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I've just my first play-through with Oceania enabled and I'm curious how many of you Shadow Empire die hards play with this DLC enabled.
I loved it in the early to mid game, but boy, this DLC is creating so many decisions each turn that I feel like a call center worker.
The MTH requests, especially the IP purchase ones, are so numerous. Couldn't they buy it once from SHQ and not from a specific zone or just have a contract for providing x of IP per turn? Only surviving MTH could generate 5 IP requests per turn!

AI was assaulting my islands a lot which was exciting, but they were leaving deserted cities and I couldn't keep up to merge them. Each turn I was dismissing several decisions to appoint governors in ghost cities. I got completely lost with amount of my zones. Cities without pops should decay to ruins or at least merge PP cost should be based on the city size (though it would still generate pointless appoint governor decision).

Oceania wa generating for me 10+ decisions per turn during last turns before I finally reached 50% VPs. I want to play more of it as I really like the transport contract idea, but this decision spam is punishing...

So where do you stand on the Oceania topic?

Hi, I played around with Oceania a bit when it was released but I soon stopped using the DLC, I didn't like it

No. I never much liked the MTH concept to begin with. But a couple months ago, I decided to try it again and activated it. On Turn 2, before I had even met anyone or even talked to a MTH, a huge invasion from across the sea came and setup next to my capital. That was game over for that game. I turned it back off again after that.

I don't think Oceania was well thought out (or play tested). Similar to when Vic put in airpower - the AI would build nothing but air defense and was brain dead (I turned Air off for a very long time). Eventually he fixed the problems with air, maybe he will revisit Oceania and fix it. I'm still waiting for ships to be added.

Nope.. stopped after 2 games. Hate the MTH and how they work. I want my own ships to move around

I enjoyed that it opened up potential for different play style and tactical/strategic challenges. Plus it made Earth-like planets with large oceans feasible from a mechanics perspective.

I play with it enabled all the time, but I still find invasions/contracting very challenging to manage and the MTH events rather time consuming to go through due to quantity as the game goes on. I probably play fewer MTH-heavy games to completion than others.

There is no question gameplay would be more engaging and perhaps straightforward as a player if we could build our own ships and manage our own routes and perhaps trade more effectively. Oceania takes a swing at enabling maritime mechanics, but it did not try to tackle those bigger, trickier, mechanics. Vic has said he would like to add player ships etc., but we have to bear in mind the scope of changes to mechanics would be large. There are so many design questions: do ships work like land units, or like aircraft? Maybe necessarily they work like neither and need whole new, very complex mechanics. How would player shipborne trade work, given there is no existing concept of units which perform trade, or specific trade routes, or time to traverse trade routes. Oceania was an attempt to create a workable maritime system where all of the combat, trade, and traversal happens off-screen. Essentially no new core system was added. Most everything is handled via events and backend rolls. And still, it took a decent time to develop, test, and balance, with a lot of the balance fine tuning happening after release, and arguably the fine balance is still problematic now and could use tweaks.