Longtime fan of all things Endless, but took a little hiatus on Endless Space 2 at the end of last year while waiting on the new update to come through and hopefully address some issues that were getting in the way a little.  Often the patch notes will claim that certain issues have been addressed, but I know the only way to be truly sure that something was actually fixed is for players to check it out themselves.

Can anybody save me some time and shed a little light on whether the following items have been addressed in the past 3 months or so?

• Pirates being way too strong in the early game / the AI players being unable to defend themselves against pirates.
• The AI refusing to ever build Large ships or strong fleets, only building weak groups of ships and being easily defeated militarily.
• Imbalance between Projectile/Energy weapons, and Long Range/All other flotilla ranges
• General combat balance, including Flak being OP at shooting down Missiles.
• Balance between Republic vs. all other government choices, and problem of always ending up as Militarist from building ships.
• UI listing inconsistent values for ship movment in Ship Builder, Galactic Map, Hangar, etc.
• Any noteworthy changes / additions since Dec 2017 / the Galactic Statecraft update?

Thanks in advance, looking forward to hanging out with the Vaulters again and seeing where this game will go!

From what I gathered most of these issues were fixed literally yesterday with a big content update, not entirely certain about the AI not making big ships, but that one was supposedly fixed when the vaulter major faction was released.

as for content, 3 DLC's have been released so far, 

the Vaulters Major faction, comes with its own traits and 4 heroes, the sisters of mercy as a new minor faction again with there own hero, and overhaul of the pirate system

the there is the small package of 2 DLC's that came out yesterday, for about 6 euros, you can get 5 minor factions (including the Harmony and the Sowers from endless space 1), 4 heroes, 7 new soundtracks and 25 new quests.

lastly I have never encoutered or even heard of the inconsistent movement bug, you sure you weren't missing a modefier somewhere?

Thanks for the info!  Gonna have to check out those DLCs!

Yeah, the displayed movement bug had been around for a while, it even persisted after some patches were "supposed" to fix it.  You can see links to some screenshots showing it and links to bug reports and other users describing it here, but it definitely wasn't a case of bonuses/maluses to movement speed such as the ones from Major Factions / events / etc.