Small Continents, King, Standard, Poland
Other Civs: All the new ones except Zulu (he had the misfortune of being on the bottom of the list)
On the same continent as Brazil, Morocco and Indonesia.
In G&K you basically always had a second or third copy of one resource close by your capital, so you would have luxuries to trade. In this game I didn't have any second copies until I founded my third city, but instead had 1 each of Gems, Citrus, Truffles, Ivory, Marble, Incense. Anyone else seen anything like this or was this completely random?
Right next to Morocco, my trade routes with them are freaking AMAZING, no other way to describe it. +11, +12, +13 gold between my capital and their 3 cities I have routes with. Tying science and religion into the trade routes makes for some interesting decisions in regards to how you set them up. Do I really want to give +3 extra science to Brazil (because of my tech lead) just for an extra +1 GPT? (As an example).
The changes to gold (not being able to sell to AI) and the tech tree (all the new building additions, wonders, etc) make the early game a lot more interesting because of the decisions to be made.
With all 4 of us crammed onto this small island things are very peaceful, I am friends with Brazil, Morocco and Indonesia are friends, and there hasn't been one denouncement or hint of war so far (on turn 180). Which is good because I completely ignored military units for a long time and was pretty defenseless. Just found Portugal and looking for Assyria so I can found the World Congress.
The trade route UI is pretty intuitive. The left and right arrows work, but wish they would just be color coded with the civs colors. So that the arrows pertaining to my civ were Red (Poland) and the arrows pertaining to the other civ were Green (Morocco), but I see how that could get problematic. You could also just replace the arrows with the Civ's icon.
The cultural UI, uh, makes my head hurt trying to decipher it. I am sure it will come with time, but it's completely different and there is A LOT of information on those screens, and I haven't even gotten to the part of the game where tourism, archaeology and great works really start to matter.
I used a Great Artist to create a work called "Naked Lady Looking in a Mirror" (or something like that) and put it in my palace. If you click on the great work in your city screen it replays the little video from when the work was created. Nice touch there.
All in all this is how I feel about BNW: