This 'expansion' adds very little to the game that I enjoy, and I recommend prospective buyers take a few minutes to read this or other recent reviews. Take note: a lot of the negative reviews around release were specifically for a major update released along with this. The update screwed up the pop system of the game in favor of boosting performance late game, so many of the early reviews were *specifically* targeting the update and used this dlc page for their outrage. Take the 40% it is sitting at with that in mind.

-The crisis ascension perk is my main draw to this dlc, without it there would be no reason for me *personally* to really enjoy it. Buffs to subjugation, military, purging: it is what every sociopath who plays this game wanted! The problem is that;
---Most of these bonuses come stock standard with just starting off as a fanatic purifier or certain degrees of militaristic/xenophobe
---The end game doomsday cube is just the equivalent of the Death Star VS Star Killer Base when compared to the colossi from the Apocalypse DLC [blow up a planet vs blow up a system]
---If you happen to grind out enough dark matter to finish the crisis engine [which takes quite a while] you just push a button to get an end screen, no real cutscene, just the end of the game

-Custodian is basically just a kind of weird middle ground to being a federation leader, but of the galactic community. You can get a federation fleet Galactic Defense Force fleet, you can declare someone a crisis and have everyone declare war on them [that will last decades if you don't do all the work cause wars are still broken in AI vs AI], and you can become the Galactic Empire. Besides the meme of being the emperor it is pretty underwhelming, there is very little you gain that you couldn't just do by being a tyrannical ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the base game.

-I *HATE* espionage in almost every strategy games since it usually adds very little to the game and ends up being pretty tedious with the AI annoying you more than anything. Stellaris has done exactly that. While giving envoys more tasks than just writing love/hate mail was a great idea, the tasks are overall underwhelming. Half of them do very little and the other half affect diplomatic relations. Why would I not just have an envoy sit in their embassy and just gain favor over time? Basically no reason. If you want to be sneaky and set up a master plan to make 2 empires hate each other: 1) they already hate each other or 2) have so much trust/bonuses they will never do so. At the end of the day it is another layer to the game that adds so little I barely use it, since most of the time the empire in question will be conquered in short order.

-Nemesis ships are a joke for a selling point, slightly better ships that cost minerals instead of alloys [they are also just assets taken from the pirates, so they are ugly].


I am a huge Stellaris nerd, but this expansion really lets me down quite a bit. I wouldn't recommend this dlc for the $20 they mark it as, heck not even $10 on sale, if you can get it cheaper as part of a bundle it might be worth it but besides that I would hold off on it unless you really like Stellaris or really want that crisis ascension perk. For me it was more trouble than it was worth.

I'm a fan.