Bought the Mercenaries DLC and the Precursor Worlds DLC yesterday, updated to 1.6 and played for a few hours. I think it's a major improvement and step forward for GC3! I was skeptical about the mercenaries but I think they add a very fun component to the game. Also I really like the Precursor worlds a lot. . . they add a lot of variety. So overall I think both DLC's are worth the money and I am pleased with them. The game is now much more fun and interesting for me. I also really like the changes with coercion. . . feels much more balanced now.
I do have some additional questions:
1) There are multiple Bazaars. How do I choose which Bazaar I want the mercenary to come from?
2) Is there some explanation of how influence adds up? If you have 3 planets in a certain area, is there a way to figure out how much influence you will be exerting on a certain hex somewhere? Do influence starbases work on their own or do they only act to enhance a planet's influence that's within their range?
Also some issues:
1) I played with 5 AI's and only one so far has bought a mercenary, and they only bought one. Not sure if this is just the game I'm in or a general issue where the AI doesn't really care much about mercenaries?
2) The economy portion still feels unbalanced. I didn't build a single economic structure and really didn't have any issues at all. Restricting the ability to sell techs would definitely help. Being able to sell techs for large sums of money to the minor races seems like an exploit to me. There should be an option to restricted from the tech trading. In fact, I may disable them altogether as they don't seem to have much of a purpose other than to provide high quality planets for invasion later unless I'm missing something?
3) Can't wait for 1.7 to address starbases and constructor spam. The strategy part is fun for a little while in the beginning when you're locking down resources but after a while it becomes a big micromanaging pain.
4) I wish you could tell planetary governors to convert a planet from one focus to another. So if I set it up as an industrial planet but now I want it to be all research, it should have the option to replace the buildings and set the planetary focus in an intelligent way.
5) On normal difficulty, AI makes some dumb military strategy choices. For example, they don't assemble fleets, they just fly one ship at a time towards my fleets. Also they choose to not try to attack my transports for some reason. Maybe I just have it set too easy.