I really loved Endless Space 1 for sweeping Galactic Civilization's confusing and unneccessary clutter away. ES was a bold, beautiful, clear 4x where almost every element was clearly defined in the interface.
I don't know if, like, I changed or ES2 did. It seems to have added systems which aren't bad on their face, but are more confusing and less explained. I found myself feeling more restricted in my strategic options and listelessly clicking End Turn through the midgame waiting for a strategy to pan out.
Maybe it's the game. Maybe it's the space4x genre. Maybe it's me. I think this game is beautiful, still, even if you have to turn off a lot of the zoomy cutscenes to make it playable. But I'm more interested in what the devs are doing next than I am interested in thoroughly mining the corners of this game, for whatever reason.

Been playing this for a while, and I think the biggest praise I can give is that it managed to hook me up despite not being into this kind of games at all.

It takes a while to get used to it, the in-game tutorial does an ok job at explaining the very basics of the game but I'd reccomend reading the manual and watching a couple of videos to actually get a grasp of it. However as daunting as this may seem the game itself is pretty intuitive, everything you need to know is laid out on the many menus the game has, you just have to read it.

Anyway the game itself is basically a galaxy conquest simulator, there's multiple ways to win and each faction has its own distinctive playstyle that favors one way or another.

I think what really ends up hooking me up is all the narrative sprinkled through the game, this isn't just clicking on things and seeing number go up or down, there's a lot of flavor text that really adds to the experience.