A friend sent me this review a few days ago, and the odd thing is as I read it it felt as though every other point she makes is just a problem I had with 6. A few examples:
Angry Civ-izens would rampage across that same town, and might declare independence. In 7, they burn down the library and the exact fudging buildings you need to produce things that would make them happier.
I had a game where I had a city that was losing loyalty, and I had already done most of the things that you'd do in that situation (Governor, monument, civics, etc.), with an exception being a government plaza. The city got ~80% of the way through production and then just... stopped because the loyalty was low. Incredibly frustrating experience. Maybe this is more common in 7, and if so, fair point.
Eventually an unhappy town "rebels" by seamlessly joining another, potentially allied empire. You can't contest it without warring on that empire. You can't grant independence or trade it away.
Also a problem I have with the loyalty mechanic in 6. I suppose technically you can just trade away cities on a whim in 6, but that is so rarely worth it even when you're having these issues. And I would
seriously hope that the happiness mechanics in 7 are more in depth then the loyalty mechanics in 6 (can you tell I don't like loyalty in 6?).
But you can only redistribute resources after acquiring a new one, just as you can only change social policies after researching a new one. Most goods become useless in the third age until you build a heap of infrastructure, making my trade specialty almost as laborious as its interface.
This one is at least acknowledged to be a problem in 6 with policies. That system
could be interesting in a simpler game, but with newer civs being as complicated as they are, it just adds to the tedium. At least in singleplayer it prompts you to change policies when the opportunity arises. But if you're in multiplayer, you run into:
Information is absent or buried away in submenus, while microscopic icons - another issue - deliver poorly organised, irrelevant news every turn.
Civ 6, especially in multiplayer, likes to push a ton of important info as notifications just above the next turn/action button. However it additionally fills it with dozens of notifications like "Look! This volcano erupted! Isn't that crazy?" when it's on the opposite side of the planet, or "hey, you're running out of housing in this city!" when that city just exists for an oil deposit. By the end of the game the notifications from a single turn fly off my 1440p screen with only 1-2 that I care about. So, even though
technically it's telling me these important things, I end up missing them anyways because I'm autopilot dismissing all of them. Speaking of things I end up missing because of this UI:
It's the same for natural disasters, which add a chance that some farms will remain damaged for hours because you didn't manually check every settlement.
Because in 6 the UI spams you with natural disasters you don't care about, the ones you
do care about end up being like this. I suppose based on the provided image this might actually be worse in 7, as in 6 the terrain changes (pillaging/removing improvements) is easier to see and usually what I use to tell a natural disaster has happened.
To be fair most of these things I've pointed out aren't really alluded to in the intro/conclusion and so might be just nitpicks, but I am curious if the she considers these problems unique to 7, and if so why.