The UI itself for colonizing and macro management is actually pretty easy to use. But the tactical commands are either non-sensical, non-intuitive, or requires you to keep using it to see which one doesn’t blow up your fleets fast.

With the addition of the Morrigi, that has mostly been corrected, because the Morrigi basically can research every tech in the game, with a good chance. And salvage the rest. This allows players to do comparisons between heavy beam lancers vs some other race using rail guns. See if they can withstand the impact and how many DNs they got to trade before they come to equal in construction costs/credits.

The AI, both strategic and tactical, was not updated for the new weapons and techs, thus often a human playing use the new techs will simply obliterate, without any losses, AI ships that don’t know how to deal with them. A morrigi dreadnought can negate 150k worth of damage, without going into the yellow, and take out 4 or more dreadnoughts, using shield projectors. The shields are up all the time, with the exception of about 2-5 seconds of downtime. It will block any damage, forever, so long as it is up.

The races are all balanced, in the sort of way Starcraft species are. Very different philosophies and offensive/defensive abilities, but they all come together very well. Again, it requires “experience” to play through, which means it has a high learning curve. The manual doesn’t really help. For example, the manual won’t even tell you what the fleet retreat button in space combat does. Like the fact that it will prevent reinforcements from arriving, so you can cut your losses and ago. Like the fact that even without a CC ship, you can order the rest of your fleet to not engage the enemy, thus preventing them from running into an ambush of 1 ship vs 3 dreads sitting on top of their jump point. You have to figure this out for yourself. The manual does not mention this. And this is the updated manual after 3-4 expansions.

The Swarm is easily destroyed by lightning gun tech. Emitters. Or anything that can track very fast and kills small stuff, like phasors or point defense missiles.

SOTS deliberately didn’t give you the stats on their weapon performance, to keep you guessing. That was an intentional design decision from the CEO down. All it does is serve to make it harder to distinguish one tech from another, not to mention calculating the advantages/disadvantages added into the racial techs as well. The only way for you to find this out is through trial and error, and you do not have a combat simulator to test ship designs. Thus you got to do it the old manual way. How much better is neutron beam from particle beam? The bar graph says a little bit, but how much does that translate into shots against a destroyer? A cruiser? A dreadnought? How much better is cutting beam from lancer, and lancer from heavy laser? Is it worth the investment?

You won’t know until you have fielded them, and by that time the AI may have adapted and hit you with something else entirely.

This is an amazingly frustrating learning curve, that is only useful once you figure out how the guts of the engine works. You obtain the weapon stats off a post at Kerberos forums. And you read about the hidden growth differences, ship costs, and other little details not mentioned concerning the faction advantages and disadvantages. Morrigi tend to have higher construction costs and their ships cost like 1.5X more or even 2X more than humans. To offset that, their trade networks make substantially more and the Morrigi have a high chance to get gravity control, which adds 30% to the construction ability of a planet.

While a human can lose dreadnoughts left and right without going bankrupt, a Morrigi has to invest yard space to freighters and won’t be able to make another DN if the current ones get blown up. Due to being bankrupt.

The Hivers can reuse their oldships since their teleport gates are instant, so can trade old ships for new ships in a system defense role. But it takes them 10 turns to get to a new star system by sub light, although when they arrive, they will be hard to stop since Hiver dreadnoughts have the most armor and hit points. Can kill a lot of ships before they go boom.

SOTS2 should correct these issues by adding a greater feedback to combat and events, as well as adding TOOLTIPS to every UI function and button. Also a lot of fleet management and battle has become smoother or automated abstraction. Meaning fleets patrol an area, as their duty station, and thus I don’t have to micromanage every single little thing about where the fleet goes and which planets make what ships.

Even though Kerberos likes to play hiding games with the market consumer base by hiding certain things like what things do what exactly, keeping that knowledge preserved for themselves or players who have figured out the engine, SOTS2 should be functionally a lot easier and more intuitive to understand. But I expect they, like with the new and updated manuals that still don’t explain what buttons do, will keep things hidden just to surprise people and have them go through the process.

However, as a genre, 4X games are kind of specific to a certain kind of temperament. They are not for everyone. I have friends who have no interest in playing these kinds of games at all. Part of the reason is the information overload that you describe. While there is probably a magical way of organizing the information in question, to be perfectly honest, there is just a ton of information the player needs. This is daunting no matter what interface you have. And most strategy games suffer from this problem. It is no accident that the only strategy game my beloved will play with me is Crusader Kings; it has less information overload than most strategy games, and even then, searching for brides can be a time consuming process.