I've been playing ES2 since it released on Early Access, and I am pleased to report that I have my first victory under my belt, a military one with the Cravers.  It left me rather concerned about the current state of the game, and I would like to report my findings and experience for those interested.

I played as the Cravers, on Easy, in a small galaxy against the Lumeris and the Sophons. Shooting for a military victory, I made a bee-line for each capital and captured it.  This was insufficient, however, as I had to "eliminate all enemy empires,"  which evidently means conquering all of their colonies... sort of.  The Sophons fell pretty easily, lacking serious defenses and being all in one easy-to-find spot.  The Lumeris, on the other hand, took until turn 123 to defeat (three turns before victory by score).  This is because they can literally spawn anywhere they can colonize for almost nothing, racing around and setting up new colonies all over the place, resulting, necessarily, in a game of whack-a-mole.  I could conquer a colony, they would found a new outpost, I'd have to go conquer it (or worse, a forced truce would kick in, giving the outpost time to grow into a colony), and once I had everything conquered, I had to hunt around for some stray colony, and indeed found it on the other side of the galaxy.

In the meantime, this strategy meant that I had some 30 colonies scattered across the galaxy, most of which were former Lumeris colonies.  This resulted in more than -100 in overcolonization, even with the era 2 tech that reduces overcolonization penalties.  The result was that my entire empire was In Rebellion.

This is what my approval did.  Now, I rather find managing the approval of the Cravers to be an interesting challenge, though given their forced expansion, it eventually becomes impossible.  Even so, for the latter half of the game, I stopped colonization altogether and focused entirely on opponent elimination, and even with careful management of politics, I still resulted in an entire empire in rebellion.  This is bad.  This is very bad.  They stopped producing money.  They stopped producing food.  They stopped doing everything.  This is what my population looked like:

As my approval rock-bottomed in pursuit of military victory, all of my FIDSI bottomed out too.  Because I was unable to maintain my income, the computer began to sell off all of my assets, including resources meant to feed my population or make them happy, which resulted in even greater unhappiness and more population loss.  In a way, I found it fascinating, watching the empire of the Cravers self destruct like that.  And, finally, I found the last of the Lumeris colonies, get out of the forced truce, bombed the hell out of them... and then had to wait several turns before the game registered that they were well and truly dead (which happened with the Sophons as well, for reasons that are unclear).

I don't think I could have done anything to pull out of this death spiral. I would rather imagine that it would eventually correct itself... but it doesn't.  I can't abdicate my colonies.  I can't raze them or blow them up.  Even when they hit pop 0, as several of them did, they still remain mine and continue to contribute to over-colonization.   Moreover, without money, without any improvements to support my population and with everything in general collapse, there's no way out of this death spiral.  If I could allow the game to continue past the point of victory, I'm confident that my empire would eventually suicide out of spite.  The galaxy, a wasteland, devoured not by the cravers themselves, but everyone's anger at the cravers.

The cause of this is two fold.  First, a military victory with a race like the Lumeris, as the rules stand now, is virtually impossible.  In ES1, I would have won when I conquered every civ's home planet, or when I had conquered a sufficient number of worlds.  Now, I have to play whack-a-mole with a race that can just keep buying new colonies just about everywhere, continuing to eke out an existence long after the game has been effectively decided.  Second, certain unhappiness factors, once triggered, cannot be undone.  Overpopulation will eventually correct itself, as will the Slavery penalty (though I often had a "GUI missing"  for that one, just to let you know), once the race I've enslaved dies off.  But over-colonization never will, because I'll have lost all of my technological improvement, thus be unable to get the techs necessary to stop it, and I cannot "discard" colonies, thus once at -100, you're always at -100, and once you've lost all of your money as a result (my entire civilization was producing some 30 dust per turn, and I suspect most of that was just my heroes), you cannot maintain anything, thus you'll lose what little bonuses you have, dropping your civilization from pissed to morbidly depressed.

Finally, I'd like to note that this form of "In Rebellion" is boring and tedious.  I spent turn after turn just clicking "End Turn" watching my population deplete, waiting for the inevitable moment when the game finally ended, which isn't how I'd like to spend a game.  I'd like to suggest pirates erupting from planets in rebellion pirates that can at least take worlds.  That would make for a much more dramatic finale in this sort of situation (if I must death spiral, let it be with a bang rather than a whimper) and if pirates can seize planets, then perhaps the overcolonization penalty will reduce.  I'll lose a swathe of my empire, but I'll regain my balance in the core of my worlds.

To some extent, I think this sort of thing is inevitable with how the cravers play.  Eventually, your worlds deplete and you must colonize, so you must necessarily overextend, but I'm not sure all of these inevitable consequences have been thought out.

The Cravers lose population almost every turn once the process starts. I find it too frequent because the bigger the map size, the longer it takes to reach factions much further away to conquer and replace the lost pops. The overextension penalty should also reduce as you lose population for better balance. I mean if they're dead, why are they still rebelling? Perhaps a solution would be for the ability to transfer pops from other newly conquered systems to repopulate dying systems. But the frequency of pop loss should still be reduced. 

MikeLemmer wrote:

That's because it's Early Access. They have "Population Management" and "System Razing" listed as two high-priority mechanics to insert. I think their main goal at this stage of Early Access is testing the first third of the game with Score Victories. Military Victories should become viable in a month or two.

Of course!  I don't mean to suggest that ES2 is terrible.  This is not my first Amplitude Early Access, and they have proven again and again that they will deliver quality game material.  Even their early access stuff is great, and Endless Space 2 is no exception.

But part of the Early Access process is giving feedback, and that's what I'm doing here, showing where a problem arises.

Also, I believe the game claims that Cravers slowly kill off secondary populations, as they're eating them.  When I have equal to or more Cravers than non-Cravers on a world, the Cravers turn gold and produce more, as expected, but I never saw a slow population drop-off of the non-Craver species.

I actually thought about doing that for my game, just to see if I could stem the slow and inevitable death of my civilization by accepting the gospel of the Virtual Endless.

Of course, it's a workaround, and it's a shame that one is necessary, but as has been pointed out, it's only for now.  If we had the complete feature list up and running, I could raze systems too.

I will say that it's classic Amplitude that there's "no right answer" when it comes to tech choices.  The upper right is necessary to keep your empire expanding rather than depleting everything around them.  Lower right is necessary to keep the militarism of your civilization up and running.  The lower left improves your productivity and to give you more money (which is interesting, as anything that improves a Craver's pacifism, like money-focused buildings, also improves their Militarism), and the upper left is necessary to keep your civilization happy, or to abandon Dictatorship (though Influence doesn't seem particularly important to the Cravers).

That's one thing I really love about Endless Space in every incarnation: Each civilization ends up approaching the tech tree in different ways, but it's never "and you always go in X direction with Y race."  There are several "right ways" to play the Cravers.

While it's true that tech prioritization paths depend a lot on the faction you play, it's not always as clear cut to apply in every new game. It also depends on the starting/neighboring resources you're able to colonize early on and how near you are to aggressive races that require greater military prioritization.