Enjoying the game so far! Reporting bugs as I find them. I did have a few things to ask about.

Regarding diplomacy:

-  I notice that the "suggest terms" option is greyed out but does NOT have the (not available in EA) tag. Is this unlockable or simply unavailable?

-  The opinion bar is acting super wonky. It will update multiple times without me actually touching anything. It's also extremely unpredictable in that often I'll *increase* the amount of a product I'm willing to trade, and have their opinion of the deal actually *go down*. I'm unsure if this is a clever but completely obtuse mechanic, or if it's bugged. I've been very much enjoying the extremely transparent and intuitive diplomacy of StarDrive 2 so not knowing WHY the bar is shifting is driving me crazy.

Regarding trade:

-  I have no idea what the trade HQ's, subsidiaries and routes do. There's no information I can find to explain what their purpose and benefit is. Unfortunately the (extremely annoying) tutorial block isn't telling me anything. Please help?

-  The purchasable items on the market screen don't seem to replenish. Does this eventually happen or is that largely a multiplayer thing?

Regarding research times:

-  Research across the board strikes me as insanely fast compared to build times. My feedback would be to double them. I'm finding myself swamped with build options and module upgrades to the extent that much of what I *could* build or design is simply being skipped.

Also, side note, I feel like either Dust is too easy to generate or building maintenance needs to be increased. I've always had an abundance of it with most of the races and I feel like having it be more scarce would encourage system specialization earlier in the game. Anyway. Some thoughts to ponder and questions to consider!

Thanks for the info! In regards to your question I've generally been playing on Hard. That being said, I've not actually finished a game yet (I've played each race to approx turn 75 just to get a feel for the mechanics and try and figure out some stuff). But at least on Hard, the diplomacy seems disjointed and Dust is overly common.

I believe your perception of "too much Dust laying around" is unfounded because you have no external demand to use Dust so you just let it grow and grow and grow.

Maybe if you had a Lumeris's expeditionary fleet incoming on your Western system you would be churning out Dreadnaughts and Battleships on every system or if you were fighting Horatio for the middle of the galaxy your core system would be producing ships instead of Dust thus your perception of Dust would change of "there is too much Dust" to "woa even with 1k or 2k per turn of Dust I still need more". 

However I believe certain play styles influence your perception of Dust. If you are a warmonger and you want to conquer the Galaxy, there is never enough Dust around but if you are a Sophons type player and you are happy to have 4 systems and science the crap out of everybody, yes there is too much Dust laying around. 

Other gameplay features try to push you to be on the offensive, like the ring of death (https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/65-general/thread/23220-cultural-flexibility-pacific-conversion-empire-technology-discussion) and the general existence of the Cravers so it is hard to be peaceful. Someone else said somewhere that the game is about Dominance and I agree. 

What I believe that is lacking in order to make it hard to think that "there is too much Dusk laying around":

-Mid term events that demand you to participate with other factions (Could be Horatio or Cravers go wild because they have found a huge pot of Dust and are just magically churning out fleets and want to make everything beautiful again/deplete every planet) 

-An invasion of aliens (could be a faction from ES1) or the rise of the Automatons and they spawn in a system with 20 fleets and declare war with everybody

-Late game everybody turning against the faction closest to achieve any type of victory

-Proper Alliance system that inspire WW1 war (One declaration of war sparks a huge galactic war)

I hope I made myself clear and welcome perspectives from everybody. Please correct my grammar as well because I'm studying for the GRE and need to improve.