I started as new game to play test with yesterday's SVN, and it seems to me that the opposite is true. For me at least, the reason to play the really slow game speeds (which I generally far prefer) is to be able to get extensive play in each era, and explore the strategies and tactics they have to offer. This means that tech has to move slowly compared to unit production so that you have the ability to experience wars, and so on in each time period, without teching-out of them too fast.
In the game with the most recent settings (standard map, emperor start, flex diff, eternity) I think unit production is too slow. This has two effects:
- No time to build up any military strength before you're moving into new tech timeframes that change the military tactics
- Animal spawn rates are too low (they also scale by the unit production speed)
The net result is that the first 500 turns basically don't have enough to do in them, because you cannot generate enough units to do anything meaningful militarily, and even hunting is extremely sporadic since the average rate at which you see animals seems to be down at around 1 animal per 10-15 turns (on a reasonably sizeable landmass with a fair number of animal spawning resources and terrains in my case).
Since this means we've now had two opposite complaints maybe we need game 'speeds' that are the same in terms of overall 'slowness' (in some sense) but have different 'flavors' - i.e. - differing ratios between tech and production for example.