I'm just done with the game after a while. I stopped playing EU4 around "Mare Nostrum" and Stellaris after "MegaCorp". 2-3 years, 3-5 DLCs, after that I want a new game. But, if I would decide to return to EU4 right now, buying a subscription for a month would be a much better option for me, than buying all the missing DLCs. Yeah, not worth it. That's just appearance stuff afaik, except the Women in History which adds some events that are kind of worthwhile. What's the price difference between the base game and the extreme? If it's enough difference to buy one or two of the more important DLCs, I'd do that. Normally Japan is last country to get the institutions, while growing huge penalties on advancing tech (basically waste big junks of monarch points). Now the manual development of province (which was part of Common Snese and is now in base game) gives you 2 bonuses: - your province gets better. - you also advance toward spawning your first The EU4 subscription service is available from today and costs $4.99 / £3.99 / €4.99. It will renew automatically each month until it is cancelled. It is only available to Windows users via I've already wasted way more money than i'd like to admit on buying the DLCs one at a time, mostly because i dislike a constant drain on my bank account more than a massive 1 time reduction. I know now i'd have saved a LOT of money if i got the subscription early on, but the fact that i have a few already makes it slightly less worth it. The problem with EU4 is that it's all the flavor that makes EU4 stand out among Paradox games, and a lot of the flavor is locked behind DLCs. The good thing about EU4 is that they have gradually moved "essential" mechanics that were previously locked behind a paywall into the base game, so there are no DLCs that are "essential" anymore. Its definitely worth it. The problem is, if you ever play a multiplayer game and get to use someone elses DLC, you will be ruined. Even if you learn what those DLC features are, it will ruin the game for you. If you can manage to play the base game in a vacuum, it is worth it. Art of War, and Rights of Man. All of those contain features that make your playthrough a much less of a headache. PDX DLCs are basically solutions to artificially construed problems that the devs are forced to add into the game by the corporates. Rights of Man, Dharma & Cossacks are the next for me but not urgent. It's not about bad quality, but it's about prices. 20 dlcs with 20 $ each is fucking ridiculous, and the game it self isn't that cheap. They are greedy as fuck. I don't agree. I have this rule of thumb that I want to pay around one euro per gameplay hour. Oh, and make sure you get the expansions not the content packs, if you buy them. The content packs are just graphics packs. Not sure how long it will last, but you can get all dlc except music and graphic packs for a 100 euros with Emperor pack, which is great value if you ask me. I played the base game without dlc for about 500 hours so it SvLaA2.