I was there yesterday and played twice. Have to run to my son's swim class soon, but quick impressions:
Fun. Streamlined without removing the complexity, which is the point. Bright graphics work well.
Disclaimer: They said they're still working on even the basics, so this is all subject to change. For example, combat cameras were horrible. But that's easy to fix in the remaining time.
Picks and chooses the best features from all the Civs. Advisors. Resources. Full tech tree. Palace. United armies. Great People. The only feature I want but didn't see is full random events like in Beyond the Sword. It's sort of like "Sid Meier presents: All of Brian Reynold's and Soren Johnson's best ideas". But it also had some of the free-wheeling feel of the early Sid games, at least through my rose-colored glasses - I want this to succeed.
Looks like a fairly complete set of Civs. I think they're recycling old leaderheads to make it easier. Everyone gets a unique art set. The barbarians are treated kinda like a Civ, at least in terms of leader personality, which feels good and makes their actions more personal.
Each Civ has a separate bonus for each Age (four Ages), according to the leader select screen. Which is good, and makes sure your Civ isn't only good in one age.
Very personality-driven. Leaderheads pop up often to comment on what's happening, both AI leaders and your advisors. Which I'm torn on. I've played enough Civ to respect the systems without a human face. But I can see the appeal of the human face, especially to new players, so it probably makes sense.
Streamlines: Units gain promotions every three victories. Handled automatically. Each promotion adds an adjective to the unit's name, which has a nice feel to it. I had Ninja Horsemen.
You can fairly easily control a city's build queue and rearrange which tiles you work. Each tile only produces one resource, to keep things simple. I kinda missed the end of turn popups that tell you what produced - I would sometimes forget to check cities to see if I needed to rearrange their production. I'm not sure if you could set up a queue - that would help.
I couldn't get a full diplomacy interaction. Not sure if that's a limitation of this build, or a sign that they're slimming this down a lot. All I could do is peace/war and some very simplified tech trades. No one would trade with me, but they would buy mine for cash.
The palace is weird. It's a bunch of different dancing bears and acrobats and stuff that you can cycle between. I had a popup that said someone sent me a new piece for it. I was hoping for something more like Xbox Achievements, that was tied to specific cool things I did in the game. Maybe it's just an early pass at it.
Shoot, now we're going to be late for swim class. Oh well.
