- Cradle of Humanity
- Kingdom End
- Tides of Avarice
- Split Vendetta
Next is Kingdom End as #2. They bring some very beautiful sectors, but most importantly distinct ships with great and innovative design. New weapons, shields and engines add some much needed diversity, and their stations are generally very pleasant to look at and fun to design. They're not blocky. Again, great music.
Then I took Tides of Avarice as #3, because I like the new ships and the somewhat lopsided design philosophy behind those factions. Unique factions with a specialization, i.e. the Donia just for solid mining and no liquid variant. Barbarossa is a quick destroyer-esque armed freighter, otherwise no destroyers or capital ships. The vanity ship Astrid is a very fine addition and now my flying office, so big bonus here. The scrap economy, Avaraice with the Tide, the Protectyon economy, those are the innovations I like to see in the game. Also very good music.
The downsides of ToA are that we can't automate the Protectyon extraction, that Tidebreak spawns Protectyon infinitely (and therefore breaks the "true simulation" aspect somewhat), that the Casino offers no reason to visit it (although I'm aware that it's not without problems to include gambling minigames).
Last for me is Split Vendetta as #4. It's not like I hate it or anything, I still think it's a good expansion and I use their ships frequently. But I'm not too interested in the Split as a faction, their sectors aren't visually impressive for the most part (Zyarth's Dominion is the exception), and they don't add anything economically unique. For me the expansion is mostly a welcome ship pack, and those ships felt extremely powerful when compared to the base game ships.
I mean, SV is still worth every cent, the ships are good and very pretty. But aside from the ships and extra sectors, SV doesn't offer a fundamentally new game experience. I'd still rank it pretty high, but a ranking is a ranking, so something has to be first and something else has to be last. SV is last, because it adds the least amount of variety and innovation.