently constituted there are a lot of things you need to do in a very short time to establish and defend a stable position, and you don't get many tools to do them with, because there are a ton of things you have to research and they're split into a lot of techs or shoved into Era II so it will take you a lot of time to get them all whatever order you choose, and because you need to expand relatively slowly due to the happiness and upkeep issues (before you get access to whatever hero abilities you're referencing, and/or research the right system improvements) plus the usual scarcity of nearby colonizable worlds (unless you research however many of the nearby types you can early), so it takes a long time to get more useful production facilities online, and so on.

Influence specifically might be something that can wait, yeah - the game ended before I actually LOST the planet in my case but the Lumeris influence sphere was definitely covering my border worlds, and I WANTED to take territory to ease the pressure (or at least burn their territory so it would stop pushing influence/contributing to their game score) but that wasn't an option because of happiness death spirals and the lack of a way to simply burn an enemy colony you don'r want to take/keep (both of which will be addressed, I now know, and I'm looking forward to seeing how).

Like I said, I like that you need to make choices about allocating limited resources (both logistically and in actual concrete resources), that's the essence of a strategy game. And I also LOVE the setting and aesthetics and art/sound style and surrounding structure of the game so I am looking forward to seeing more of the gameplay as it's built. What bothered me in my first impression was the extent to which the game and the challenge posed bordered on feeling more frustrating than fun, because of the way the initial situation's constraints were structured. Maybe it will be easier when the AI aggression or the effects of unhappiness or the happiness penalties for more colonies/more population on a given colony are toned down, or maybe it will be easier with another race (I'll give the Lumeris a try in my next game, those two are the ones I find most interesting of the initial four), maybe it will be easier when I git gud and get a better feel for what needs to be online NOW NOW NOW and what can be delayed in any given start situation.