Several years ago, I played ES shortly after release, and wrote up my thoughts here, giving it a 7/10.

Years  of experience later, with a much improves ES:Disharmony and the excellent EL under their belts, they release ES2, which I would give... a 7/10. In many ways, the game still feels like it should be in beta. Fortunately, with some more work there is no reason this couldn't go up to a 8, 9, or even 9.5. 

Senate and Politics

The politics feels like it was meant to be a large part of ES2. Unfortunately, it mainly comes down to 'your political party if your primary species preference'.

- Buildings/events modify politics, but they all seem to average out. I have never had any outcome that actually leads to a surprising political party gaining power.

- The exception is militarism : building ships and fighting seems to give outsized militarist influence

- It doesn't feel like there is any way to actually change the senate outcome. Changing your playstyle to avoid other influence types is impractical and ineffective. If you want to chance your politics to something besides your primary species or militarism, you are out of luck

Population Mechanics

The new species and populations are one of the best parts of ES2, or would be if the system didn't feel like it was half finished.

- Population mechanics encourage micro to get collection bonuses and extra FIDSI from being on a specific planet type, but the ability to actually control the populations is abysmal. See the many forum topics about this for more details.

- Odd designs: A species that lives on gas giants and gets a larget bonus to FIDSI on them is happier on a terran?

- Conquered or attracted species are automatically added to your empire and politics. My cravers conquer and enslave a bunch of space hippies, and suddenly become pacifists?

Luxury Resources

ES and EL had unique and interesing uses for luxury resources. ES2 has massive stockpiles of useless ones

- Limited uses; besides a few colony upgrades, there are few other uses. The population growth boosters may not match the species you want...and I think thats it in terms of uses for luxuries?

- Forcing a standard template on colony upgrades reduces choice. Why ever take +food over +industry, since +industry is always useful? If I had a choice, I might sometimes use +food, but with the current system you are forced to use something that is 1) abundant (can't use that rare source of something useful because then you are locked out of upgrading the rest of your colonies) and 2) most generally useful in all situations, since you have to use it in every colony

Minor Factions

Minor factions feel like they were meant to be CIV city states or stellaris Enclaves. Unforunately, they are less interesting than either.

- The main way of interacting with them is either immediately declaring war and conquering (with minimal difficulty), or slowly feeding them minimal influence to gain approval. Neither is very interesting

- The random pirate spawns feel frustrating and makes keeping minor factions around a nuisance. They love me and give me most of their resources, but also spawn ships to constantly raid me?

- Minimal benefit for interacting with : Absorbing gives a (sometimes) useful bonus, and the passive resources are ok, but there's not a lot to do otherwise. No real interesting interactions. I remember there was talk of them granting a unique ship hull with special capabilites (like in EL with new units). What happened to that?

Balance and Design

A few questionable choices here. Primarily, it seems that Amplitude is unnecessarily restricting content

- The last tier of strategics require a t5 tech EACH to unlock (aka within 20 turns of game end if reseraching t5), while they are used in things mostly unlocked in t4. Why even have them unlocked if they are not usable?

- Similarly, the last tier of exploration is also a t5 tech. This means that the last tier of luxury goods (which seems to be locked behind the last tier of exploration) will never be used in most games

- Certain tech tier balance choices seem off. A t4 tech unlocks a +40% science bonus. A t5 tech unlocks a 20% plus 10% per war bonus, at a vastly increased research, build, and upkeep cost. Why ever bother with it?

- Exclusive techs (primarily ship upgrade and ship weapon exclusivity) don't seem to add meaningful choice. It just cuts the amount of ship classes that are actually usable to those that you pick the extra modules for.

Bugs, UI, and Polish:

Amplitude games have always stood out to me as gorgeous, well polished, and with a great UI. ES2 is better than ever in terms of aesthetics and looks, but its polish and UI are disappointing, especially from Amplitude. A few specifics:

- Nearly half my popups and tooltips contains something along the lines of UI%String%Not%Found

- Tooltips are often misleading. A planet type (ice maybe?) had text about how it would be a breadbasket that could feed worlds, yet the planet type produces 0 food. Carriers are dedicated to non-existent fighters and bombers. A quest improvement didn't indicate it was a unique, either in tooltip or by saying 'Unique Improvement', but could only be built once

- The scan views are very pretty, but uninformative. Try using scan view to determine how trade income is generated, or how political events will impact elections

- Battle mechanics are particularly unclear. How much does a -10 chance to be targeted effect things? How does during combat repair work? There needs to be much more information here

- Multiplayer is apparantly completely buggy (haven't personally played)

I left the forums after update 2 so I could enjoy release as a finished product. The disheartening thing is that all of these issues were brought up even back then, and little work seems to have been done with them. Many of them (particularly Politics, Populations, and Luxuries) have had many forum topics each throughout all the betas to release.

Suggested Improvements:

I am sure that the bugs, polish, and balance will improve over time. For the major issues:

Senate : Needs significant work. I don't have too much concrete, but at the end of the day there should be SOME way to try to encourage / discourage certain political parties, either by changing your playstyle or by spending some FIDSI or resources. Species should also interact with politics in a more interesting way...

Population: ES2 populations are great because they are all unique and different, rather than something like stellaris' randomly generated names with a +/-5% attribute difference.  On the other hand, the way stellaris HANDLES populations is great. Each can have a different base happiness depending on where they live and where they prefer to live. They can join political factions, leading to localized unrest and happiness depending on your politics. They can CHANCE their political affilitation if the player works towards it. They can be easily managed and moved to be most efficient. There are species wide 'rights and obligations', so you could have the cravers / authoritarian UE decide its worth the cost of suppressing the xeno vote, or the unfallen decide to promote diversity and happiness by giving everyone full rights. Happiness being PER POPULATION (or at least per species) would allow for a fair amount more nuance at a minimum.

Luxuries : Give some other use for them, scaling up to the resources that I use to upgrade all of my colonies but still have 100s left over, and the ones I pick up a few of from random events but would still like to have some use. There are tons of forum topics with great ideas as to how to do this.

I can agree on luxuries. So far their only use is for upgrading your planets. Sorta disappointing considering they had gotten more use in ES1 and EL. 

Luxuries can also be very frustrating. Playing as a Riftborn/Vodyani and starting with only the +food and +garrison luxuries nearby ? Well you might as well just restart the game or be ready to invest massively in the marketplace. The fact that luxury resources and colony upgrade with permanent bonus are linked add a huge RNG factor to your empire build. And if on the other hand you start stacking valuable luxuries that fit your civ playstyle the game become much easier. I feel this should be reworked and changed. 

I really really like my Endless games. This new one is fabulous but sadly, I can't enjoy it like I would because of a game breaking bug in the latest preview version (as I had another one in the previous version too :)).

So, as always, these game can be quite frustrating at first... But I do remember things like that in many  other games and, appart from Paradox, I don't know any other editor like Amplitude which react in a matter of minutes or days to theses issues. So I'll just wait a bit, until this evening, and I'm pretty sure a fix will be found.

Anyway, keep the great job and I hope DLC will come soon with new features... But first, bombers and fighters in next free update ;)

Great write up. I agree on all points especially the luxury resources feels it's the most in need of changes. I am a bit surprised to see weapon balance not make the list. I think tactically the game is very stale right now with beams being near useless and kinetic being great at everything including countering missiles.