Scripting in 4X games

I am playing my first game of Endless Legend 2, while also watching YouTube videos about the game. And it becomes immediately obvious to me that when I play the same faction as somebody on YouTube, we have the same quests. And regardless of faction, we have the same sequence of monsoons and tidefall, increasing the landmass over the course of the game. That makes me happy that I am trying this on Game Pass, and didn't pay $50 for it. Because I really don't want to have the same problem again that I already had with Civ 7: A scripted 4X game, where the repetition of the script in each game significantly lowers replayability for me.

Now I completely understand the interest of this sort of game design. In a first game of Civ 7, it is interesting when the game changes, and you suddenly have to explore a new world. In a first game of Endless Legend 2, it is interesting when your coastal city is suddenly landlocked. 4X games without any scripts or events can become monotonous, as you have to rely on emergent narrative. The problem is that I don't buy 4X games to play them only once. My ideal 4X game is Age of Wonders 4, where I have such a huge selection of choices on setting up the game, that there is endless replayability. In comparison, Endless Legend 2, despite the "endless" in the name, isn't endless at all. If you play Endless Legend 2 five times, you have seen all five asymmetric factions and their quest lines, and the 6th game is necessarily rather similar to one of those first five.

Don't get me wrong. Endless Legend 2 is a very competent and fun game, especially if you consider that it is still early access. And maybe you only want to play a few games, and five very different factions are enough for you. But my experience with Civ 7 was that the structure of the ages, and wanting to do all legacy paths in order to have the bonuses for the next age, resulted in all of my games having a very similar flow. I liked Civ 7 a lot in the first few games I played it, but lost interest in it much faster than with less scripted 4X games. I also found that the script in both Civ 7 and Endless Legend 2 limits your choices: Civ 7 didn't have a pangea map at release, because that doesn't work with the new world mechanic; Endless Legend 2 necessarily has a lot of water on the initial map, otherwise tidefall wouldn't make sense.

I guess your impression of Endless Legend 2 will depend a lot on how often you usually replay a 4X game. For me, a game with less replayability is totally fine on Game Pass, where I don't get permanent access to the game anyway, and DLC are a problem. For Age of Wonders 4 I much prefer the game on Steam, where I just bought the third expansion pass for it, and the game is permanently installed on my hard drive.