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The Spire Rises introduces the Spire race, with some factions helping you into open warfare, and others being quiet neighbors or in their own war. There are new units and arks, a ton of new turrets to defend with, and the insidious Scourge. There are new mechanics, and modular ships!

Content Variety
This expansion adds a lot of welcome variety to every game you play, without being overwhelming. Thirty new kinds of turret make the various tech options more well-rounded, and make your own planets as well as enemy planets more unique and interesting. This doesn't increase the learning curve, since the normal method is to evaluate things as you go (rather than memorizing or coming up with a "perfect" meta) anyway.

Aside from the mass of new turrets, there are five new Arks that provide a variety of strange and interesting new abilities as fleet leaders. There are other new capturables to find in any campaign, and some fan-favorite strikecraft and frigates have been adapted from the original AI War into this game (and made even more interesting).

These aspects are part of any game once you have the DLC, and make the game a richer experience in general. There's also some new music! However, there are also several notable opt-in new factions:
Option For Open War
The Fallen Spire faction is another fan-favorite adapted from the original AI War, but massively expanded and overhauled in this sequel. The core premise is that you shift from hiding and fighting from the shadows to instead growing an increasing number of large alien cities that work under your orders. As you grow your Spire forces, you can either choose to just augment a normal-style campaign, or you can build so many cities and have such massive armies that the AI starts freaking out and recalling its own super-units from its other war outside the galaxy.

Seeing your massive Spire ships in battle against the dismayed Exo War Units of the AI can be... extremely satisfying. A year on after this DLC's initial release, and there are some players who just don't want to play the game any other way -- which is great! All of the normal features of the game, including any mods and other DLC, are compatible with this style of powerful Spire/Human empire.

For other players, a Spire game is something to play every so often as a change of pace, or to mix and match. It's really not a rigid game mode, and allows you to push as far as you feel like going.