I don't understand this. Unneccessarily difficult same way difficulties between 2-10 ?
The difficulty is a meaningful choice, and there is risk/reward here. The higher difficulty you put, the higher score you get (for one thing), and the more satisfaction you get out of winning.
For me these things and hybrids are what make the game. They force you to make meaningful choices every second of the game. Hybrids alone force you to spread your defense instead of making ChokePointOfDoom.
As I said, some people may enjoy extra micromanagement and tedium, you seem to be one of those people. Increasing the difficulty is something you can do without Hybrids - Hybrids just make it difficult on top of that. I promise you, on difficulty 10, said "chokepoint of doom" probably wont work out so well for you, unless you have some extremely broken unit like the Botnet Golem for defense.
If "chokepoints of doom" become a gameplay concern, then it's up to the developers to fix said game imbalance. Things like this have been done for all kinds of broken strategies - Blobbing (AI Eyes), Deep-Strikes (Core Shield Gens and Hunter-Killers), Riot Control Starship stunlocks, etc.
I don't think "chokepoints" are a broken mechanic, in fact I think the developers encourage it. When you're facing an army that's literally 20 times the size of your own, how else are you going to even the odds?
So what I'm saying is, there are better ways to fix broken mechanics than to add unnecessarily difficult factions to the game.
I am going to take a leap here, and assume that most people play with Hybrids off. It may be cool every once in awhile to make things ridiculously challenging, but I wouldn't assume that most players like to leave that stuff on just for the hell of it.
This forces you to make much more meaningfull decisision than something like Dyson. Only decision you have to make with dyson is do i free it now or noooooooowwww. For me the challenge options have always added more to the game than those that just give boost to the player.
Dyson Spheres are really good, but there is still risk/reward involved in taking them. For example, in my current game, I popped a Dyson Planet (which was way out of the way), then let some allied Gatlings build up. After I had a few Dyson Gatlings of my own, I took over the planet just for about 2 minutes to kill the Core Shield Generator and gather some Knowledge quickly. In that time, the Dyson Gatling had produced about 30 guys, who literally wiped out my entire army faster than I could get away. Now maybe this was just a newbie mistake, but it's just an example of how Dyson Gatlings aren't always a positive thing. In addition, you now have the ability to choose how often they spawn - so if you think they are too beneficial on default, then you are free to tweak that.
I could argue that apart from Broken golem's Medium all of the golems/spirecraft/dyson offer less meaningfull/no-no brainer decision than the other options.
Well Broken Golems/Spirecraft Hard offers choices as well. You know you have to get some Golems or Spirecraft, the bigger question is
where, because you can't take over the whole map getting them. Resistance Fighters definitely don't add any meaningful decision making to the game, but they're nice to have, especially when you're playing single-player, to get a sense of alliance and comraderie (it gets lonely in space!). Maybe that's just me though.
Marauders - too random and arbitrary to make a real difference; mostly just annoying.
Miners - good in some ways, bad in others, but you really have no control over where they spawn or what they do. Also the fact that they are "invisible" to the AI makes me chuckle inside, it makes no sense whatsoever. I don't see a lot of risk/reward to using this faction, it just seems like something interesting to "spice things up" if you're bored.
Fallen Spire definitely adds some awesome decisions to the game, especially an alternate path to victory.
Spire Civilian Leaders are fine. It's not my cup of tea, but I can see why people would play with it. There's a huge risk/reward ratio there.
Human Colony Rebellions - great mechanic. Adds something really good if you turn it on, but if you lose the Colony you pay heavilty.
So there's a lot of good mechanics, mediocre mechanics, and bad mechanics (all my opinion of course); but I don't think you can argue that Golems/Spirecraft are the only 2 meaningful mechanics which have a high risk/reward ratio.
