Like posted before on this board and countless others, the base game isn't very good indeed. For fans of the GalCiv series vanilla v3 was quite a big letdown.
The team has been working hard, through ups and downs, for these last few years and support has been ever ongoing as is now shown by the truely humongously sized re-do of the game in the form of Crusades.
Brad Wardell has returned to the team to give the development process focus again, something GalCiv 3 sorely needed. He has also worked his AI programming magic again and it shows; the game's AI is devious and cunning.
The new Civilization editor is great as well. You can expand the game's content pretty much infinitely now with new races and custom ship builds which is great for the future.
Espionage has returned. They nicked Civ 6's Great People mechanic in some form with (Specialized) Citizens and the Economy and Colony management has seen a complete rework. The Constructor-spam of old is gone as well.
The game might not score high on innovation in relation to what is already out there, but the game is a complete and sturdy package with many of great things we love in 4x games and the AI will truely kick your ass on higher difficulty settings!
Forget any GalCiv 3 version up until Crusades. Really.
