That's the price of a loaf of bread (in 2022), if the money printing continues

Stardock patching sucks: Instead of carefully refining and expanding the base mechanics, they've repeatedly reinvented whole game systems, drastically changing the game.

And these constant radical changes are often extremely unwelcome - for example, artificially limiting the number of farms per planet to a small random number of "Arable Land" tiles, which is not only irritating to play but utterly ridiculous in concept given the presence of advanced farming and outright terraforming technologies in the game.

Or the infamous change to AI whereby defeated empires destroyed their own planets, killing ALL of their billions of citizens and reducing their worlds to lifeless hunks of rock, because it was supposedly "inconvenient" for players to have to manage conquered territory. This was a change so unpopular on announcement that it was made optional in a subsequent patch.

Or the removing of fog of war within the borders of player empires without reworking sensor technologies for planets and starbases - undermining a significant strategic element of the game.

The list goes on, but let me put it like this: The game was much more fun and full of potential around the time of the Mercenaries expansion. This "test random ideas" model of patching has steadily made it worse, especially considering the time and effort could have been better spent adding meat to the barebones initial release - such as greater number and variety of events, unique faction dialogue, etc.

Some expansions have brought interesting additions - citizens, for example - but on the whole the result of Stardock's model of development is a sad state of affairs: years after release, when it should be polished gem with plenty of content, GalCiv3 instead feels like a sloppy ongoing experiment with much too little content.

Okay, as someone who only has base game, what DLC-s do I need/which DLC-s bring most to the experience?

remember when gog did connect on stellaris, it got broken and they decided to cut it early, then promised to return stellaris to connect later? was like... 1.5 years ago? good times

What would the price of Stellaris (complete bundle) be in 2022, 50 loaves of bread?
https://costaide.com/loaf-bread-cost/

If you ever release a complete version at a reasonable price, I might be interested. Until then you'll have my stellar indifference.

There are very few cases where the AI can access DLC content that you don't own. I think it's just civics, and most of the best civics from a strict power standpoint are in the base game anyways (Meritocracy for +10% specialist pop output isn't very flashy or interesting but is incredibly strong) so you're not at any disadvantage. However, there are actually many cases where the opposite is true; there's a whole bunch of DLC content that the AI was never programmed to use so even if you have that DLC purchased the AI will never use it. There's also a lot of DLC content it's not very good at using, to the point at which it basically gets no benefit from it.

Xeno-compatibility is the most notorious, to the extent that Paradox actually added an option to disable this perk from your game entirely in this update; that's how bad the AI is with xeno-compabitility. It's actually a really solid perk, provided you use gene-modding to fix the random genetic junk that your hybrid species inherit, and consolidate redundant hybrid types into a single subspecies. If you just leave them to randomly propagate, as the AI does, then after a century or two you'll end up with literally hundreds of subspecies with nonsensical genetic combinations. And if you sign migration treaties, they will spread their nonsense across the entire galaxy because none of the other AI's know what to do with them either! In the late-game this can get so bad that it makes the species management UI unmanageable and actually cause performance issues due to just how many subspecies the game is tracking because the AI never consolidated any of them.

I will say that 2.6 made choke points much less effective as a strategy. If you sit back in a war and let the AI just muster its forces for a few years, it will literally send everything it has in one big push against your choke point (as it should). With the caveat that I do play on the highest difficulty setting, my experience is that the AI can very easily break any realistic choke point and you're much better going on a counter-offensive in a war rather than huddling behind choke points.

There isn't. As I mentioned above this isn't a real problem, and if anything the issue is the opposite where the AI doesn't know how to use certain DLC features so if you do own those DLC's you're at a massive advantage over it and the game will be much too easy.

I'd take a look at the big expansions first (Apocalypse, MegaCorp, Utopia, Federations). As someone else mentioned, Utopia is probably a good idea. I have very mixed feelings about MegaCorp but it does add Ecumenopolis planets which makes dealing with your empire's hunger for both alloys and consumer goods for non-gestalts much easier. But there were a few changes here for 2.6 as well and I have not yet really test-driven those.

For the story packs: as already mentioned, if you want to play as a robotic empire (including three different additional options on how to ... deal with pesky organics) from the start and not through ascension later on, Synthetic Dawn might be worth a look. Personally, I really enjoy the archaeology in Ancient Relics.

The species packs are completely cosmetic except for Lithoids which get some unique modifications from the baseline. Still crossing fingers the other species types could get something like this down the line as well.

I don't play Paradoxs games, but I'd just read the First user post in this thread, before responding to the ones quoted in my post, my main point is the awful business model, is bad enough, and this was just a thick layer of scummyness on top of that, stated from someone that played, and used to like the game.

No announcement of Crusader Kings III?

Thank you! I have another question, is it possible to play game diplomatically in style of Federation from Star Trek without Federarations DLC, or am I forced in playing like Imperium of Man or some other military xenophobe?

No problem at all with playing a diplomatic empire even without the Federations DLC.
Federations themselves are not locked behind this DLC ;)

The "default" pre-set empire United Nations of Earth is actually built around this idea of a multicultural democratic empire, where aliens and humans share the same rights.

Hmm then why buy this dlc?

I do not own it, so I will not be able to be exhaustive, but from what I understand:
• It adds multiple federation types;
• Federations can be improved further;
• It unlocks extra origins for empires;
• It comes with an extra ship type and a new megastructure type.