The measure of a great expansion pack isn't the laundry list of features it brings to the party. Every preview written about Beyond the Sword, the new expansion pack for Civilization IV has pointed out just how much stuff the Firaxis development team has added to the game. In fact, one of the first things I did when I installed my review copy of Beyond the Sword was click "Civilopedia" on the main menu and check out the new "Beyond the Sword" section only to find when I was done that I really didn't have any sense of how all this new stuff fit together. Greatness comes from revisiting the underlying game experience and making it richer and better. It wasn't until I started playing it -- and playing some more -- and playing still more -- that I formed my initial impression that, yes, Beyond the Sword is a great expansion pack. 
The unifying element of Beyond the Sword is the improvements the expansion pack brings to the non-combat elements in the game. One of the biggest changes is the way espionage works. Spying is now a much more integrated component as espionage itself and agent units now become available after the discovery of the alphabet. Espionage has also become a line item in allocating a civilization's production output. In addition to putting resources toward research and production, every civilization can also produce "espionage points" that can be used to empower spy units to perform a variety of functions. Spies can poison the wells of an enemy city, steal technology or money, switch a city's religion or even foment unrest.
Other key changes include the new Apostolic Palace wonder and Corporations. The Apostolic Palace is based on the structure of the Catholic Papacy and functions as sort of a medieval United Nations, offering players who accept the Palace's religion the chance to issue edicts, enact trade embargoes, force peace or even declare holy war amongst all those who share the faith. Players can even use the Palace to win a religious victory by getting all the civilizations in the game to vote for one divine leader. Corporations, on the other hand, are far more concerned with the more secular values of resource accumulation and commerce. There are seven different corporations in the game and they offer a variety of benefits (mostly gold) to the civilization that controls them.
The result of these three changes alone completely change the way the game is played. Suddenly going to war has become a much riskier proposition. While spy skills, for example, can be used to soften up an enemy city for the kill, I've found in my games that they're much more useful in a defensive capacity. A sudden spate of religious "conversions" in an enemy's key cities can make war against me untenable. I've also been on the flip side of such attacks, though, where spreading unhappiness from spies I couldn't see made my war effort unsustainable in the face of popular opposition. Spies can also change the strategic calculus, making winning the game possible from positions on the map that make military victories impossible.
In just one example, I was playing on a map that found me geographically hemmed in with very little between me and a bunch of hostile civilizations other than my wits and a crew of very dedicated spies and missionaries. Rather than pour my resources into a futile bid for military supremacy, I decided that God and gold just might be my ticket to world supremacy. The result was a surprisingly exciting game where actual combat was confined mostly to the borderlands and carried out primarily by the much larger, more powerful civilization of English people next door to me. As it turns out, being the holder of the holiest city in Buddhism -- Miami -- was enough to make me good buddies with my co-religionists (the steady stream of money and research I provided Queen Elizabeth once I founded Civilized Jewelers, Inc. didn't hurt either) and eventually secure me the position of ruler of the world.
While these three elements alone would be enough to warm the heart of any dictator-in-training, that's only the beginning of the great new stuff to be found in Beyond the Sword. New abilities for forts, for example, now actually make these seldom-used elements a viable part of strategic operation. Forts can now be used to create canals up to two tiles wide which can completely change the strategic picture on Terra-style maps. They can also connect a civilization to resources within their cultural boundaries and act as air bases to repair flying units. New random events and quests (not seen since the original Civilization) offer a fascinating (and occasionally frustrating) random element to the game that can turn things around on a dime. One of my favorite moments so far was a wedding between two prominent Chinese and Japanese families done under my state religion's ceremonies. Since I'd been looking for an excuse to go to war with them with no attendant diplomatic penalties, sending a huge gift and declaring a national holiday got me my fight and eventually, the game.
Even mastering these new elements -- by itself a daunting prospect -- doesn't exhaust everything Beyond the Sword has to offer. Like Warlords, Beyond the Sword offers a number of mods and CivIV conversions to play between rounds of the main game. Some of them were created by the development team, others are polished-up version of popular offerings from the Civilization community. "Final Frontier," for example, turns Civ IV into a space expansion game not unlike Galactic Civilizations II while "Broken Star" places the player into post-Communist Russia and challenges the player to reunite the Rodina by any means necessary. (Hint: Nukes help.)
The difference between the variants in Beyond the Sword and those in Warlords is that these mods don't play it safe. These are some seriously radical modifications and redesigns of the original game and all of them offer fascinating new strategic wrinkles. Additions include three new WWII scenarios, a "commerce victory" scenario that challenges players to accumulate wealth rather than conquer cities and the "Next War" mod that adds near-future toys like 'Mechs and cloned armies into the end game. My favorites so far, though, are "Age of Ice," part of the popular "Fall from Heaven" mod series which adds RPG elements into the game and the "Afterworld" mod which turns the game into a squad-based tactical game. It'll take time to fully explore them all, but I'm very much looking forward to it.
The sheer amount of content in the expansion makes my few complaints sound like the kid complaining that the free ice cream is chocolate and not vanilla. There's the possibility that all the stuff added to the game might be too much. Civilization IV was already a complicated game and the level of complexity that Beyond the Sword adds is unbelievable. As a result, the interface (never one of the game's strongest points) is beginning to look a bit too muddled and complicated even for someone like me who eats strategy titles for breakfast.
The level of strategic depth can also contribute to a bit of micromanagement overload. When fifty-two factors combine with every move a player makes, there's always the possibility that Beyond the Sword might exacerbate the "Dead Game Walking" syndrome in which a player loses the game but doesn't realize until another 200 turns have passed. All of these factors and how they factor into multiplayer will be considered as we continue to test the game. For now, though, it's pretty difficult to conceive of major snags we might possibly hit. We're just having too much fun beating our swords into ploughshares. 
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