Was playing on UH and disabling the control towers does not recharge the armor. Dropped down to hard to check and still, nothing. There isn't any advantage of disabling vs destroying afaik.
I think it'd be great to confer some kind of permanent advantage for hacking them but I'd also want it not to be possible to permanently screw yourself out of it by destroying the tower. shrug
Continuing on from my Ultra Hard save was a mistake, first proper machine fight took forever and that's after just running past the first stalkers you meet.
What's up with the new skill tree? Probably the worst part of the expansion, it's as bland and lazy as it gets. I literally never even used a mount in the base game.
Don't really care about the mount stuff and repairing machines is very silly since new mounts are a dime a dozen and non-mounted machines don't follow you around the world, but the expanded inventory space and the improved rare drops stuff is very nice.
I think there are loads of potential systems for Guerrilla to experiment with improving upon for the sequel, though, and serious improvement to enemy conversion (like, let me straight up have pet companions and improve their stats and abilities, let me ride even the biggest machines, etc) is one of those systems - if THAT were a thing, i'd be all about repairing them. Expanding the max health of mounts IS nice, though, if you ride a mount into battle - it helps them do that much more damage before they die.
For Horizon 2, the systems I want to see expanded the most are melee combat (specifically, a perfectly timed dodge should net you a critical strike opportunity, so you can basically be a stylish bullfighter), enemy conversion, and more/more interesting enemy pickups (i.e. being able to pick up a shellwalker's shield tech or a stalker's cloaking device in addition to the assorted weapons some enemies drop would be really badass).