Each race gets a new campaign, which is told in a largely confusing narrative and just as convoluted as ever. But the feeling I had was that there should have been more. Ah, but that is the problem of parallel timelines, if you add these now it is in conflict with what took place before. Visually, things are much improved. Additionally, real-time and colored lighting is in abundance.
Day continues to turn into night and weather effects are just as cool as ever.
There is also a greater sense of location, as real world settings of San Francisco, Munich and Amsterdam are modeled so expect snow in Europe and fog in the Bay Area. However, the scale of these geographies are greatly reduced, to the extent that four or five tanks will pretty much cover the entire city of San Francisco which is really too bad, as the tactical possibilities of blockading the Golden Gate bridge or placing artillery on Alcatraz could have been very intriguing. In the end the limited space is just too cramped to really do anything interesting and this just ends up feeling like a gimmick. Finally, you can also zoom out several more steps from the battlefield, which can really help in the larger battles. However, this will put a strain on even the highest end PC processors.