I've tried this weekend for the second time to get into the game and only lasted about 15 minutes this time. Two hours the first time. For comparison, to get into Europa Universalis 5, I watched about fifteen hours of tutorials and had four starter games before settling on playing Byzantium and I am now three full games into it and with 600 hours of that game.
So, why did I fail to get into Sins of Solar Empire 2, despite also having watched a few hours of tutorials and read one or two guides?
It's not the empire building or the ship combat, it simply is the really lacking research guidance and feedback. To enumerate:
1.) There are no alerts when a research option is done. This leads to research feeling samey and unimpactful (despite obviously having an impact). When you are new and overwhelmed with managing all the other important aspects of the game, not getting any feedback that your crucial research is finished makes it feel unimpactful and very easily missable.
2.) You also don't get any obvious alerts or feedback if your research queue is empty, making you miss out on research progress when you already are overwhelmed with managing a battle or just looking at options / building up infrastructure, until you glance at your upper left corner and notice that nothing is being researched. The game seems to lack alerts for this obvious problem and leaves the new player floundering in options, while one of the most crucial aspects of progression just sits there doing nothing.
I know SoSE2 is a real-time game, but I got 1500+ hours in Stellaris and therefore know how a real-time 4X game can be paced. This "miss it and you lose it!" approach ain't it, chief.
I most likely will get back to trying the game when the campaign comes out (so in.... two years at the earliest, given the lack of progress and updates on even the DLC before that?), but one can hope one of the dev sees this and takes it back as feedback on how to make onboarding easier for new players.
If there are any mods out there which add alerts to an empty research queue and give better feedback to completed research, I'd love to hear about it. Or maybe I am an idiot and didn't check an option to enable this from the base game, please educate me on this, if this is the case. Currently, I am a bit too frustrated to try again with the options I find to be available from the base game.