Suzerain: Kingdom of Rizia

It's insane how much content indie devs push to their game expansions these days. Rizia DLC is just as expansive as the base game, and features several new mechanics not found in the Suzerain Sordland experience. The core of the game is familiar. You attend council meetings, wine and dine envoys, react to some crises, and instigate others in a nicely flowing CYOA statecraft novel. This type of game lives or dies on the strength of its writing, and Rizia thankfully meets the high bar established in Suzerain. The characters are memorable, and they tend to have their own personalities and charisma. I must also commend the effort of the dev team to present all worldviews in a sympathetic light. Progressives, royalists, nationalists, communists, and homosexual bodybuilder jihadists get their say without being reduced to hate sink caricatures. Statecraft is slightly changed compared to the parliamentary Sordland. As the King of a hereditary monarchy, you have absolute say in state matters, and the new decree system allows you to lead the Kingdom towards a wide variety of outcomes at your preferred pace. Rizia can be an energy-exporting petrodynasty, revanchist military-industrial powerhouse, progressive tourism-driven welfare state, or a fundamentalist theocracy after your first decade on the throne. Of course, you might also get couped, deposed or die in exile. The Rizian noble houses are a fickle bunch, and the geopolitical neighbors are a bundle of conflicting societies and loyalties where bowing in one direction risks exposing your backside to the other. Rizia is thankfully slightly more forgiving than the base game, so keeping your head above water isn't impossible on the first run. The accumulative Budget/Authority/Energy system is also easier to get a handle on than the opaque economy recovery metrics in base Suzerain.

The expansion goes great lengths to remove the frustrations of its predecessor. The inconveniently timed construction proposals that went straight into the dustbin if you didn't have the budget in that moment, and couldn't possibly be planned around without foreknowledge, are gone. You no longer need the experience of a prior playthrough or a walkthrough on hand. Rizia's monarchy offers a more proactive approach with a huge list of decrees that can be enacted at any time. This enables better planning and consistency in building a specific style of kingdom from the get-go. All of this is tied together with the series' immersive writing which is some of the best in the genre. Even your previous save file is transferred over. Decisions you made in the base game affect events in the expansion as the timelines overlap, and you'll see familiar faces like Alphonso and Smolak from a different perspective. If you liked Suzerain, this is everything you could want from an expansion. And they just keep adding more. New mechanics, more music, expanded storylines, etc. The updates have been tireless and even encompass the base game (since they're tied into each other), making an already great series even better.