But there are some basic interface problems that should have been fixed before the game was released. Most importantly, the populations of your cities are hard to read. In the previous game you could clearly see which of your citizens were happy, which were content and which were unhappy. This time around the different heads look much more alike and are harder to read at a glance. Since the happiness of your citizens is so important to maintaining order, this similarity is kind of a pain. And while the game automatically prompts you to adjust city production at key moments (like when you need an aqueduct for instance) it doesn't prompt you to add entertainers to cities in civil disorder.
Another irritating bug is that the list-sorting feature on the domestic advisor screen doesn't stick. If you're interested in seeing your cities rated based on scientific research, or production, or food output, you can click the corresponding icon in the menu bar. But when you move the mouse off of the icon (say, to scroll the list) you lose the sort and go back to the default city list. It's not as big a pain as the indistinct city heads but it's still sloppy.
The game also has some shortcomings in the area of sound. While I've never thought that sound or visuals are necessarily the point of the game, a little more could have been done here, especially in the area of sound. The basic soundtracks are nice and unobtrusive (an mp3 player in the game would be nice) and the sound effects are pretty average. Unfortunately the sound loops every time a unit moves. When you've got units that move a long way and make a lot of noise, you just get these short bursts of noise rather than one continuous sound.
And for some reason, someone thought it would be cool to add the sound of birds chirping to the game. This is honestly probably the most irritating aspect of the game. It's bad enough to hear real birds chirping outside my window because I've been up for 10 hours playing this game. When the game makes chirping sounds it triggers a Pavlovian response in me that makes me feel more tired than I am. It sounds stupid, but it's true.
