Good morning/afternoon/evening all. I'll not take up too much time or space, I am simply leveling a criticism that may or may not be a problem that other people have had but I myself have taken note of.

This criticism pertains to AI aggression in Endless Space 2. I have found across four or five test play-through's of the game up to turn 250 that the AI can seem overly aggressive after first contact regardless of the faction in question.

This issue has thus far applied to both major and minor factions. In the spirit of keeping things organized I will bullet my various examples so as to avoid creating a wall of text.

• A good example being that every minor faction I encountered attacked me the moment I encountered them without provocation, which I found became rather irritating after a while as all the minor factions would  become hostile to me after I was forced to defend myself. 
•   The sophons on all but one play-though declared war upon me within the first twenty or so turns of me first encountering them.
• The lumeris would often be found with a disproportionately large army relative to their dominant political parties at the start of the game, which makes me question if political orientation has any effect on AI behavior. I would think that would be of importance so as to add a level of consistency to the individual faction AI and variation to the various AI behaviors as a whole.
• on more than one occasion I would have all the AI's in my game declare war on me within a sparse few turns of each other, regardless of my faction choice, their faction, my actions, or my attempts to foster good relation with said factions. this I found to be quite irritating.

please be mindful that this is just my personal observation and may not be indicative of everyone's experience with the game. Though I would be interested to see if this is in fact an isolated complaint possibly caused by some error on my part or if this is in fact a valid criticism to an issue that others have also experienced.