Buying tips

Hello! I'm planning to buy Terraforming Mars, I tried once and really liked It. I wanna ask you two things: -should I buy Prelude and play immediatly with It? (Consider that I play Always with my wife and some fixed Friends, but they never played the game so I don't know of they really Will like It. I don't want to buy and expansion workout knowing of everybody would play...(In this case I would play solo or with some other friends group, but with them I would meet less commonly) -I saw that does exists some good 3d tiles: are these some fan made or are part of an expansion?

Thank you!