A5 = Auric Damnation, modifiers not included, at least when I say it.
I welcome other perspectives on this as I hope to just be crazy and they didn’t actually break anything. But all of your examples (sans Arbites) were a thing before the update and nothing felt as off as it does now.
But I must say, everyone else that has weighed in on this issue has had the opposite opinion as you, for what that’s worth.
It was clear as day for me: I played my usual A5 QP games night before update, went to sleep, woke up to the update, and Auric was a snooze fest. Then many other people poured in with the same opinion. We’ve since filtered out the issue of QP placing you into “low-intensity” campaign missions, but there is still something not quite right.
They have since actually patched in their baseline Hi-Int for all Aurics and, allegedly, Hi-int on the board now means “double hi-int.”
I’m wishy washy on this because I never expected this to be an issue, so i don’t have hard data from before the update. But the universal opinion was new Auric is off. I don’t know where the consensus stands 3 hotfixes later.
Now I’m investigating how things feel when Arbites isn’t around, but that’s hard to do at the moment, and may be for some time.