Most noticeable issues I've seen so far (besides the performance issues others have mentioned) is that you need to expand constantly to stay competitive and yet the enemy AI (even on easier difficulties like normal) will blockade your outposts as soon as they find them, even before you've had time to unlock any diplomatic options. This makes early war inevitable and the ships are just too expensive to upgrade and repair, often consuming every penny you're generating just to keep a few basic patrol ships going. Definitely need to balance ship costs and early AI aggression.

Sounds like you are overexpanding by sacrificing too much military power for that.

That's a matter of priorities, like always in 4x games. Fast expansion, going full military, fast teching or something balanced between that - it's all viable ways, and some work better in different situations than other. If you think AI's tactics is better, try to do the same with them and see how it works. On normal difficulties you should be able to repeat that almost 1:1.

Thanks for the feedback!

The AI may indeed currently be too aggressive in "normal" difficulty - this is probably good news for the final release: it is simpler to make a sneaky AI less performant than it is to make a dumb AI more so. In EL there are restrictions on what low-difficulties AIs are actually allowed to do: for instance they aren't allowed to attack your cities until a goodly number of turns have gone by. Bear in mind that currently there are no such restrictions in place in ES2.

I am not finding this to be the case (but I played the heck out of ES1, so I might need a higher difficulty to stay entertained). The AI's aggresive, but it is welcome. The game doesn't leave you alone to become a juggernaut and then start a war when it is already too late for them to mount effective resistance. Besides, I like it when the AI shows me what it's got. If I'm going to only have a 10% chance of winning a single player game and need the difficulty turned down, I'd rather that be clear by turn 50 instead of 150.

I don't really agree with the "too agressive" point, but I second the fact that ships repair and more important, upgrades, are way too expensive in early game. With the "rock paper scissors" thing between weapons and defense it's really mandatory to keep up with what your ennemies are doing, but you can't really do it since retrofitting ships is so expansive.

You could watch letsplays/tutorial of PANCZASU, who explaing his moves really well. Here's his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/truePANCZASU/playlists

Thanks, I will check out his Youtube. Yea it wasn't that the AI is too aggressive to handle, it was merely that the AI is aggressive enough to have to fight with 1 or 2 ships and even those are hundreds of dust to put 1 or 2 basic modules on or repair (the hero ship at least). That's more than entire colonization policies.