The expansion pack to Sins of the Solar Empire was released a few days ago, and at 10$ I decided to go pick it up. I see no-one else is talking about it so I thought I might share the impressions I had from my first match.
I haven't been playing SOSE very long. My match was 4 FFA with 3 computers, which I defeated easily. I played as the Advent.
The first thing I will comment on are the mines. What you do to lay these is to use your hanger defense bays to produce mine laying squadrons as opposed to fighters or bombers. If you then have the mine laying squadron set to autocast "lay mines" they will go and lay mines, somewhat slowly. I noticed very quickly that each mine costs a little bit of resources: 400 cred and about 50 metal/crystal. They do, however, pack quite a punch and the Advent mines are homing. If you have a couple of mine layers autocasting "lay mines" around a planet, you will soon have about 30-50 mines. It seems to have a limit, as the number of mines I had didn't seem to increase after a certain point.
The way you are supposed to counter these mines is using scout ships which have the new ability to detect mines. Pairing them up with light frigates makes them able to detect and take out the mines. You need the light frigates for the firepower to destroy them, definately if they are homing as they will take out your scout ship before they can shot them down. I was not able to experience mine sweeping myself since the normal difficulty computers did not lay any (that I know of).
Now to the space stations, what most people would get the expansion for. I keep wanting to call them stardocks 
. What I thought was going to happen with these are that they would be uber expensive but almost invincible. I am happy to say that is not the case on both accounts. You make these space stations by building a certain cruiser. The cruiser costs 2000 cred and some metal/crystal. You then take the cruiser to wherever you want the space station to be. It will cost you 1000 cred and some more metal/crystal to have the cruiser build the station (which consumes the cruiser).
At first, your station will not be very usefull. Weak weapons, weak shielding and only 2 squadrons. The point of having a space station is upgrading it. You can have a total of 8 upgrades which can go into weapons, shields, more squadrons, culture generation, raising the planet's aliegance (inside gravity well only), preventing enemies from taking planet once destroyed, trading port capabilities and one more I can't remember because I didn't use. Each of these upgrades are about half the cost of a capital ship. The space station has no upkeep (that I noticed).
The first two space stations I made was along the right side of my empire at an asteroid belt and a junk pile system which were adjacent to each other. This turned out to be a great idea as later this allowed me to use them as links to my trading network and to expand my culture. I was alarmed at first at how fragile they were. They start with about 3000 HP and quite a bit of shields. I guess I was expecting it to be nearly invincible. After upgrading the longetivity aspect of the space station, I got it up to about 9000HP. Then my space station could hold it's own very well. I still had to jump one of my fleets to it to respond to a heavy attack.
I fought quite a few Vasari space stations. I noticed that they could move around their gravity well (slowly) while mine could not. I suppose that means that while my space station could inhibit phase jumps, theirs did not. They also did not seem to have their space stations upgraded much, therefore I defeated them with my large fleet fairly easily (which I would not have been able to do if the enemy fleet was there). I suppose that means the space stations are well balanced gameplay wise.
The last thing I remember hearing about was the AI is better, which I would have experinced if I played the computers on hard. I would recommend the expansion pack since it is cheap and the space stations are really nice. If anyone is interested in playing me online, I'm registered as Senlis. I don't think I need to regester again on the expansion, so I should be there.
