>>2104575
>as if not having 200 dlc is a bad thing.
tangentially related but I was just thinking of how terrible all the DLCs are in ES2. The factions they add are all good but the new mechanics are all bad:
>Vaulters
The pirate diplomacy feature is non-functional. You can pay pirates tons of dust and place a pirate mark on a newly formed colony next to their outpost just for the pirates to go do something else instead and see 0 returns on investment. The AI is just bad at attacking targets in general. It gets a pass because the pirate hero is fun, having a non-aggression pact with pirates can be helpful sometimes and it adds boarding pods as weapons.
>Supremacy
Behemoths are not that good and require a lot of research to be worth it. The AI is terrible at using them too, I see behemoths without engines spending tens of turns moving between systems almost every game. They can be fun in the hands of a player though and nuking whole systems at once is undeniably satisfying.
>Penumbra
Hacking feels like it was made solely with the umbral choir in mind: it's not well integrated in the existing research tree at all and instead you start with the ability to cause a civil war that will cripple your opponents without requiring any research or system improvement. At the same time if you can't hack a home system and you're not the umbral choir then hacking is pretty much a useless thing that you still can't ignore because the AI can hack you. I keep this disabled unless I'm playing the choir.
>Awakening
The academy only gets in the way of your interactions with other players, genuinely makes the game worse, 0 upsides.
I'm not familiar with stellaris but in general civ games always nailed expansions, ES2 never had that one expansion or update bringing it from good to amazing and maybe that's part of why it's never got as popular.
