Finally got a chance to start my first game...
- game seems much quicker! they optimized something or other
- edge scrolling works! no need to custom bind WASD camera controls anymore
- UI is better. I don't miss CQUI nearly as much as I thought I would
- OCC culture is still hard and I'm going to lose, but it's probably doable with better location and more practice. My game has been tons of fun and I built a lot of wonders and great works, but am still fairly far behind the AI's tourism output on King level
- AI or at least a few of them seem quite competent, pretty good district placement, and conquering CS / free cities easily
- made some regrettable governor choices, should have used Magnus. forgot about Amani way too long (obv 2nd choice for OCC because she's the only one you can assign elsewhere)
- alliances as Cree are very good, they seem like an great peaceful tall civ (just more than 1 city lol)
- dark ages/golden ages are kinda meh? at first it seems important, and the storytelling aspect is cool, but then the bonuses are kinda underwhelming. I'm in a modern era heroic age right now and it's pretty decent, but overall it hasn't seemed too important to worry about this. I got a lot of era points early on that didn't seem very rewarding. Maybe it's better to get them later.
- probably should have restarted the game a few times to get a better location. 7 mountains in my area put a crimp on things, with all the wonders there's no tiles left for production. probably not worth the campus/holy site adjacencies.
- spies taking out governors really sucks, you lose the 8 turns then 5 more to put them back! I had my spy defending the gov't district instead of the city center and that hurt for sure
- all my spies on offense were killed, probably just bad luck
- AI is super competitive with CS. It seems the 4-envoy-lead is no longer safe. They love Amani too.
- In turn, Kilwa was less good than expected because it was really hard to nail down Suz status.. expensive wonder too
- loyalty never affected me but didn't really expect to given OCC. I'm surrounded by Australia but doesn't seem to matter much since it's my capital with a governor etc. Some cities flipped but they made good sense - civs settling distant continents with no governor.
- right click to instantly end leader animations is a godsend
- AI still competes hard on religion. Prioritized it highly but by the time I got my religion both my neighbors already had established theirs in all cities. I think that was bad luck more than anything as I got the 3rd religion and 1 of them built Stonehenge, but whatever. I wanted to have alliances with them so decided against a holy war. My main goal of a religion was to get divine spark (extra GPP) and divine inspiration (faith from wonders to buy GP) and these were accomplished. Still a little disappointing.
- Temple of Artemis is a must have for OCC, probably insta-reroll if no camp. I got lucky to get one. Cree land grab ability helps nail down the location.
- generally housing is no restriction anymore, reached urbanization with zero hold ups (got all the bonus era points for largest city on earth along the way)
- A couple water tiles would be ideal. Trade routes to allies are sooo good Colossus would be real nice. Plus I'm pretty sure that's the only way to get the 4-trade-route inspiration with 1 city.
overall I think its a good sign it wasn't easy and I didn't succeed culture OCC on first try on the first random map. Curious to give it another go with better location and governor choices, but first I'm gonna play some other styles.
You should be able to "conquer" more tiles. 
