There’s a significant mismatch between what Era I is designed around, the techs inside Era I, the speed at which you research Era I, and the events that happen outside the tech screen in the same period.

The central problem is that Era I is, as advertised, Ad Astra! To the Stars, an era of discovery of the world immediately surrounding you and the possibilities of space. Era II is first contact, notionally a time when diplomacy between space faring empires really begins, and Era III is notionally about starting significant development of the assets discovered during Era II and particularly Era I.

In my experiences so far, by the end of Era I, I’ve fought one or two wars (or cleverly headed them off), explored a large portion of the galaxy, claimed most of the prime systems that I want, and, by extension of all of this, have a fairly solid idea of who in the galaxy is going to be the main leaders and competitors as the game goes on. This suggests a fairly major problem with the relationship between tech research speed and the empire exploration/expansion more broadly. Most of what is supposed to be accomplished in Era’s II and III seems pretty baked and ready by the end of Era I.

Another significant issue is the mismatch in the number of seemingly necessary techs and the amount of techs that you stand are likely to actually research. Perhaps it’s due to the relative newness of the community and my own particular immaturity as a player, but I’m looking at Era I, and there’s 18 techs, of which the 4 colonization techs seem more or less necessary (but quite unexciting!), the 4 empire techs seem pretty essential, I’m not sure how you’re really going to survive without the 4 econ techs, oh and hey that’s 12 techs of the 10 you’re to research without touching the various miltary techs or the science techs.

An issue that may not be meaningful to others but is close to my heart is that in EL, your production and research were generally timed to each other - if well-managed for booming, your city production line was finishing the latest building as the next research came out of the labs. Again, this may be due to the community not having optimized the research pathways as well as the EL community has due to the newness of the game, but at the moment this leads to lots of wasted production time and often gives the sense of a lack of progress to the player.

Some light suggestions:

    Compress the some of the techs and increase the speed of research in the early game. For example, it’s hard to logic out why boreal and tundra are separate colonization techs in the current iteration, and same with jungle and atoll. Making exploitation of hyperium and titanium come from different techs may make sense lore-wise but is bad pacing gameplay-wise. Overall the tech system seems hamstrung by a limit of two effects per tech (which is probably good aesthetically but bad pacing).

    Spreading out the number of systems and increasing the density of minors may help matters, particularly in terms of exploration and expansion. In EL, there’s multiple minors per major, and they are a significant factor that needs to be dealt with one way or another, sooner or later, by every successful empire. Minors in ES2 are much rarer and insignificant. This leads to a feeling of lack of interactivity in the earliest parts of the game, and does not encourage some of the more interesting options for expansion in the early-to-middle game.

Now, perhaps many of these issues (particularly the exploration and war) may be alleviated by fast speed, but I feel that my concerns need to be made visible. I do believe that Amplitude will be able to resolve these issues to my satisfaction, with or without my suggestions. After all, EL has managed to nail a good Era I exploration phase.

I had a similar feeling of being stuck in Era 1 for a long time, especially playing as Cravers. I think you shouldn't be overly penalised for not running a science-heavy empire. I mean in EL you had a science victory so it made sense to invest heavily in the tech tree, but you could more or less keep up with the science heavies until later eras when new technologies became too expensive (and considerably more powerful).

Clarste wrote:

Cravers don't have any science penalties, do they? Actually, they have an overall FIDS boost from their affinity, so they should be pretty decent at science.

No they don't untill you get the depleted planet modifer, but at that point if your careful enough you won't have major penalties. Only if you expand too much. Cravers will get major disapproval from their government however because you get a -20 or -50 approval score for having the same government over and over again. and if you expand too much that adds on top of it. and in the end you have a bunch of zero pop systems with no to extremely low FID production.  

There's a bunch of things that need adjustments.