The best addition is Leash, however, which lets you make any alien into your own personal fighting pet. For instance, there's a new tech which keeps them calm, so you don't have hell to pay every time you have to stomp one of their nests, and another which lets you sic 'em on an enemy. You can do more things with/to them, too.
There are quite a few more alien species hanging around, for a start, a few of which are pleasantly enormous and more ambitious in their design than the 'just some big green bugs, I guess' approach of the vanilla game.
While Rising Tide doesn't quite wash away the dryness, it does take Beyond Earth further away from Civ V, and closer to the otherworldly experience I know I'd been hoping for. Not being the spiritual Alpha Centauri successor many had long prayed for was one thing, but not creating a meaningful sense of strange new worlds was the kicker. While perfectly solid, it was greeted with no little gloom at its conservatism, at how it felt so much like Civilization V with rather dry sci-fi lip service applied. The good news is that, with its first expansion, Beyond Earth feels much more its own game than it did before. It's out tomorrow, but I've spent the last few days with it. Rising Tide is the first, and some might say much-needed, expansion pack for Beyond Earth, the sci-fi Civilization V spin-off which met a somewhat muted reception.
