I ran a quick prince game with Kongo this afternoon just to get a good feel for it. Went 6 cities wide, and won cultural victory.
Key things to note:
1. Sumeria is going to be even scarier than they were before, now that they upgrade their war carts into knights without wasting time. Boy did he have a lot of them too. (He even came after me with two other civs between us.)
2. I found a new bug where that red exclamation mark for the barbarian scout, now gets stuck on other civs units for some strange reason.
3. The AI (Sumeria at least) brought a bombard and actually tried to use it on me. I took it out fast before he could get into range of my city, so I cannot tell you if he would have used it correctly all the way.
4. Egypt still struggles early on, like before, but caught up big time mid game. Which is a good thing. Same for Monty.
5. The AI now seems to really target spying on your capital. I collected 6 jailed spies from my capital, and too many countless dead ones. They never tried my other cities. Might need to play Emperor or Immortal this weekend to see if they spread out their spies or not.
6. For the first time ever, I became friends with Rome, could initiate embassies, and managed to get allied with him. Allying with him and Egypt made Sumeria angry and he DOW'd me some turns later. This is good. Never got this to happen before.
7. I only had two enemies by the end of the game Monty and Pedro (Brazil) (jealous because I took all the great people). Everyone else was friendly, neutral, or ally.
8. Got to try a research agreement for the very first time. It's kinda cool how it works. It targets a specific tech and you pay them the incentive to participate.
9. Deploying airplanes still seems to trigger troops at their borders whining.
10. The AI still needs work in battle, but they do seem to hit and run (more and better than before) and change targets (cities). I could have sworn it tried to flank me too, but that could have been the coffee talkin. I dunno gotta play another game on to know for sure.
11. Sumeria was suzerain of a city state south of me. They were hurting me so badly, with their own knights, I had to out-suzerain them out of that city state ASAP.
12. No one DOW'd me that was not capable of kicking my butt. I still need to have a game against Suicidal Harold to know for sure, but before the patch, just about any civ would try to fight me even if their military score was way below mine.
If some players that never go above Prince have a hard time with the game before the patch, it might actually get harder unless you handpick the civs to play with. No Sumeria or Scythia, perhaps. The guy earlier talking about how intense the Mamluk rush was, that he got hit with, reminded me of the Sumeria knight rush. It caught me way off guard and surprised me big time. I actually had to go into a war-time mode and stopped doing culture stuff just to get them and that city state off me.
