You'll have to excuse me if I didn't jump at the bit to purchase the Rising Tide expansion to the utterly depressing Civilization: Beyond Earth, but it's totally out on Steam and I totally forgot about that until I saw reviews popping up. The stated goal of this expansion was to make it less blatantly like Civ V and I'd like to know if it got anywhere near accomplishing its goal or if it's still just kinda boring.

Nope. I'll hold off and read the reviews (and probably wait for a price drop). Like you and most people that played it, I found Civ:BE to be a huge letdown, so it's going to take something substantial to make me even consider going back to it.

Yes. I actually just got off a 3 hour session with it. Here's my initial impression: they did a lot to give diplomacy more depth. The whole agreements system is a pretty good idea, and being able to take your relationships with other nations to different levels of like/dislike is really cool. However, the game is still just as fundamentally flawed and boring/drab as it was when it was first released. But I really hope they put this new diplomacy stuff in Civ 6. Also, water cities are nowhere near as cool as they sound.

Ye, I've been playing quite a lot of it. (done like 7-8 games on epic). Not quite sure what to say. I guess the main thing is that they didn't do enough to really change things up. That's not to say they haven't done a lot of work, but they sorta didn't address my biggest issues with the game (which is mostly that the win conditions are really really boring). I remember one of the great things about the expansions to Civ 5 was that they added the culture and world leader victories, which made the game very fresh again. They also did a lot more changes to the tech tree (which has mostly stayed the same in Rising Tide, except for adding new stuff).

I do enjoy what they've done though. The new diplomacy system is much better than anything they've done before and aquatic cities add a whole new dimension to the territory control part of the game (it's much much much easier to expand without warfare). There's a bunch of balance issues at this point though, and my experience with the aquatic civs so far has been very poor. The new tilesets are pretty great as well, but not really something worth buying it for.

Overall it got me to play the game again, but it didn't take long before it was back to the "oh god, 50 more turns of clicking to go" mode. The game is still great (or possibly even better) in the early game, but there's not enough exciting things to do in the mid-game, and due to how the tech web works the game is always over before you reach the (possibly) exciting late game stuff.