Now that a lot of information has been given by the previews and videos, I have more of a better idea as to what this game is becoming (which I like a lot, BTW), and I would like to share some ideas that I've had from watching the demo and even playing civ3:
1 - Mountains: There are three things that I would like to see implemented about mountains: a - I wish they didn't only occupy a single tile and would form ranges (but I wonder about the difficulty of implementing this at this stage); b - I wish rivers would be blocked by mountain ranges, which would have to happen if these mountains were not single-tiled. They (the rivers) should twist and turn to avoid and circle mountains on their way to the sea, or a lake; c - I also would like it if mountains were impassable by most units, unless following a road, like Rhye did on his mod.
2 - I would like to see an option to extend the working range of a city, in the case of coastal cities. Maybe one could build special fisshing boats that could 'travel' further than the 21 x grid to get those lucrative fish and whale bonus resources that would be far away in the open sea.
3 - Like many people, I would like to see flanking.
4 - I really, really, really hope there is an elegant way (visually) of knowing that a city is occupied without having to have those giant units covering my beautiful sprawling cities.

Considering civ cities only take up a single square no matter how big they are... is sprawling really the word for it? :P Seeing units in my city is a small issue to me. The graphics of civ 3 is underwhelming anyways (im not talking about resolution either)

What we need is a terrain system closer to alpha centuri. Also interesting is its system of.. if you don't have enough movement to cross a terrain, sometimes you failed. Rather then always being able to move a single square if you have any movement at all.

I didn't play SMAC much. Uhmm, so you are saying that a unit with just one point of movement would not be sure to climb a mountain? Interesting. But why should fast units, such as horsemen, be more able to climb a mountain? Uhm...

Bleh, at the shortest each turn is a half year, a tank can turn to face the other direction in that timne

I agree that the terrain visually could be improved in the sense of size and detail. My guess to improve those features would be to increase the size of a square.

make a sqaure more significant and broad.
eg; a small village doesn't even come close to filling up the sqaure, a city perhaps 1/4 ..expanding there from with pockets of sprawl. With all this you'd still need a larger sqaure, this would also benefit large battles as more visuals could be programmed in for the square.

A bit of the other way around there warblade. You need to decrease the size of squares, making them more numerous and increasing fine detail of the landscape. Cities would expand to fill more squares as they grow.

A bit of the other way around there warblade. You need to decrease the size of squares, making them more numerous and increasing fine detail of the landscape. Cities would expand to fill more squares as they grow.

That would be nice, however my suggestion was of the concern that having more sqaures and terrain to fit into those would make it a lot more complex to integrate. I guess that's not for us to worry about but the developers :p

Intergrate into what? The only issue of having more squares is more processing power required. Older games like AC managed to have more squares then civ 3 and much more complex terrain yet lower system requirements.