This is a 8/10 thumbs up. I forced myself to do everything, all the campaings, achievements and playing around in solo free games, you can see by my playtime.
Gameplay is mostly : send an army explore and try to keep it alive to make the most of it, then when you have high tier units available, roll doomstacks out, full with equipments and keep them grouped to insure they don't get ganged up on by 5 ennemy armies. Overall it's fun enough and, in terms of game rythm or combat mechanics, you don't have time to get bored so it hands down beats other games likes endless legends or any of the civilisations in those regards.
Campaign mode is decent, frustrating at times, but well balanced. Your decisions carry from mission to mission, what allies/ennemies you made, who died, etc. The story has an interesting twist in that you play a sub-campaing for each of the different races and get to pick which one to play as in the final mission, with every big decision in every single mission coming into play depending on who you pick.
By playing solo games in the Empire mode, you unlock special artifacts and levels that allow you to gain an increasing advantage in subsequent solo games, such as bonus starting technologies and special troops/equipment. This makes solo games much more enjoyable and amazingly enough, gives you a sense of progression that is inexistent in other games of the genre.
With the dlcs, you get to pick between 7 gameplay defining technologies and 8 species (half of them are basically just different human cultures though). I will say for new players; Vanguard and the lizards are terrible, especially when you're still learning the game. Syndicate sucks at autoresolve but is decent otherwise whilst assembly will trample on everything in autoresolve.
Units skills do not weight in the autoresolve, but make a huge difference when you play your battles, so I would say the more skills your units have, the more it's worth it to play your battles manually.
I had a fun time, though since the game with its dlcs is somewhat expensive, even with all it has to offer, maybe wait for a sale and then I'm pretty sure you'll feel good about your purchase afterwards.
