This expansion is bad ass. I highly recommend getting it.

The campaign mode has been highly refined. Instead of the typical linear progression of maps played with the armies, they changed it to planet conquest. The Planet Kronus is broken up into many provinces. Each race has their home province where they are the strongest. There are many other provinces that you can take in order to conquer the planet. Each province you take gives you certain bonuses for holding it plus it increases your requisition points. Requisition point can be used to reinforce provinces you have taken or add starting troops and buildings to the battle for a province you attack. Some provinces open up more units and buildings for you to choose from the requisition screen.

Conquering a province is not limited solely to annihilation. There are several different scenarios depending on the province. You will get beat several times in certain provinces until you figure out the trick. You also are still going to get beat by the opposing army too. Each province has a strength number representing difficultly to take it. I saw as high as 15 on a home province. You start out at 10 for a home province. The non-home provinces usually range from 3-9 strength.

The conquest mode is turn based. So every army gets a turn. You can either attack or move and you can reinforce. You can only attack or move to an adjact province unless you take the province with the space port that allows you to attack anywhere.

Wargear is in the game now. Your commander gains wargear for accomplishing certain mile stones. For instance, 2000 kills will open up one additional wargear slot. I think there are 10 total wargears to select from and if you are skilled enough you with be able to equip all of them by the latter end of the game. Your general is a complete bad ass by end game. The wargear adds playbility to the game. I personally want to see all the wargear you can get. for each race.

There are 2 new races added to the game. The Tau and the Necron. I am playing the Tau in the campaign. They are a pretty good army. Their Stealthsuit units are great. You can upgrade their guns and they are very annoying if the opposing team doesn't have something to see through stealth. Conversely you need to make sure you have some Pathfinders to unstealth scouts and assassins. There are 2 end technology paths for Tau. One gives you the ability to build a tank. It's very good. It's got a large plasma cannon for a main weapon and 2 smaller anti infantry plasma guns. You can only have 2 of them though. The other path lets you open up heavier Kroot unit types. Kroot are an allied race with Tau. You also can get a higher level of armor and weaponry for your Tau units that you don't get with the other path.

The necron I haven't played, but have played against. We will just leave it at that they are bad ass.

Yes Assassins are in the game for IG. At least that is who had them in one of the maps. All the exsisting armies got new units. I mentioned Assassins, Eldar get Harlequins, and Chaos got Daemon Princes. I don't know the rest since I haven't played the rest of the races in campaign or multiplayer.

Multiplayer has been improved. The match list refreshes quicker now. Also when the maps are loading it shows the teams as color coded and aligned to their relative starting locations.

Overall I am really impressed with the expansion. I can't wait for more of them if they keep up the quality work they did on this one.

Yes! I agree this game is the shit! I have also been playing the Tau for my first race in the campaign.
I have most of the map and all races have only their stronghold territory left and like one other territory. I have not wiped any races out yet but am deciding on who is going to be the first to take the fall.

I find the Tau fairs very well vs. all armies with the exception of the Eldar. I have found that if I don’t bum rush them right away I get bogged down in a long long drawn out fight that just gets annoying. So if I build up a quick force around my leader and "drone" rush the HQ I can wipe them out in 3 min every time. But this is kind of the cheap way out but shit I don’t want to spend a whole night on one battle, I don’t have time for that! haha

Desp, what are your strats when playing with the Tau? Let’s share some ideas here.

I like the stealth suits also they are very useful and they are like my main choice of unit for capturing points and harassing the enemy, I have found the pathfinders a little annoying and somewhat underutilized to the point where I am like why bother in most cases you can just use the stealth units to expose the enemy at long range for your troops to rain down on the enemy from a far.
I have also found the drone tanks to be quite useful as distracters and to tie up whole squads at a time. If you got the power you can just use them to hold an enemy at bay while you flank with your main front. I had overlooked this tank at first as well as the drones as a whole until just a few missions ago. The AI will automatically focus on these drones and it’s very useful to distract them with an endless stream of drones while my long range fire just decimates their whole army!

Personally I miss the linear story campaign mode as I enjoy that sort of stuff being the 40K freak that I am. I think that the current campaign mode should be a standard template for Skirmish modes in games, and then allow a custom skirm mode where you choose from the dropdowns like it is now in most RTS games. Don't get me wrong I am not knocking the game in any way, I like it a lot I just miss the story; it would have been cool to have a Tau/Necron based story campaign.

Oh well that’s what exp packs are for, eh?

Strats. Def Stealthsuit harrass. I find that most of the time in games against players my Stealthsuits, fully upgraded, are my main infantry. If people don't have a way to unstealth them or don't know how, a mob of stealthsuits will take down every unit. Normally I go Morth'ka tech route to get their tank. They are pretty bad ass.