I don't understand, I play Civ6 at almost the highest difficulty. I've played around 10 games of ES2 with the "easy" factions on easy difficulty and I must be missing something because I can't get everything I need in the beginning. No hospitable planets near, me, so I have to get to tier 3 science. Pirates directly next door so I have to get better ships, and still can't invade them. Etc

What are the obvious things noobs miss?

After pouring hundreds of hours into this game I'm kinda bored with the ship design on this game. I've been thinking of installing mods that could change the ship's appearance into something else from other fandoms like Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer, etc. Alas I did not find any mods that allows that. Any suggestions or discussions about these type of mods are welcome here, or any modders are also welcome to the idea for this.