Boardgames

There were two things in the original game that needed tweaking, in my opinion. The first was the over-powered "big money" strategy, which became almost a standard opening with which the starting player could open up an early lead. However, that was largely fixed by Rise of Ix. The second problem, in my opinion, was the original Imperium deck. It had too many weak cards, not enough opportunities to trash cards (or at least cycle the deck more frequently), and a relatively low frequency of combos. The relative weakness of the card deck compared to the huge point-generating strength of the phase 3 conflict cards made combat pretty much mandatory in the original game. These two issues led to some strategically-repetitive game play, which was only partially mitigated by Rise of Ix. (Side note: this weak, low-combo, low-cycling, low-trashing deck style is also characteristic of Paul Dennan's other big game, Clank. He could learn something about interesting deck-building from Dominion, in my opinion. Then again, Dune Imperium is a more mechanistically complex game than Dominion, and it is harder to create a good deck that is also well-balanced with the other game mechanics.)

In Uprising, there are more steps involved in becoming a dominant combat-based player and there are fewer points to be had directly from conflict cards. This means that it takes more specialization and commitment to pursue a successful combat-heavy strategy. Also, especially with the Immortality expansion, there are better cards and more combo possibilities, which creates additional viable non-combat strategies. On top of that, they made the Spacing Guild more powerful in Uprising, putting it more on par with the other factions. All of this is great, but having more viable choices also makes the game more complex and can sometimes lead to less interaction and direct competition for key worker placement spaces if people are pursuing quite different strategies.

So, overall, I think Uprising is a more strategically balanced game that is less "on rails" compared to the original game. However, the original game is, on average, probably a little more tense and directly competitive because there are fewer viable strategies.

Take everything I said above with a grain of salt because I play both games with expansions. So I'm not really comparing base Imperium with base Uprising.