I haven't been able to finish a full game yet; last night I played for about 4 hours and restarted 3 times. I'm not a super good Civ 5 player by any means (only finished 1 King game, played mostly on Prince) but I preferred exploring and fighting over sitting on my ass so I picked Brasilia for each of the games and started with Engineers, Retrograde Thrusters and a free Soldier (don't remember the other starting choices).
Admittedly the sponsors don't have much differentiating between them but there are a lot of choices that change how your civ will work throughout the game, ranging from the tech web and virtues (which are given in a UI so you know what to plan ahead for) to small bonuses from quests (which will just show up every once in awhile when you do something and there's no UI in the game that lets you know what all the quests are and what they award). Despite the civs being mostly standardized in Civ 5, their differences felt important enough that there was a mostly clear strategy you should follow through from turn 1 onward. With Civ BE this isn't really the case, your civ isn't as front loaded and you get to choose how it grows as the game goes on.
Having alien life forms that are always a real threat was pretty awesome. That mostly applied to siege worms than the rest of the fauna though, since the smaller bugs don't immediately start chomping unless provoked. But it was nice to have something to fight and deal with for the most part since the other civs seem to prefer sitting back from the few small games I played. This would probably chance once a game goes on longer and affinity differences along with past transgressions start building up.
Miasma on the other hand just seems mostly annoying for me to deal with. There's a lot of stuff that's green on the map and sometimes the miasma clouds are also very hard to see. Outside of ADVISR telling you the first time in tutorial mode, there's no warning for when units are taking damage from miasma, so I could potentially be sitting in it while trying to heal a unit, which is annoying (and also requires more scrutiny on my part, but still annoying). Also some excavation sites are covered in miasma, so my Explorers would need to eat damage for awhile before they finish the dig (or I could wait for Lv 5 Harmony lol). Basically Alien Biology seems to be a very high priority tech to me.
As for something more personal and mostly irrational, assuming I understand how levitation works from the description for LEV Tanks, I'm really happy to see "real" flying units in the game. Purity is the affinity I'm most interested in at the moment thanks to LEV Tanks and LEV Destroyers, although I know that the other affinities can get max tier rover units that have levitation. I preferred the way air units worked in Civ 2 and wasn't really a fan of when they got turned into weird tower things that had to live in cities or carriers.
So far my limited experiences with Civ BE have been good, although I can understand why some folks are not super enthused with it. Hopefully this weekend or some other time I'll get a full game in and have a more meaningful response.
