First of all, I'm okay with the many DLCs: developers need to eat, I understand that. But there are many issues here, which I don't understand given how many updates that game had. My main issue is the user interface. It is absolutely atrocious and mostly useless. Here are a couple examples: - Apparently there's a way to see a view of all your colonies in a single window. I've been told it's "hard to find". I can confirm that, I never found it. - The only way to know what a battle report is about is to click on it, which moves your cursor to the battle and open the star system. There are LOTS of battles, 90% of them are not important. This is very annoying. - The battle report are mostly useless. There are numbers at the bottom, but even when all the numbers are better on my side (fleet size, hit percentage, etc.) I still loose. There are no indication as to what are the possible causes of my failure. - At some point, the battle system was rewritten to make it more enjoyable. That's fine. Except the "fleet strength" indicator is still there, and by account of other players, it is completely useless and badly calculated. - The game insists I use spies and the spy system... except it is empty because I have not the Nemesis DLC. Again, I'm ok with DLCs. But getting constant reminders of issues with my spying network that I cannot fix is very annoying. - The voiceover often tells me there's a battle going on but there's no indicator of it anywhere. The only way to know what's going on is to go all around the galaxy to find it. - Production numbers shift up and down with no indication as to why. I'm guessing it's people moving around, changing jobs, but again the interface doesn't tell me anything. There are a number of bugs too. Some freeze and crashes. My "Ironman" savegame was never corrupted, so there's that. I feel like the current state of the game is to be a frustration generating machine. I got enough of this at work. Play Master of Orion II instead.
