----------------------------------- BECK Mon Jan 05, 2015 1:34 pm ----------------------------------- I wouldn't call it an expansion necessarily. The mechanics of the game are very similar. The graphics and gameplay are basically the same, so from the respect it could be interpreted that way. But it took me a bit to get used to playing a futuristic based game with entirely new techs, resources and units. There is a learning curve to the basics of the game for even an experienced civ player. But basically the game is the same. You build colonists (settlers), found new outposts (cities), build units, perform research (although it's not a linear loose tree like prior Civs - its an entirely new web-based thing where you can really focus on specific branches, neglecting others). Gold from Civ is now Energy. There is no happiness, it's now health. There is still culture and food. Instead of barbarians, there are aliens which in the early part of the game can be pretty formidable. The upgrade system for units is totally awesome though. You don't have to pay to upgrade, your units just automatically progress as you add new affinity levels. And they are really badass, there are some really really sweet units. Probably one of the coolest things is that there is sort of a loose storyline that goes with the game. You get prompts to make choices all the time that will affect buildings and other things, so you can really specialize on particular attributes depending on your intended victory type. So for example, you get asked if you want to improve production for a certain building and can choose +1 energy or +1 production. Things like that. Also, when your units upgrade, you can pick between two bonuses, like +30% attack or +5 health per turn. Kind of like in regular Civ when you get an XP upgrade, you can pick certain attributes to improve. But this improves all the units, even though already built and deployed. There is still a veternacy system for units based on XP. There is also a better focus on covert ops in this game. You can assign them to cities much easier and quickly than you could with the old civ games, and have them do missions to steal science or energy, or at certain levels even sabotage and force coups and stuff.