I'm sorry, but this is crap.. i highly recommend trying ES instead of listening to garbage like this (it's free to try this weekend). The AI is decent and will only get better, it's certainly fun to play against.
Unless it's been patched, it played the same way consistently. And I've admitted to having not played much (Steam tells me I've played 4 hours) - however it doesn't look as though my impressions are far off those of many people who've played it for longer.
The game is not overly simple, it has a fantastic planet and resource management system, and one of the best UI's I've ever seen.
I'm not sure what I'm seeing that's fantastic. In Endless Space, a star system is one colony- no multiple colonies in a multiplanet system as in most games of this type. The four resources are simply additive, and all are used in the same way. Food works no differently from credits (dust?), works no differently from production, works no differently from research. It's a very static system with neither dynamism nor the flexibility to add interesting effects that affect your income or expenses in different ways (hence the various available bonuses appearing so generic). It's all what we've seen before in countless other games, only - indeed - oversimplified compared with many.
Resources are automatically generated in the maximum quantity the system allows if you have a planet that produces them, as with minerals or crystal in Sins of a Solar Empire; there is no 'worker' system as in Civ or Master of Orion where you trade off production, say, against food or research depending on how you assign workers. All you can do to influence it is to build different resource-modifying structures, which just add a permanent boost to the resource output of the system. There's no system of supply lines which can result in your planets getting cut off if they no longer have an uninterrupted path to 'supplier' systems (in MOO, if your spacelane was cut between a food-producing and food-demanding system, freighters couldn't continue to transport the surplus, resulting in starvation even when you had excess food in your empire). There's nothing nuanced or complex here.
It's NOT a game centered around tactical combat (like Moo2) and isn't supposed to be.
Which would be fine if it centred on anything else, or offered anything new that MOO 2 didn't. If it's just going to be based on a similar engine but removing elements, what's the point? Yet there is no deep strategy here, no colony micromanagement to focus on; you don't have any of the decision-making that went into MOO2 (which of the mutually exclusive techs to research, when you can research everything, and quickly, say).
Your systems and planets come pre-specialised given the available resources, so it's just a matter of building the standard structures for that world type.
Diplomacy appears to be an optional extra, and again diplomatic relations tend to be decided for you by the game's pre-built good/evil alignment system, in a much less malleable way than MOO's racial prejudices.
As I mentioned, this feels a lot like a turn-based Sins of a Solar Empire (which also preselects your planet specialisations for you), and by its nature as an RTS reduces strategic complexity to allow real-time play (although the logistical/tactical slot system in that game prompts more complex decision-making than I've noticed in Endless Space).
You can customize your ships in a myriad of ways (not cosmetically unfortunately)
The problem is, the customisation isn't very relevant. You have a weapon that adds +X to your attack, and the only relevant stat that varies is type (laser, missile...). Similarly you can add to your defence, but since ships do nothing but attack, and combat is based around exactly two stats (no effects of ship combat speed or the like, no weapon facings, no heavy or point defence weapon variants), for practical intents and purposes you're just levelling up the same basic designs.
There's tons of different things you discover as you explore systems, resources, anomalys, wonders of ancient civilizations, random events, etc...most things that I would put in a 4X game, they've thought of.
As above, these are all the things other people have also thought to put in 4x games, going right back to Master of Orion 2. It's the stuff that people put into those other games that isn't here that's frustrating. Even if this were just a modern reskin of Master of Orion 2 it would have elements that are missing from this game; food that's actually needed to support and grow population (and freighters to transport it), actually needing money to support your fleet, something resembling a meaningful economy (granted not brilliantly handled in any 4x game other than Distant Worlds), tactical combat with customisation options that are meaningful, or at least characterful, diplomacy that plays a meaningful role in the game (in Endless Space it appears to exist merely to give you points towards a diplomatic victory, not to actually add diplomacy as a gameplay element more generally), there's no fuel system that limits where you can explore... What does Endless Space add? All I can really see is the explore moon mechanic, which is a nice touch but a direct lift from Sins of a Solar Empire's exploration mechanic, and one which loses its lustre when you realise how generic all the finds are.
Worse still, MOO even scores on the graphics front - not in technical quality, but you've pointed out yourself the shortage of cosmetic spaceship options (present in MOO), you see planets in an orbital diagram in MOO 2, which is much more immersive than the solar system wallpaper of Endless Space, and you have a Civ-like visualisation of each planet's colony, all of which is more characterful than anything Endless Space has to offer.
Amplitude Studios is a tiny indie developer, and it's amazing what they've achieved. We really have to support little developers like this, they're aren't many people making 4x games, especially people that love the games themselves, as AS does. ES is clearly a labor of love. They're very responsive to customer and forum suggestions and are just super good people.
If you want to support little-known studios putting out 4x games, play Distant Worlds.
This is only true in Civ V, previously in Civ combat amounted to creating a stack of units, and attacking another stack of units, the bigger stack wins.
The older games had terrain effects, and units that attacked one by one - they certainly weren't complex decision-making exercises, but they offered somewhat more in that regard than Endless Space appears to.
