One is that it’s not nearly as customizable as it thinks it is. You *can* go hog wild on the tech tree, but there tend to be too many truly essential techs that you can’t ignore, which funnels you toward the same playstyles regardless of faction.

Then there’s the fact that unique faction features don’t always have a compensating element. Endless Legends’ Forgotten need tons of heroes to act as spies, but they don’t have any Dust bonuses to pay for them.

And it’s not like spies matter much, because Endless Legend is full of systems that the AI can’t work with well, resulting in very passive games where little happens unless you force it to, and that requires massive FIDSI output, as the only thing the AI seems good with is stonewalling you in diplomacy.

So I like the series, but I don’t love it. But they get better game by game, and I do love their commitment to strong aesthetics and personality.

Civilization feels to me like an exercise in speedrunning through the same steps to the perfect empire while ES2 has very different starting conditions and very open-ended development – you always have to strife for resources but you can do very different things with those resources.

Trade companies may somewhat be justified by the fact they make you very dependent on integrity of your empire – so whole is more than sum of its parts, losing just one system with trade company/subsidary will make you disproportionally weaker, but it doesn’t feel like there’s enough risk there. Maybe it’d work better if you’d have some sort of galactic economic crises with trade companies not working at all for several turns every N turns so that you can not depend on them. Anyway, yes, economic victory is very broken. The could at least add some additional condition besides reaching some number, like “and generate 40% of galactic Dust production”. The sad thing Amplitude is very deceptive about their policy of listening to people. After couple of games of Endless Legend I had a list of roughly dozen obvious seemingly easy to fix issues, mostly with UI. I posted it on their forums couple of times, was ignored. Only one of those problems (anomalies no being really visible in schematic view out due to the icon being 3×3 pixel size or something) was fixed after developers were asked to fix it on some podcast.

I only played 1.5 games and the second one is stuck due to infinite AI thinking bug (now supposedly fixed) but I don’t remember feeling such joy playing 4X since Civilization 4, I think. If you took grand strategy genre as a whole Europa Universalis 4 captured me similarly. Usually I see that game is good, rush through it and forget it. ES2 I want to play. A rare occasion!