The expansions for Civ V do add a lot. Much better than the basic version.
I agree. I was VERY disappointed with Civ V when it first came out, but tried it again with the expansions a year or two ago and completely changed my mind. At this point I prefer it to Civ IV. I think it's religion, tourism and culture that do it for me. They also seem to have tweaked it so that you can support a large empire - my recollection with the early version was that corruption/unhappiness kept me from conquering everyone else (I like huge maps with lots of empires). That being said, it seems like I always end up going for the culture/tourism win.
Bought Beyond Earth before Christmas, and then was royally pissed that it consistently crashed during start up, presumably due to video card. So every couple of weeks I've been starting up Steam to see if they fixed it, and last week voila - it worked! Currently in my second game - jury's still out on if I'm going to like it or like Steve I'm "meh" (I was a huge fan of Alpha Centauri - resurrected it and ran a game or two a couple of years ago.)
One thing that I find really annoying with it is that there's no way (that I've found) to rename your leader, so after a couple of games the save files start to collide. In addition, you can have more empires than leaders in a game, so you can end up with two "ARC" empires with the same leader name, which is VERY confusing. I assume they'll fix this in a future version, but you'd think they would have noticed this in play-testing and done something to fix it.
On the other hand, they completely renamed the tech, resources, and buildings (e.g. happiness --> health, gold --> energy), so it's very unclear what one needs to drive for to win. It's nice to be completely disoriented by the tech tree for once - in Civ V I always drive to get a religion ASAP. Another downside - they've taken out the Great Persons, so even though specialists are there it seems like they're a lot less useful. And the revised city screen makes it harder to manage specialists. Again, I suspect they'll fix this in an expansion.
So overall, I think Beyond Earth is starting off better than Civ V did in its first release. If they support it with expansions then I have high hopes for it being really good. OTOH, I assume that they're mainly focused on the mainline Civ brand, so there's probably a Civ VI on the drawing board somewhere that will suck resources away from it.
This seems to be what happened to Civ: Colonization a few years back. I REALLY liked the old Colonization (except after a while games bogged down due having to micro-manage the wagon trade routes), but was very disappointed with the remake on top of the Civ engine - it turned it too much into yet another flavor of Civ. The Pirates! remake, OTOH I thought was great - it kept the spirit of the old game but upgraded the engine.
John
