This is one more step toward making this game as great as GalCiv2 became.

I bought this pretty much sight unseen because I love the game so much. I'll admit, I was hoping for more new ship parts more than anything else. I am glad to see another new Earth race available and will certainly be trying it out (just as soon as I finish my current game-in-progress). And considering the number of hours I have in game play, I think I can be considered a fairly good judge by now of what works and what doesn't.

As always, keep up the good work, development team. You rarely dissapoint.

Best DLC so far, love every minute of it. 10/10

Having beat the campaign and played with the United Earth Faction, I feel it is meaningful that I tell you what you'll be buying if you add this to your cart. I will tell you now that the only tangible thing that you will get out of this is the United Earth faction and the campaign.

I will begin by explaining the Campaign you will be in for.

The first campaign involves the Stellar Guild as an adversary, and a lone Space Monster. This is also the only mission where you play as United Earth (You're Terran Alliance in Mission Two)... My experience with this map paints a simple portrait: Every planet you colonize brings you closer to actually fighting the Stellar Guild. Hold off on colonizing, and you have time to build a massive fleet. I figured this out early on, and decided to fortify before I actually faced anything. This meant that in the time before I decided to colonize Haven, I was able to dot the entire map in well-fortified Star Bases, fully developed planets, and created my own fleet of warships for whatever onslaught was coming for me. The First Campaign is a very simple one that leaves you alone for 3 quarters of the time, until you colonize the last planet, whereby it will generate the Stellar Guild, which is simply the "Pirate" faction, except with a planet. I wiped them out in only a few turns.

The Stellar Guild is not a meaningful addition to the game. In fact, it is exclusive to the first Campaign mission from what I know this far. They do not appear elsewhere in the game. You can not communicate with them. Looking through XML files at DLC\DLC6_RiseoftheTerrans\Campaigns\RiseoftheTerrans\Game, you can find their faction information and, likely, could make a new minor faction or full faction out of them if you want.

One thing I will give the first mission is the benefit that it is an easy win. This is not true for the second mission.


The second campaign mission wasn't a fun one, and I don't meant that in the "You're facing an onslaught of deadly enemies" way, no, I mean that in the way that the mission itself was extremely unbalanced and, scripting-wise, completely unfair. You start with a fleet of ships equiped with Beam weapons and Shielding. These ships are ahead of their time, and their weapons make them a convenience for the most part. Problem is, the defending Xendar ships seem to have beam shielding and are primarily armed with Kenetic weapons, which means your ships will get banged up unless you stack a doom-deck. On top of that, the faction bonuses for the Xendar allow them to construct ships at a rate much higher than your own. The reason for this lies in the scripted race traits and abilities for the Xendar, which make the game unnaturally hard.


Race Traits
PirateGold
PirateBuilding
Productive +2
Economical +2
Handy +2
Militant +2
Likeable -2
Organized +1

Abilities
Engineers
Colonizers

With Militant and PirateBuilding, the Xendar create fleets that are extremely large, filling up the Shipyards, and Planets they want to guard. You will run into full fleets in each one if you wait too long. With PirateGold, Economical, and Handy, they can sustain these fleets. You simply do not have enough planets or production to counter these, and unless you hit their shipyards first, you will be overwhelmed... Or annoyed enough to quit and try again.

[Fun fact: The Xendar Ship Style actually comes from the Builders Kit DLC, a ship building set known as "Raider" in faction settings. You do not have access to these ships by buying this DLC, but they are the only new ship design added... And it's for a faction you don't even get to see outside of a single campaign mission]

I tried three playthroughs. I didn't lose a single planet to enemy transports (though I assume you're supposed to lose a few), but each game dragged on for 90+ turns as I tried to build an actual economy (hindered by pre-placed buildings) and at every angle I was inferior to my enemy. I got bored with trying to manage a decent fleet to combat the constant onslaughts and the horrible economic balance in this game.

The third time around, I decided I was going to play differently. I was all about offense, and ignored defense. Using my beam ships and researching planetary invasion early, I took three planets from the Xendar; Farside, Ruby, and Pawn. These planets were largely unfortified, fresh colonies, yet they had been quickly developed by the Xendar, whereas my planets were still taking several turns to complete anything. I camped two fleets of beam ships at each Xendar Shipyard build point, and simply waited for them to create more ships to throw at me. One is at Haven, and the other is at Xendar (Capital). By destroying these shipyards before they completed any military ships, I was able to keep most of the challenge at bay (and by challenge, I mean completely unfair playing conditions). I ended up winning, but only because I had to create a fleet of Large Ships outfitted with Antimatter, Elerium, and Durantium weaponry.

The campaign does add some enjoyable backstory to the game, and I love more lore, but the fact of the matter is that the campaign is also a very tedious and poorly-thought-out mess to play through, and I found it to be the most obnoxious thing I've had to do in GalCiv III... But hey, at least I've got the achievement to prove it.


Now we get to the part about the new United Earth faction.


Race Traits
Productive +1
Adventuresome +1
Likeable +1
Fast +1
Organized +1

Abilities
Engineers
Colonizers




Race Traits
Productive +1
Clever +2
Handy +1
Likeable +1

Abilities
Engineers
Experienced

The United Earth is supposed to be a predecessor to the Terran Alliance by 60 years. With that said, the ship design they use is the exact same Terran Ship Style as the Terran Alliance, which for me, kills the unique aspect of this DLC. Designs really do change a lot in 60 years, so there should be more new content here to meet that fact. The least I can ask for is a somewhat altered design of the original Terran ships given its own category; it takes about 3 minutes to swap around certain models to give it a ship its own life. They could have even outsourced creating ships to the community, which could have given this DLC more flavor. For re-using the same exact ship design, I feel like creativity and vision were shoved aside for a quick, cheap release. Along with re-using the Builder's Kit DLC here, this release feels very cut down to me, especially knowing that there was more love and effort put into the Snathi DLC.

The solar system is the same for both the Terran Alliance and United Earth, so a tale of two Earths is what you can call a match involving them. The Map Color is also the same; luckily, the game will automatically change the second Human faction map color to Teal to help avoid any confusion there.

I think it would be wise to bring up these issues with Stardock Entertainment, just as friendly critique and reminder that they have the power to do better. Every faction has a soul. For them to release a faction that is cut down and lackluster compared to those in the base game, Mercenaries DLC, and Snathi DLC... well, it's a confidence crusher. My own personal worry is that the future campaign DLCs will skimp content in favor of quick and streamlined production like this one, and I really don't want to see that happen. I want to see this company expand on the universe we all know and love, and I want to see them do it as passionately as we would if we could, as that passion and love that created its predecessors.

It is for that reason that I can not recommend this product in the condition that it is.

I love these kinds of DLC- The DLC that add a new Race and Campaign. While it is true that the United Earth race is by no means as unqiue as the snathi- it still provides additional content and options for you to use in the many games of galciv you will be hopefully playing. When comparing this DLC to the Snathi one you can easily see there was a different focus here... The snathi was an in-joke, but their unique abilities really set them apart from the other races and combined well with other DLC such as the Mercenaries Expansion pack.

This represents something different- something new- an alternate version of an already included race and a brief side campaign which offers interesting lore for players. When I look at this DLC- I not only see additional and cool content for my future games but also a possibility for future DLC. What if they used DLC like this to reintroduce side stories involving races which are "dead" in lore but players may want the option to play anyway? Such as the Korath or the Korx?

While I do feel that the DLC is a bit more lackluster then the Snathi DLC was- I still value the lore which it gave and its ability to tell this rather interesting story from galciv lore. While I think it would have been cool to see a Xendar race as a playable/talkable race it wouldn't at all match with the lore of what happened during the incident. Either way- solid DLC and makes me look forward to future ones.

As an avid player of GCII, I decided to be a Founder fort its sequel : playing the beta and having all the future DLCs for free seemed quite nice !
I must admit though that I find a lot of the DLC to be disappointing (like the mega event one, wich could reasonably part of the core game) and Rise of the Terrans also falls in the mediocre territory.

Let's examine what we are promised.

1) New prequel story campaign. Stardock knows how to create interesting backgrounds and humorous quirks for technologies and diplomacy, but an actual narrative is not their strong point. When you see the trailer for the "standard" human campain and then actually play it, it's actually quite uneventful and not really challenging...
Here there is more substance to the narrative, but not that much. The birth of the Stellar Guild seems a bit hasty, casting doubt on Earth's governance right after the first colony !
As always, you can choose between the three ideologies to face this menace and other events.
As for the titular rise, I failed to really taste it, because the Alliance from 60 years ago has an extremely similar feeling with the actual Alliance. Same design, same techs, same gameplay.

2) Face down new threats. The first mission is not exciting about that. May be one of your colonies revolt if you act malevolent and adds to the challenge ; in my case I played benevolent and faced a lone, little planet acting as the Guild's stronghold. Even with many ships initially, they took a very long time to timidly attack one or two of my starbases.
It was just a matter of piling up ships, fell the defendind fleet and conquer them. Not complicated, not long, not very rewarding.
Then you have the Xendar menace in the second mission. They represent a larger threat, but it's painful to be able to destroy their outer planet's shipyard as often as you want, without any fear of retaliation. I didn't do the same to their homeworld (would have been cheesy), but in the end, it was just a bit longer to take them down.

3) Play as a new faction. Now that's debatable ! They fiddled with some traits, slapped a new name for the leader and called it a day. It's the prime problem of the DLC : it should provide an unique experience, not offering some core content slightly changed to fit the bill (the Guild and the Xendar hardly feel unique either).
Plus this 'new' factions does not use special traits, it could have been made with the base game. Hence the feeling that there wasn't a lot of work put in Rise of the Terrans.

Note that, as ever before, whatever you do in a mission, the next one will discard it. GCII was heavily guilty of this kind of thing and it shouldn't be seen again. I understand that a crazy-prepared player would have too many advantages for the next mission, but a little acknowledgement of past actions and choices would be nice.

In fine, I think Stardock should focus on what the studio does best, and that's not campaign missions. Even on sale, I wouldn't recommend this DLC, it really lacks originality.

This DLC gives you a different take on the Terrans. The United Earth faction has 2 racial traits in common with the Terran Alliance with UE having 2 other traits (one of which is a +2) and Ta having 3. They both have the Engineers ability (shipyards production decays at half the normal rate) with the Terran Alliance having the Colonizers ability (Colonies first improvement free) and United Earth getting the new Experienced ability (25% extra experience for ships from battles).

The two Terran factions do use the same parts and colours but would you really expect that in a 60 year range the external look of the ships would change that drastically. United Earth has been given a different leader due to them being based of earlier Terrans.

The are 2 campaign missions (the Snathi pack had just 1) so take that into consideration if you consider the reuse of the Terran parts to be cheap. I'll edit this post more when I've had a chance to play the missions.

Reviewing this DLC I found a bit problematic. On one hand there is the "it's only $5 and it does technically give what it says it will" on the other there were a number of maybe more nitpicky things that left me fairly unsatisfied with this DLC.

The main issue I have really boils down to that this feels like it was thrown together on the weekend for sale on Monday. The "new" faction is simply the Terran Alliance with a new leader (which is probably the only sign of time spent on this DLC). They have some different traits, though they aren't unique. In essense I could have put this 'new' faction together with the base game (excluding the leader animation).

The other point is that because the changes are so minimal it kills the feel of this being a prequel. Your main visual aspect is your ships and station. They used the Terran ship style despite the story taking place 60 years earlier. It would be like going to play the USA in a WWII game and having Abrams MBT, Apache helicopters, B-2 stealth bombers and modern assault rifle, guided rocket armed infantry.

Then there is the Xendar. A 'new' race as well. They were in an xpac for GC1 (which I never played), unfortunately we don't get any leader images for them or new ships. In fact it seems they use the designs that were released in the Ship Builders DLC released a few weeks previous. So you kind of pay for the same set twice...it's all a bit strange. The point I'm trying to make is that the DLC comes across as done on the cheap.

You do get 2 missions (though it seems its one map with the first mission on a cropped version) and they are okay. The story is basic but serviceable, but the way it is delivered lacks...personality. You have the same issues you had with the original campaign with things like units not rolling over. How you can get battleships in one mission, but start the next and only can build small ships or how your work in building on planets is undone next mission. The progression from mission to mission is something that needs to be looked at by Stardock.

I could keep rambling on, but I'll cut it short. The main issue I have is that this doesn't seem to offer great value, especially when you compare it to the comparable Snathi DLC. In the end it's just a pretty meh DLC and probably only worth it when on sale.