Hello, I'm 29 years old accountant who loves PC games and I quite possibly have more than 20000 hours play time just strategy games alone. With the recent "free weekend event" I reinstalled the game and liked what I see, so I managed to make 3 of my friends bought the game as well and we are playing multiplayer ever since. With the recent incoming patch rumor, I stopped playing to make myself hungry about the Endless Space 2 again so I decided to write and reflect how I currently feel about the game. There is going to be writing about 4x games in general too, so I'm interested to know what others think of 4X too.

Amplitude Studios

I started playing Amplitude Studios games with Endless Legend Shifters update. At that time, I remember Age of Wonders 3 come up and It was far more enjoyable for me. Until that day, I always thought Alpha Centauri was the peak of the genre. While there are lots of honorable mentions, Endless Legend was the only one which managed to break this notion. It was extremely clever. The game design was clearly made by experienced 4X players. There were lots of pinpoints to make me think like this and because It's stylised too...It sits on the throne of 4X for me. The famous motto of "one more turn" was broken with Endless series; the turns are lasting -average- 10 minutes. In Civilization games, there are lots of empty turns you just ending your turn; the exploitation is not enough as Endless series. So there for this "one more turn" is created itself, people often say as if it's a good thing but the Amplitude changed this notion. In Endless series, you just don't pass your turns to build your 20 turn wonder in 2 minutes. Even opening turn could take 15 minutes to create the best starting plan. So in that regard, I wanted to start by saying Endless Space 2 equal to Endless Legend in terms of exploitation and exploration. Turns in ES2 are lasting longer too because there are lots of things optimize in a round. So this brings me another point: expansion.

Expansion done in 4X games are capturing different points besides cities. Mines, watchtowers, farms, wonders...you name it! The satisfaction of building/improving your or raiding/capturing other lands are done by this visual aspect. You have to feel envy about that building or resource you see that you don't and you go to conquer that. EL went to the next level and you can see the districts as well. That made the expansion feeling tripled. Seeing your cities expand and while doing so getting all the resources was a great enjoyment. In other 4X games such as Age of Wonders or Civilization series, they have their own way of making you feel expanding. Sadly, I think the core problem in ES2 is the lackluster feeling of expanding.

Accelerating Expansion Of The Universe

How does one game make you feel like you are expanding in space? Jokes aside, how can a game really makes you feel like you are expanding in a space game? There are no tiles to raid or improve. The sterile, hot or temperate differences can't compare to a tile management. Since you can't visually see what others have on their planets I feel like I start wars because I need to not because I want to. The only way to know you are expanding is the border of your chosen color. Which is not satisfactory. You don't even feel like your empire is growing. The whole empire stands stale. While Amplitude tries to make expanding fun by creating sectors and unique sectors. It is just a step, in the right direction, not a permanent solution. 

I think what would be a permanent solution is increasing the activity between systems. The galaxy stays the same even after the factions expand only the color changes. If only there were FIDS transportations between systems (just like transporting populations) without using building queue, It would make the galaxy more living place by civilian ships going their way in each turn. It could also allow raiding possibilities too. Another thing to improve is buildings in space. We can't see these megastructures or defenses we are building. Even If we able to build or research something at unique systems would be great because expanding just border isn't fun.

The feeling of expand comes in 4X games is the visuals.EL took this to very next level bu ES2 is just standing still. It doesn't have to be graphically amazing or anything but It has to be present. No one likes to rule or conquer visually empty places, especially in 4X games. 

Eras

Now I'm going to talk about 2 different things Pirates and lacking eras. Pirates could be one of the most annoying "natural-evil unit" implementation in 4X games! I think It could be altered as a galactic crisis as Era of Pirates. Another thing lacking is features for certain eras. Just like science vs religion end game (mini-game) feature, there could be more eras happening with different crisis tied to each. With the trade happening galactic the pirates could appear and claim them selfs a pirate heaven and rather than lots of random pirates there could be only 5 pirate "minor factions" with each tied to a specific sector. Other players could interact with them and support them covertly which they improve with each support rather than a specific turn time.  So these pirate factions only aim to plunder their own sector trade and we get to enjoy an era-specific mini-game while enjoying the whole game. 

Other eras could happen just like this one which could affect planets (maybe a disease spreading to a certain type of planets) or populations (via introducing new belief throughout the galaxy and we have to convert).

 Conclusion

There has to be some co-op friendly QoL features as well. More options to set a perfect turn time, Synchronised way to watch battles, Anti-spoiler solutions for the ones are not watching the battles (you can know the result before the end of cinematic battle), Desync happening when one is tinkering at market when ending turn, hotkeys for population screen and ordering continue movement to all units...Things like that would help the co-op a lot. 

Whatever you do I know It's going to be good but be mind that the only thing in ES2 is direly lacking is the expand side of the game. Please be aware of that when planning patches or DLCs. It's hard to create the feeling comparing to "tile improvement 4X game" but you have to do it somehow.