Excellent Space 2

Excellent Space 2 is an Overhaul mod that has several missions:

– Add lots of consistency changes mainly across technologies, laws, buildings and modules.
– Enhanced tooltips to understand the game’s information and mechanics better.
– Changes to improve game flow, balance the game a bit, while maintaining the vanilla experience and the asymmetry of factions.
– Lots of Quality of life, to make the experience less annoying where it really shouldn’t.

As an overhaul mod, is not compatible with ESG or ES2 Redux. I personally recommend ESG if you don’t mind a different experience, specially if you play on fast speed: is not the vanilla experience anymore, but has much more content, and is more focused on balance on multiplayer. ES2 Redux is a mod worth trying out if you want a more challenging experience.

– Has all the fixes from Community Fixes mod baked in.
– The mod is fully translated into all 9 official languages.
– Resource rewards from quests scale way faster with turns, and specially dust and influence rewards. 500 dust and 30 titanium on turn 70 could be 4000 dust and 30 antimatter instead.
– Arid and Snow now have 1 more base population, Terran and Forest will have same total FIDS than Atoll and Ocean. Gas bodies tweaked, to spread resources and the FIDS and to make sense with the type.

– Food: less food from hero skills, more food from buildings, slightly increased food upkeep cost of population (by about 20% on average).
– Dust: minor buff to a few dust buildings, slight decrease on buyout costs, dust inflation reduced, specially in mid to late game, but still full vanilla impact of inflation in military upkeep.
– Industry: Changed T1 industry buildings and added lot of stuff so industry compounds from many small sources, making it not so dependent on number of planets/population, jadonix and sim camp.
– Science: buildings pretty much the same with small adjustments, but added some empire improvements to reward fast science progression immediately, not gated by industry.
– Influence: pretty much the same, just a proper T4 Influence building (Body Language Institute), and some tweaks to outrageous sources of influence.
– Approval: again, the same system and almost the same sources, also some tweaks to outrageous sources of approval.

– Removed 500 health to a total of 3k base from small support hulls.
– Medium hulls get a bit more health: 1k for hunters, 1.5k for coordinators.
– Arks from 1000 to 700 hull weakness.
– Carriers get more health: from 14000 to 22000 base health, also from 800 to 700 hull weakness.
– Juggernauts, and Behemoths with 8x multiplier modules, from 600 to 700 hull weakness.

– Often overlooked now quest modules remain relevant for a while.
– Improvements from quests got a minor balance pass, so they always offer something meaningful.
– Balance pass to Deeds Rewards, still outstanding, but a bit more inline with normal improvements.

– Now you don’t get your honor gain cut down to a max of 100 honor, you have the entire turn to spend it instead.
– Essence cap on Vodyani higher per Ark, so you don’t need to micro-manage essence generation when nearing the cap (Ark costs remain the same).

Shield absorption works the same as Hull absorption: nullifies damage completely.
Shield damage is all the damage that didn’t get absorbed by the shield (penetration damage + percent not absorbed), this damage is further reduced by hull absorption and applied to health.

With this simple change, shields are as much as a counter to energy damage as hulls are to kinetic damage. Kinetic damage (missiles and slugs) shred shields, the same way energy damage care so little about hull plates.

This means the usual "mix shield and plates in equal quantities" while still somewhat effective, is far more effective to get more shields vs energy or more plates vs kinetic.

To accommodate this fundamental damage mechanic change, shields now have much less capacity and don’t provide bonus health. Also defense values for shield absorption are significantly decreased.

– Siege damage is increased from ships, giving more offensive ships, behemoths and heroes, averages in about double the vanilla siege power (that was just Command points x 2).
– Siege damage is not static, but depends on the percent of the system manpower vs maximum system manpower under siege, up to 75% siege damage reduction.

With this change, you still can brute-force systems to 0 with enough siege power (double the system value), or brute force in with lots of manpower modules, but has diminishing returns. Is a way to give systems a bit more defensive value for a few turns without upgrading system capacities, enabling mixed tactics of siege + manpower modules as the most cost efficient way to conquers early and mid game when you don’t have spare resources.

– Some of fixes so you don’t get "free manpower" due to bugs. Now what you see is what you get.
– Greatly enhanced tooltip for empire manpower, showing all manpower sources clearly, like excess from system manpower generation, upkeep named properly (from Systems/Fleets), food into manpower, essence into manpower, etc.
– Now manpower from food is adjusted automatically and will use as much needed to fill the empire reserves (up to your maximum capacity), on vanilla was a on/off switch depending solely on if you miss any manpower at the empire level, easily killing lots of population when that happened.
– Added new effect "Manpower from food efficiency", that simply enhances the ratio of conversion of food into manpower without using any more food.
– Added a basic manpower income, of 4 + sum of system levels, to help with the lack of manpower generation on the early game.

– Flak now fires from 3 to 2 times per seconds, and has 85% accuracy.
– Flack damage only gets affected by module multiplier and the manpower bonus (up to 20% more damage with full manpower ships).
– Missiles health have less increasing health values than same tier flak, but health gets augmented by module multiplier.
– Swarm missiles are launched in sync with normal missiles, missiles are a bit slower and have a slightly slowed fire rate (from 6.55 to 7.2 sec, adjusted damage).
– Squadrons take from 20% to 6.66% damage from flak(2 damage per 30 flak). All damage increasing sources for damage to squadrons will be a percent of this base damage.

I cannot add in more stuff as there’s a limit in descriptions. Full changelog[drive.google.com]