I have been playing TBS/4x games for more than a decade, and I am a pretty competent player. I have tried all but three of the races, downloaded a significant number of the DLCs and tried various difficulties. map sizes, played with setting in terms of resources, star distribution and density. I feel like I have tried exceedingly hard to make this game more playable and in 68 hours of play time I feel like this game does not get anymore enjoyable. I think the world building they did at the core of this game is quite fun and interesting, I enjoy the conceptual ideas behind the various game play mechanics, but ultimately, if I am always playing from behind and nothing I do really affects that then I'm sure what the point of having different levels of difficulty. Every game I have won or come close to winning I did so after playing into the late game in last place and becoming close with one or two of the major players that, when they ended up loosing passed all their resources to me. Really not a super enjoyable experience or way to win. When this quarantine situation ends, Ill likely not come back to playing this for the foreseeable future, I guess at nearly 70 hours all of the money I paid for the DLC's worked out to like 10 bucks an hour, cheaper than some past times, but doesn't really compare to endless space 2, Empire total war, Civilization, where I got 100's of hours of game play out of it.
