Great game!
My only previous FFG game is TI3 and while I saw some similarities the games are quite different in how they function. FFG has (again) produced a game which has high quality components and a beautifully painted land hexes. But two things bothered me a bit.
1) we played 1,5 games, first a half game followed by the real thing. I played the humans in both and I found them to be quite lame when it comes to fighting battles. I played humans in both games and felt that the other factions, primaraly the two evil ones as I almost ever fought them, are significantly stronger in combat. What is your experience when it comes to balance of power? Things which might have influenced my experience are: I don't usually play aggressively, I never owned any city (they were razed by the bloody bid season event in both games) for more than two rounds and lastly, I'm not sure what the best ratio of different unit types is.
2) Battles are ,despite me losing most, still pretty fun. BUT, it seems to be almost impossible to make any kind of decisive breakthrough. I take a hex from my opponent and then he takes it back, and so on for most of the game. In TI3 you can't, most of the time, move units you just produced since the system is activated when producing. In RW you build and then happily march off to battle. This mechanism seems to favour grinding wars with little progress.
Overall a nice game and I look forward to playing it again in about a weeks time. But I'm sure as hell not going to touch the human faction again. I think. I do like to be humans…purge the filthy xenos and all that