@Fleur de Lis
It does. Especially the diplomacy system; they tore the entire thing out and developed a completely new one. Your relationships to other powers now break down into your political stance and special deals where you buy & sell access to special effects that result from the trait system. In the case of the former, you essentially have war, embargo, peace, friends, best friends and allies. As for the trait peddling, you might take an espionage trait and gain the ability to sell other players a buff to their spies’ abilities in exchange for diplomatic capital (a secondary currency used to purchase both traits and, at a mark up, units & building). Notably the closer two players are (diplomatic stance), the stronger the trait bonuses become.
As for trading, you no longer directly trade resources and such via diplomatic deals. Instead resources now naturally flow along trade routes between cities. So if you need some floatstone, for example, you’d establish a route to the city of a friendlier civ with access to floatstone. City swapping has also been removed outright (no real loss since the AI never actually accepted it anyway). Might be annoying in multiplayer but, well… you won’t be playing Beyond Earth in multiplayer.
You can also assign your spies to purchase black market resources for a considerable amount of diplomatic capital per unit. I’ve never actually used this, however, so I’m not sure if it’s a permanent thing or if you’re essentially “renting” a unit of that resource and lose it when you unassign the spy.
AI opinion modifiers have been broken down into two scores: respect and fear. If you share traits, enemies and certain behaviors in common, you’ll gain a civ’s respect. Fear, meanwhile, is a comparison of your military capacities and
I THINK also accounts for things like proximity and how aggressive you are. So an AI that really respects you is more likely to make & maintain deals with you and generally be peaceful, but likewise so is an AI who’s pants-shittingly terrified of you.
Most basic units now have three hybrid options for their third tier in addition to the three single affinity options, and there’s a few new units that are exclusively hybrid in design (though you can still specialize them).
Cities can now be founded on the water and move around, albeit it extremely slowly. There’s a few new buildings unique to aquatic cities to make them stand out, including two or three wonders. This might have been a thing before–it’s hard to remember after so long–but you can now build all kinds of improvements on the water, too. Farms, generators, domes, nodes, etc. Quite a few new aquatic resources to flesh out the water, as well.
Only thing I don’t like is how your cities now turn into an ugly ass hodgepodge of all three affinities in the late game when you’ve more or less maxed out all the affinities. And unfortunately that’s coded into the EXE so there’s no way to fix it.
