What a difference an expansion makes! In a bad way!
When Disharmony expansion was released, the original game broke for many of us. The changes were pretty radical, to the point where the game felt like a very different one than what we had been playing. For me, it became unfun. And this wasn't bout new release bugs or anything. It was about design decisions that were almost indefensibly stupid.
Amplitude made the classic mistake of not trusting its own intuition about what made a fun game. Instead, in the name of bogus collaboration with the kind of tw*ts that hang around on message boards 24 hours a day, they almost completely reworked the original release into an abortion of an expansion, because those same tw*ts wanted to play a different game. You know the type: "Hey, can you make my balls green?! I really want to have green balls!" Those kind of morons.
So a game that started as a multi-strategy game where empire building was as rewarding as constant war-making turned into the usual tank rush soup to please a certain crowd of fan boy. And in the process, ruined the nuance that many others of us had come to appreciate. Stupid changes like making planet characteristics change in physically impossible ways, for example. You could settle a beautiful,perfect class M planet that would only 10 turns later somehow have its gravity negatively altered, or become toxic, or come down with a wicked case of radiation poisoning. No one knows why, because the events aren't explained, they just happened. And your promising little civilization is turned into sh*t at the whim of some programmer who thought this might be amusing.
There were other ridiculous changes: a new faction who has a super freeze ray that basically kills your scouts on contact. Making map exploration virtually impossible in sectors where they exist. That's not very fun.
And so forth.
So, for gamers who had heard about this great game one month or so ago, beware. That game is not the one being sold right now, and I'm writing this review to let you know that, since there's no way the company the butchered this title will do it. Approach Endless Space with caution, and don't rely on older reviews to assist your decision. They are describing a very different experience.