Downloaded the demo, basically because I really enjoyed playing the original Endless Legend a few years ago and wanted to see what they had done to it.
Based on less than an hour of very quick play and reading tutorials, a few comments:
The Tech tree is simple but similar to the original: you can research techs in any sequence you want, subject to the fact that they are divided among 4 different categories.
Combat is still on a tactical map related to the basic map - similar to both the original EL and Humankind. Just looking at the first 3 types of units, factors are much diffrerent from Civ: a 2-unit army was 130 - 180 combat factors. This implies much more detailed gradations in strength, but probably won't be sure until the full game is released.
The map seemed very dark to me, which makes the detailed graphics rather immaterial. I hope they tweak that before release.
'Cities' when first built automatically also include the adjacent 6 tiles as 'foundations'. Like Civ, you apparently build most of your structures in those. Like the Tech Tree, buildings all seem to be divided by category related to the basic in-game currencies: Food, Production and 'dust', which is Gold by another name.
People in your city/cities are divided into 3 basic types, at least at first. This I immediately mentally related to Civ VII's Urban and Rural workers and Specialists, but of course they don't appear to work quite like that, since among other things you can seemingly at will move someone from one category to another. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of conditions for that, so that population management may be EL II's version of Micromanagement.
A lot of interesting things - almost familiar to Civ players, but not quite, showing that Legend has definite 4X roots but approaches the 4X systems from a different angle.
One to keep an eye on.
