With this new update, do you recommend buying the expansion?

[Supermarine]

I am well aware of the reviews, but apparently, some options have been added to disable certain mechanics. Is it worth playing with the expansion now?

[jfcabirol]

Hi supermarine,

It depends on what you like and what you are ready to cope with when you ae playing a 4X.

Some people like the World Council, some don't. I don't. But as you wrote it already, you can disable it.
As far as I am concerned, the way the council is working is odd. Some decisions are forced upon you with no possibility to react or even declare war to refuse them. Others are terribly used by the AI and amount to a nuisance rather than a feature.

The worst of it all, in my opinion, is the new resource, Leverage, and it is not disabled with the World Council. It appears on the map seemingly at random (I know, it isn't) and you have to move ambassador or spy units over the map to gather it. Ambassadors and Spies must be moved into your opponents' territory to accomplish missions. I found all that moves overly tedious. If you are not bothered by that though, Leverage, Ambassadors and Spies can add a new and interesting layer to the game.

I really like the vanilla game, it is well balanced as is in my opinion. Of course, someone who is playing with the DLC would offer a more informed opinion though.

[Captain Butthurt]

The newly added ability to disable the ungodly Congress of Humankind mechanic has singlehandedly uplifted the "Together We Rule" expansion from being irredeemable (it's so bad it actively destroys your game, turning a previously cohesive and logical 4X TBS experience into complete circus) to being mediocre (all other features are solid, but not ground breaking).

At least now I can recommend buying it (especially on sale) if you enjoy the game.

[Supermarine]

Thank you both for your detailed insights!

[DNLH]

If you treat TWR as culture pack it's pretty solid but nothing groundbreaking, I feel like all the cultures added have circumstances under which they're a good option to advance into.

I don't mind the agent units, played a bit more with 'em after the expansion released, nowadays I barely bother with spies and maybe get their advanced version or two, but I still feel like they're a bit clunky to use and the fact that they don't have third or more iterations means that once modern unit roster appears in game they're toast when random unit accidentally bumps into them when they're on a mission. Envoys are fine, IMO, especially once you get the naval transport capable of braving the oceans so they don't cry about being lost at sea every couple of turns, you can just spam three or four of them and send them to auto-explore, and whenever they get eaten by coyotes you can go to shelter and get a new envoy.

Embassies and leverage actions are mostly okay, there's some fun to be had there, although most of it is standard HK fire-and-forget kind of deal. One outlier is Placate action, which was busted and I'm not sure it got fixed, at the very least it needs to be capped on how low it can get the War Support down, because right now it's another one of those things that allow abuse of the whole war system which otherwise I find a real nice addition to the genre.

Now for the hot take, I think Humankind Council was a great addition, the whole global ideology thing can flip the game on its head if you let it start handing out free tech to everyone or something hardcore like that, and the voting made me more careful about keeping a surplus of Influence, because now you need it to avoid civics you really don't want to follow. The crisis votes are a rollercoaster, if the world generally doesn't like you and has you by the balls on leverage it will make you miserable, and with some stubborn personas it may make the game really volatile, because AIs will declare crisis wars on each other left, right and center. Still, one of my favourite things is now hoarding leverage, seeing which vassal makes a crisis vote about freedom, and then supporting them with leverage in the council and with gifting them a bunch of modern armies outside of it.