It's just a better version of the first

Pretty unique co-op moba style game. Has a lot of depth to chew on. Has a lot of options to tailor the difficulty to your group.

Very good, especially with a group -- friends or pubs. It's like Sea of Thieves but with character progression, session based missions and only pve.

Still has that great cultist sim vibes, but removed a lot of the grindy bits like needing to pay money every day. I was having an alright time until I started tracking what the results were of actions like reading specific books; then I started having a great time.

is good game

TL;DR: Ask for help. If this the game for you, you'll likely love it. If not, you'll like find it too slow or too confusing.

The game offers a very interesting problem to solve with a complex production chain and a player driven economy. The game certainly has its rough spots, but the community is ready and willing to step up to help work out any hitches you might hit while starting up. It also has a very slow early game compared with the mid to late game (that I've only witnessed) but so far I've had a lot of fun thinking about my production chains and how to best utilize the limited resources available to me as a newer player.

It offers a very generous free to play option coupled with a subscription model without micro transactions to pollute the relationship of player and developer means that the devs can stay true to their vision for the game without needing to try to drive a mtx storefront.

I recommend this to a very specific type of player as it is not for the light of heart. It is very much a thinking mans game: this game runs in real time and is a hard sci-fi universe, this means that things can take days (like real life days) to complete. This means that every choice is important, and there are a lot of things to take into account with each choice:

How much does the fuel cost to send this ship to market?
How much does it cost to satisfy the needs of my employees at my rig?
Would those employees be better served working at a farm instead?

The list of things to consider is quite exhaustive, but depending on the level of optimization you wish to achieve you can gloss over many of them.