So just played a full game with a couple of friends, impressions:
- We played on emperor, 4 players, 4 ais. Two ais were wiped out easily, one was way ahead of everyone for most of the game and together with another of the players knocked one the humans out, before combined effort took this ai down too. We ended up spending most of the game cooperating against the ai instead of destroying each other. The three remaining players were well balanced, and we had no clear idea who was going to win. Stemaroll effects seem to be mostly under control here with everything being based on flat bonusses.
In the end, the remaining ai got a surprise religious victory in (two of us had ignored religion, and when the third took out the last civ, the ai jumped on the opportunity). A very anticlimatic ending to our game, but we enjoyed the learning experience.
-Stability seems way better, but at the start we still had some issues desyncing. Once we changed hosts by reentering the game it went way better. We had no problems reconnecting, loading autosaves and all of that. Didn't see any double turns either. So technically it seems much better, but still not perfect.
- AI behavior is appropriate. They appear to act very similar to single player. You just get nice little popups in the bottomright whenever they want to tell you something.
- Military is definitely still king. Production seems a good second. Science and food didn't seem nearly as impactful as it had in longer civ 5 games.
- Starting land balance and so on felt acceptable, it didn't seem to matter as much as in civ 5. The only one who got dealt a crappy hand was one surrounded by 3 militaristic civs (the one human who died before the end), but you can't really prevent that sort of a thing anyway.
-Kind of lacking in good mapscripts atm. But I'm sure that won;t be a problem in a few months.
- Some of the mechanics just felt fun, deep and absolutely positive additions to both single/multiplayer. Districts are great, the new culture/governments/etc system felt good. Sieges felt better, some of the support units are cool. We also got positively surprised by the power of the religious victory.
- It was long. Too long. We played on quick, and duration wise it felt more like a civ 5 standard game. Took us 12 hours to lose a rather quick defeat in terms of gameturns. We may try either the multiplayer speed option or one of the scenarios next.
- We all had our little peeves here and there about some quirks about balance (food seems weirdly weak when you;re constantly capped by housing), flow of the game (what's the deal with the mad beeline towards anti-tankguns?) and ai functioning, but nothing stood out as super major this first attempt. Nothing like the overpowered ranged units of civ 5.
Overall, we honestly had a very good experience. I much prefered it over civ 5, while still feeling like a similar sort of experience. Obviously just a first impression, and maybe we'll bump into more things. But with this as a first build, before patches.expansions and with the option of multiplayer modding, I can't really see it go the wrong way.