Siesta, what can we "hope" out of v7? What is to expect? What did you see in your tests while in the making of v7?
So in terms of districts it definitely feels way better, most cities end up making districts up to their limit or close to it. Most cities feel like they have appropriate sizes and improvements. They're still not as good as human cities, since they don't do well with adjacency bonuses, and underuse/badly use internal trade routes. They're way better than vanilla cities though.
In terms of religion, the AIs will pick up religions until the limit is reached, and then some will be very dedicated to their religion and some a little less. There's a couple of civs which basically try to rush their religions, building holy sites or stonehenge asap, and then there's some which take it a little easier and just get a holy site or two.
In terms of settler escorts, I'd say about 75% have an escort now in formation with it. Of the remainder, there'll usually be at least one unit nearby. I haven't seen a single settler be captured by barbarians in my last 5 test games (in observer mode), but they're still very vulnerable to players that go in for the surprise war to nab a citizens.
Settlers mostly run straight to their destination and settle. But there still are some that do the walking back and forth thing, maybe about 15% of settlers. The main two causes are barbs and others having settled before them. It tends towards only a single civ a game struggling with it, while all others do fine. I haven't personally seen any civ end up with more than 2 settlers simultaneously in the last few test games. But I expect that that issue isn't completely gone either.
City states build districts of all the relevant types now (campus, industrial, theatre, campus, harbor), but still prefer their 'natural type', science city states prioritize campuses etc.
War wise, AI civs usually don't really get that far against other civs but sometimes do make gains. City states are easily taken, but most AI vs AI wars end up in just a single city, or no cities whatsoever taken. War declarations are mostly appropriate, but they lack the ability to push through the unit walls. In what is kind of counter intuitive, some of the best conquerors I've seen were on lower difficulty levels, with the rare civ (mostly Rome) ends up taking over 1 or 2 other civs completely.
Against humans, they can be a little scary because peace orientated humans tend to have far less troops. But they're still easily outfought using simple tricks that allow you to hold them off long enough to break them. They still are only really properly scary at the very early game, or if you never build any troops. Sometimes a civ with mounted units can still do some harm, as can those that rush down the field cannon line. Their individual unit control is not the worst, but they do really badly at having coordinated goals (missing opportunities to take a city in a turn).
Defensive wise, they're still horrible. The main problem is still that they're unwilling to bring their units towards battle. Often because they're planning to attack some city while being attacked themselves. They build walls way too late because they all avoid masonry now for some reason. At least they sometimes get archers now.
The individualization efforts are coming along nicely. It does feel like the civs are much more flavorful along lines you would mostly expect. France will be busy being cultured and refined, Rome is expansive and aggressive, Germany becomes a science and production monster, Gandhi peacefully spams his religion, Qin protects himself while building wonders, etc.
Peace offers and other trades are still going to be terrible, they're still weirdly eager to go to peace and to give half their stuff away. Sadly little I can do here.
