I’ve played the original with a couple mods a few years back and had much fun. Thought about starting again and wondered if I need the DLC nowadays.
Note: I have played a heavily modded game with both Royalty and Ideology, not Biotech though.
None of the DLCs are strictly necessary, but I would highly recommend Ideology - the core mechanics it adds are compelling and impactful, and it serves as a nice base for a huge amount of mods to build off it. Royalty isn’t bad either, but it seems more disconnected from the rest of the game than Ideology is.
Nah, the DLCs are great, but the base game is great too. Chess is good, but wizard’s chess is also good.
DLC are only really mandatory if you are playing with mods that require them.
The base game of Rimworld is still chock full of stuff to do and stories to experience, and i always reccomend people play just the base game by itself before thinking about DLC or mods, because DLC adds so many mechanics and new items as to be completely overwhelming even if you have a familiarity with the base game, and if you have no familiarity? Good lord!
The dlc is good but not necessarily a prerequisite. Though a lot of content mods depend on assets from the dlc.
I recently did some Vanilla with my brother since he hadn’t splurged for all the DLC yet. It was still a ton of fun but missed having Idealigion. Just love all the depth it adds!