Fezred: Thank you for all that info! I had meant to say "looks awfully like" rather than "looks awful like" in that last post of mine, BTW, in case anyone thought that was a criticism.
I think I'll miss the perspective of CW2 and the ability to play more with the depth and digging, but if CW3 has learned lessons and offers more of that sort of flexibility I guess I can always enjoy CW2 and CW3. Hopefully if this is a hit we might see more. Normally I don't like tower defence games as they seem unoriginal and boring now, but this has clearly had a lot more creative effort and thought behind it than most games.
Diggin is out, unfortunately, due to the top-down perspective it do not work as a gameplay feature anymore. There is a new terraforming unit, which you can use to lower or rise ground, but it is an energy drain and it is slow (because it is such a powerful tool). But mining and anti-creeper is in.
Fezred: I heard it was an all new engine too. How well does that run on lower end systems? Does the new engine allow for more features or modding this time around?
Yes, it uses Unity now, so it depends on whether your machine is happy with it or not. I ran it without any problems on a very low spec machine.
Modding is much more powerful, this time, due to the new engine. It comes with some scripting tools (no idea how it works, I am not a programer...) which allows you to change the nature of everything, even make your own units and mobs. In Alpha Sector there are maps which bear no resemblance to CW at all, one of them is a puzzle where you need to push buttons in correct order, reminiscent of a Towers of Hanoi game. It also comes with a Dial-A-Map feature, where you can set parameters and let it generate random maps for you,, you can then share those seeds, if you want.
Granted, it is still not easy to share user created maps (except the DAM maps), it is scheduled to have an way to browse and download maps in the next update (it is the section called Colonial Space on the main menu)