This is probably the best 4X I've ever played. It's got everything that I wanted.
Complex economy, logistic network, unit design, personnel management, population dynamics.

The only thing is that the UI is terrible and all over the place. Kinda ugly too.
But it is not as hard to learn as it looks.

I prefer it over the first one, mainly because of the improvement on the dialogue, it is not cartoonish, you don't go evil mad scientist over small stuff and you don't go naive good towards everyone, very sobering after what BioWare made on the first one.
It is certainly a much better decision to make the player character a Jedi from the start, as it saves you the pain of dealing with the botched multiclass that KotOR 1 forces you into.

Sadly this is a game that you feel how rushed it was. For the most part it is great. The start of the game is kinda too focused on combat, but it picks up nicely on Citadel Station, still, you have plenty of opportunities to RPG your way on the asteroid medical station.
But then you start to get into the parts of it that had cut content due to weird deadlines, even before you arrive in the final area of the game (which suffers a lot from this).

The game is still solid, the combat challenges are, in average, very well done and fair. The dialogue is amazing, it is amazingly entertaining to talk about the nature of the force and the role people have with it with your party members. All interactions you have with non-party members are centered on this theme too, in some way, which makes the game feel thematically consistent. Light side and dark side choices feel whole, both sides are reasonable and unreasonable at times, the game wants you to think about it yourself, like it is trying to convert you to one of them for real or like it is one of those buzzfeed personality tests, amazing.

BUT, fuck the last boss I hate it, savescummed to the end of times that fucking crap, better than what I did on the first one with grenades and mines and running.