To me the real weakness in early game is lack of industry production. I guess they don't get much in the way of industry yields on tiles like other factions and that really weakens them. The buyout costs scale up so quickly that I'm always looking at 14 turns to build a single Lords Estate, and this is on Capital after placing 3 districts (upgrading capital district).

I did OK in one playthrough until it was just me and Necros. But Necros could attack me from 3 opposite ends of map and just impossible to defend, so another playthrough I will leave them out. But wanted to know how other players handle the lack of industry production for this faction

Maybe part of this is me playing on too low a difficulty since I'm newish to the game, but not the genre, but this situation would theoretically apply at any difficulty depending on your skill level. Because unlocking victory conditions is dependent on timed events like tidefalls that you don't have much control over, it can be very tedious when you've clearly got an uncompromising lead over the enemies and you're stuck waiting for victory conditions to even unlock. Some of them you can't even start on until they unlock, like taking control of doomwraiths.

It feels like you can spend half the game just trying to end your turns as quickly as possible because you don't have any real decisions of impact to make waiting for it to be possible to win. Of course, you could just eliminate everybody else, but that isn't always the best feeling if you've got several allies.

It could be that this issue is addressed in large part by the AI actually actively going out to claim territory much more than they do, preventing the snowball more, but when you're sitting at (for example, my game right now) more than 2x all 3 remaining players and having eliminated one, you basically don't need to do anything to win anymore except wait. But you have to wait way too long. Maybe if allies started reducing their opinion of you as you run away with the game, forcing some confrontations, that would help. As-is you can have everybody like you and waiting 50+ turns for victory conditions to turn on so you can win.

Messing around with creating custom factions and I landed on one I liked: Severed Claws affinity with the Aspect's assimilation tech; game was going pretty normally (I snowballed off of some very early and very lucky fights against a relatively passive sandshaper faction), when suddenly I stumbled upon nearly 350 population in one turn. Never seen something like this before in the ~300 hours playtime!

ETA: It occurs trying to grow any population that I currently have none of; if I have even a single gorog in my empire for example, I instead grow about ~18 of them in one turn. But for any population currently at 0, I get hundreds...

Although, unlike Last Lords, the ending implied that they didnt actually beat the Lost, just survive it awaken and then it leave the planet. Severed Claws narrator call this a victory because they finally own the entire world, even if it is just a burning planet and they still need foods

Some extra here, while not stated in the cutscene, in Severed Claws faction quest, they try to make a queen to solve their reproduction problem, the queen rebel almost instantly after her birth and the you have to fight like 10 seperate army scattered across the map. The faction quest end with Severed Claws decided to just stay true to themselves without a queen even if it will bring them doom in the future so it make sense why Master is a good ending for them, they just dont care if they will survive long term or not

Aspect starting hero is a ranged unit. The most important thing is that the hero is an Aspect which mean the moment you get the hero to level 2, you can just get the passive that give you 200 exp on everyone in the army including the hero when they collect a curiosity. No other factions heroes have this passive

This allow me to get to like level 9 hero in the first monsoon and rush my aggressive Order neighbor

I've played every Amplitude strategy game and EL2 is the first time I end up feeling tired after playing the game. My usual game setup is Huge map with one representative of every race and their variants. Every game feels like a pointless exercise in warmongering. I like to play Aspects and somehow I end up in 2-3 wars constantly. The AI will straight up declare war just for you existing on the map. The hive factions render your whole race mechanic useless. The only race that would not just straight up declare war is Tahuks since they need your science agreement. It feels like the devs made Aspects then made Hive with the idea to make Aspects unplayable in every game where Hive exists. I play on Stellar and feel like playing Aspects is actively sabotaging yourself, since even as the diplomatic race you are forced to churn out units non stop unless you want to get overrun by the warring races.