Endless Space 2

Most 4X games treat your people as a resource. They are numbers that turn into production, science and tax. Endless Space 2, from French studio Amplitude Studios, treats them as voters, and that one decision shapes everything else about the game.

The game came out on May 18, 2017 for Windows and macOS, priced at $39.99. It was the studio’s second trip into the Endless universe after the first Endless Space and the fantasy spin-off Endless Legend. It is a turn-based 4X built on the genre’s familiar pillars: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. You start with one star system in a galaxy littered with ruins left by the Endless, a vanished precursor race. From there you scan anomalies, colonize planets, set up trade routes, research a large technology tree, and eventually meet rivals who want the same stars you do.

What sets it apart is how it stacks its systems. Your empire’s population is made up of distinct species with their own traits and political leanings. Their happiness decides which parties win elections in your senate. The winning parties decide which laws you can pass. So a militarist empire that suddenly takes in a flood of peaceful, science-minded immigrants may find its war laws voted out from under it. That is a strategy game making an argument about power, not just a spreadsheet with a starfield behind it.

The competition is serious. Stellaris owns the grand-strategy sandbox. Galactic Civilizations serves players who love classic ship design. Endless Space 2 sits between them. It is more authored and asymmetric than Stellaris and far more stylish than GalCiv. Amplitude designed it for players who want each campaign to have an identity, not just a different map seed. Its critical reception was solid — a Metacritic score of 80 — and it remains a fixture in discussions of the modern space 4X.

• Eight Asymmetric Civilizations: These are not reskins with a +10% bonus. The religious Vodyani live in giant ark ships and drain planets instead of colonizing them. The Sophons pursue science at reckless speed. The mechanical Riftborn bend the usual rules of growth. Each one changes how you open a game.
• Population & Senate Politics: Species have political leanings. Their happiness sways elections, and election results unlock or lock the laws you can pass. Expansion becomes a question about who you are letting into your empire.
• Faction Story Quests: Every civilization has its own written quest line, which gives each campaign a narrative spine the genre usually lacks.
• Heroes: You recruit and level up heroes who either govern star systems or command fleets. They add a layer of character-driven specialization.
• Custom Ships & Card-Driven Battles: You design ships, then fight in cinematic real-time battles that you shape before they start by picking formations and tactic cards.
• Multiple Victory Paths: You can win by conquest, science, economy, wonders and other routes, backed by minor civilizations, diplomacy and multiplayer.

The Core Loop: Familiar Bones, Unfamiliar Muscle

The first fifty turns will feel familiar to any 4X veteran. You scout, pick your first colony targets, queue improvements and start working through the tech tree. The technology tree is broad, split into science, economy, military and expansion. Its circular layout makes it easy to see your options, even if the sheer number of incremental upgrades eventually blurs together.

Where Endless Space 2 earns its place is in how quickly its factions stop feeling alike. Playing the Vodyani means rethinking expansion from scratch: you move your ark ships around and feed on other peoples’ worlds rather than planting flags everywhere. The Sophons push you toward a fast science race in which falling behind hurts in a very personal way. Amplitude built asymmetry into the rules, not just the stat sheets, and that is the main reason the game rewards repeated campaigns. Eight factions, eight very different openings.

The faction quest lines strengthen this. They give you goals beyond “paint the map” and deliver lore in small, well-written pieces. Many 4X games leave the story to your imagination. This one actually tells one, and it does so without taking control away from you.

Politics: The Best Idea in the Box

The senate is the game’s standout system. Each species in your empire leans toward particular parties, and your actions push their opinions too. Wage war and militarists grow stronger. Invest in research and the scientists gain seats. Every election then decides which laws you can use, and those laws are powerful: bonuses to production, influence, research or combat.

This produces the kind of friction good strategy design needs. Growth has a political cost. Absorbing a new minor civilization might hand you a valuable species and also a voting bloc that hates your war policy. You end up managing your own people’s moods, not just your enemies. It is not as deep as a dedicated grand-strategy game’s internal politics, but it is far more readable. The interface explains cause and effect well enough that an election result rarely feels arbitrary.

Heroes and Ships

Heroes add a welcome human touch. A good governor can turn a mediocre system into a production hub, and an admiral with the right skills can decide a war. Leveling them gives a slow-burn sense of progress that carries across a long campaign.

The ship designer is solid rather than spectacular. You pick hulls and fit them with weapons, defenses and support modules. It is flexible enough to reward thinking about counters, since kinetic, beam and missile weapons all behave differently against each type of defense, but it never becomes the engineering sandbox some rivals offer.

Battles: The Most Divisive Design Choice

This is where Endless Space 2 splits its audience, and both sides have a case. When fleets meet, you do not steer ships in real time. You choose a formation and a tactic card, then watch a cinematic battle play out. The decision matters, since cards counter one another and formations determine range, but once the fight starts, you are a spectator.

It looks fantastic. It also risks feeling hollow by the twentieth battle. Space combat is the fantasy many players buy a space 4X for, and turning it into a rock-paper-scissors choice followed by a cutscene cuts against that. It is elegant on paper and thin in execution, and the design practically invites auto-resolving most fights — which says a lot about how central it really is.

The Late Game and the AI

The genre’s oldest problem hits here too. The first half of a campaign is strong: decisions come fast, the map is unknown and the politics are volatile. By the late game you are managing dozens of systems, the tech tree has become a list of small percentage upgrades, and turns start to drag. The UI helps less than it should when the empire gets big.

The AI is the other weak point. On higher difficulties it leans on bonuses rather than out-thinking you. It struggles with coherent war plans and uses its advantages in ways that feel mechanical. A skilled player will find its limits. That makes multiplayer, or a set of self-imposed challenges, the best way to get the most out of the game long-term.

The DLC Question

Endless Space 2 has had a long post-launch life, and much of it has come as paid expansions and faction packs. The base game stands on its own, but several of the most interesting factions and systems sit behind extra purchases. The complete experience is spread across a DLC catalogue, and that is a real cost to factor in. It is not a scam, but waiting for a bundle sale is the smart move.

Amplitude’s art direction is among the strongest in the genre. The galaxy map is painterly and readable at the same time. Nebulae glow, star systems pop, and each faction has a distinct visual language, from the Vodyani’s cathedral-like arks to the Riftborn’s crystalline geometry. The UI is dense but elegant: clean typography, strong color coding and panels that feel designed rather than bolted on.

The soundtrack, by Amplitude’s longtime composer FlybyNo, is atmospheric and melancholic, and fits the game’s theme of an ancient galaxy full of ruins.

On the technical side, a turn-based 4X of this scope is light on hardware, and the cinematic battles are the heaviest load. The design of large maps with many AI players means long turn-processing waits late in a campaign — an inherent cost of the genre’s scale rather than a deal-breaker, but it adds to the late-game fatigue.

On Steam, Endless Space 2 is exactly where it belongs: a mouse-and-keyboard game built for a desk. Hover tooltips carry a lot of information, and the nested panels for systems, senate, heroes and tech assume precise pointer control. There is no meaningful controller support, and you won’t miss it.

Steam also gives you achievements, cloud saves and Workshop mod support, which extends the game’s life, especially for players who want to adjust AI behavior or balance. Multiplayer runs through Steam’s infrastructure and supports long, asynchronous-feeling sessions with friends, which is where the game’s political and diplomatic systems work best. The DLC catalogue is easy to browse on the store page, and frequent sales make the complete package much easier to justify.

Endless Space 2 is a game of strong convictions. Amplitude bet that asymmetry, story and internal politics matter more in a space 4X than direct control over combat, and mostly won that bet. The senate system is one of the smarter ideas the genre has produced in the last decade, and the faction design gives it an identity its closest rivals lack.

It still has flaws. The battles are pretty but shallow, the late game loses momentum, and the AI won’t challenge an experienced player for long. We recommend it to strategy players who value political systems and faction identity over tactical combat — ideally on sale with a bundle of the expansions. Pick a faction you’ve never played, and let your senate make your life difficult. For the first hundred turns, few strategy games are this engaging.