OK, I need to rant.
I was super excited about 2.0, seeing the effort to fix the boring, horrible combat before as a desirable and good goal.
To celebrate two friends and I started a new game, played for a day or two, and got to midgame, so I got my first war.
Now, entering into the war, which was declared on me by an AI neighbor, I had two fleets and was at the recruitment limit.
My opponent had equivalent tech and power.
He is how the war went.
1. Enemy invades a border world soon after declaring war, I watch the attack on my station, observe the enemy fleet and upgrade my flee to counter-act it.
2. My fleet takes some time to upgrade, the enemy rapidly moves through systems attacking my stations, it is about at this point I notice that the stations aren't destroyed as in previous versions, but somehow magically convert to the enemy side, after being destroyed with weapon fire. I definitely didn't see that coming.
3. My fleets finally upgrade and I send them to the next system in line, they move incredibly slowly and the system falls before they reach it.
4. My fleets reach the system and engage the enemy fleet, we are of the same sizes, but I upgraded, so my ships easily win.
5. Then as the enemies flee, my own station, totally uninjured and seemingly specced with my own best weapons, opens fire and trashes my wounded fleet into also fleeing.
6. This repeats a second time, I figure OK, new plan, lets focus on winning back the systems.
7. I can't because the enemy is just fleeing engagements now, and I can't catch them because of how slow travel is. The worst part of combat before--endlessly chasing an enemy fleet around your map, remains strong.
8. I can't because the war ended without so much as a notification pop up, the alien enemy, who heroically lost two fleets in two battles has taken literally half of my empire.
9. the cause? War exhaustion: my sentient AI race got so tired of winning, and so scared of the stations they themselves built, they gave up half the empire.
10. I spend 10 (!) years rebuilding from this absurdity, launch an attack and lose in months, again due to exhaustion. In that time I win three space battles, lose one, and take numerous systems. War exhaustion victory for the AI, they even steal a few more worlds from me while I get nothing.
Fuck this game.
I honestly can't understand how it is possible to mess up combat more: their take away from previous combat problems is that people LOOOVE chasing enemies around the map fruitlessly and losing wars for no discernible reason.
I honestly can't play this game right now, which is embarrassing given that I experienced all this in the middle of friendly multiplayer.