Played a bit:
- Performance is still pretty shit. I honestly don't see much of a difference. Medium size galaxy with all default options and its slow as hell unless I use ticks_per_turn which is still pretty slow. It's still nowhere near EU4 or CK2 levels of speed and smoothness. There's also now a thing where the game will lock up for about 10-20 seconds during the end year auto save on Jan 1st once you get past 50-75 years in.
- Origins looks kind of meh. The ones that have you start as part of a federation or with friendly empires look OK and interesting, basically a way to guarantee you have some decent friends (probably a very powerful option on harder difficulties since your federation members would get AI bonuses and love you). Stuff like Ringworld or habitat start is clearly going to be very imbalanced in some variation of: 1. OP, 2. OP if you can get migration treaties to get other pops, 3. Worthless.
- The new diplomat system works pretty well. Basically you need to choose between using your diplomats to improve relations with someone (for agreements like getting a migration treaty so you can settle new planets effectively), improving your federation cohesion which unlocks bonuses and centralization over time, or improving your position in the Galactic Senate. It does kind of make things too easy though I think. As long as you aren't a genocidal race the optimum strategy for everyone is going to be to explore, find everyone, immigrants welcome please turn my pop pie chart into an impossibly grotesque clusterfuck.
- Galactic Senate thing is just annoying really. There is literally around 100 possible laws to pass and virtually every god damned one of them is like "give +2.5% resource production, -1.5% pop happiness, +5% diplomatic power weighting per worker pop, -5% consumer goods required, +5% build cost". That's not 5 separate laws, that's what a single law looks like, a gigantic amount of bullshit that you just end up ignoring because the modifiers are so fucking small to begin with. And the thing is that even proposing a law costs ~200 influence, the most precious resource in the game. I feel that this whole thing is basically a noob/AI trap, you're always better off using that 200-300 influence to run an edict that gains you something like +20% mineral production for a decade and a half rather than taking a chance to pass a law that helps you a small amount while also helping the rest of the universe. It's also really slow to work and get laws through (you have to pass certain ones before more powerful versions unlock) to the point where you'll probably have won the game before you get to the serious stuff about major sanctions for not dotting your i's and crossing your t's properly on the bi-weekly TPS reports.
- The federation additions... didn't really add much. Basically you can eventually change the rules so you are always the leader and so your other federation members donate more fleet power to your federation fleet, but that's about the gist of it. It'd be way more interesting if some of those Galactic Senate laws were available for federations. There's some small bonuses you build up based on the type of federation but there's not really much options aside from building up that meter.
- The new economic/research model is FUCKED. Its absurdly easy to tech way, way faster than you used to be. You now have zero penalty as long as you build those bureaucracy buildings which are fairly cheap and efficient. You'll probably trivially be churning through repeatables in around 6 months to a year each by 100 years in while swatting down FEs without even trying.
- AI is still very much awful. I played on Commodore which has pretty substantial AI buffs and they fell behind so quickly it wasn't even funny. They still build way too much fleet early game and never develop their economy/tech well while also not using the fleet well because the AI can't fight a war effectively to save its life.
