First Game Impressions

[James_Champagne]

110 turns in, some more thoughts:

I really wish there was some kind of demographics screen (like CIV V had) or the global reports screens that VI had, because I like to know where I stand in comparison to the other civs in terms of military power and things like that.

I'm REALLY starting to wish that I had picked the level below "moderate" for disaster intensity. My capital city is sandwiched in-between a river and two volcanos and I'm CONSTANTLY being bombarded by floods/volcano eruptions (thank god I didn't pick the highest level). And unlike in CIV VI, here I think floods actually do damage to Egypt (correct me if I'm wrong). Actually, I really wish there was a way to tell how severe the damage is, I mean in CIV VI the game always told you how much pop you had lost/tiles damaged, that kind of thing.

Still trying to figure out how merchants/trade routes work. I did complete one trade route, but when it was done, the merchant vanished. I take it that it's not like in CIV VI then, where merchants are just reassigned, but you have to keep making new ones?

I do like how the game tells you if another civ is working on a Wonder that you yourself are working on. That's very helpful.

 

[ColPaladin]

Upgrading the city/town hexes is so confusing. Urban? Rural? And those TINY little circles that have 1 building in them, but what building is it??? You can't tell. And there are no examples or mathematical explanations about what you are getting and losing from putting a building in a hex. It's just really not explained enough with tutorial and tooltips.

 

[Kulko]

I started playing yesterday at the official release time (so a few hours late apparently) and played the game for about 15 hours.

I play as Friedrich (scientific) starting with Persian and then Songhai (because I got a desert start) and finished the first two ages.

Currently I mostly enjoy the experience, I think the guys who came up with the games system can be pleased with themselves. Both ages where fun to play through, it is very clearly communicated, what you are trying to achieve, and I believe the also got the numbers right for the legacy paths Hard to say about replayability, but currently I am much more engaged than in my first Civ VI playthrough.

I started in the central western part of my continent, with Rome above me and two city states below me. Later I found the eastern side of the continent to be Charlemagne and Benjamin.
After some initial city building (as always a bit too slow, because I like Infrastructure so much) I build up an army to attack Augustus. When it was ready, one of the city states started to send all his warriors, so I tested it out against him and everything went fine. When the time came to attack Rome he proved no match. I took two of his towns, killed all his units in defense and then made peace to concentrate on a bit more empire Buildup.

When I reignited the war I went straight for Rome because I wanted that port for the second age. But apparently Charlemagne had also attacked Rome earlier, so his capital lay almost defenseless, because everybody was in the provinces fighting Charlemagne. And when I took Rome the game informed me that Augustus has been defeated. Well more space to myself, apart from the fact, that now the age progress escalates massively. And also drew the everybody is unhappy crisis, which was just brutal. I was over the cap and had not prioritized happiness infrastructure yet and most of my towns where now hit with a minus 12 happiness penalty, because I was forced to add two crisis policies in 1 go.
The rest of the age was actually not very pleasant to play, as having all your cities flipping on you, almost kept me from completing the Militaristic legacy path and It definitely cost me the second point in the economic path.

I was forced to attack Benjamin to get one of my more important cities back and the AI had similar problems so I also got Knossos for free but it was a huge mess overall and all the suggestions from the advisors weren't really working either. ad that point I seriously thought about switching of the crisis system the next time, but the Exploration age crisis was much more fun.

Speaking of the exploration age, I went all in on trying to find distant lands, settling an island in between (which was not really helpful) and then a perfect location with 3 treasure resources on an empty bit of land.

Then came about 20 turns of waiting until I could get my army over too. I sent my two experienced commanders to start on the legacy path, denounced Hatshepsut and attacked. The other civ where the Inca and they were allied, so this turned into a two front war, but with my experienced troops and the Songhai UU it was still a cakewalk. I conquered enough to fulfill my Victory path and then waited out the timer to settle for peace. This time I had enough time to get my happiness under control before things got ugly so I roleplayed friedrich and set about to develop my ill gotten gains into a thriving empire.

The economic path was easy to fulfill as songhai, with there ability to freely gain homeland treasure fleets and the AIs inability to attack the ones I send from the distant land, but even if not I would just had to manage my fleet commander a bit more to secure the shipments.
I also wanted to finish the scientific legacy path, but here the explanations how to get there where not good enough and the bad UI actively hindered me in figuring out what I want to do. so in the ende I was 5 or 6 turns short in all my cities before getting the third specialist online in the target tiles and breaking the treshhold. And since that goal is actually a bit all or nothing. I ended up with an scientific dark age, which has no effect unless you choose for it to have one.

End of age was a crisis of gold this time which was no problem to manage for the songhai, so I finished it off and went to bed. Now writing this AAR and then jumping back in to finish the game as Prussia.

The Good:
The systems work well and are fun and engaging.
The game runs stable and performant for me on my PC. #
And the achievements and meta progresssion are actually nice too.
But most importatntly I am 15 hours in and still happy to play the game.

The Bad:
The little things:
I always knew all the fancy graphics were just a waste of money for me, but I wasn't aware how hindering and useless they are when you are actually trying to play the game.
On Governor the AI is a pushover. Biut mostly in the old fashioned way they were in earlier installments, not because it does not know how to play the game at all.
Why did they have to rename the lower Difficulty levels. I find that really irritatiing.
The leader quest sound fun, but it never amounted to anything for me. Life of a young warrior was nice, but step two was killing a cav and neither the AI Civs nor the independent powers ever build one.
and in the exploration age it took me so long to get the armies to the second continent, that I had the feeling a timer had run out by the time I managed to kill a commander. At least the goal just dispaapered when I fulfilled it without further story of Attribute points given. But maybe I ran into a bug there.


There is now underselling how unfitting the UI is for a game like Civ. Whoever thought it more important to develop a day 1 DLC (With all the backlash invovlved in this) instead of hiring a new UI team and spending the last 3 months night and day fixing this, is a moron.

Here are a few Lowlights from my playthrough.
- When a desater hits you have to repair a few tile and I am mostly doing this with purchasing. I switch to purchase select what I want to repair (one item per damaged building) and then click on the map. Now the game repairs the fishing boat and reverst the city menu to standard again (so again, switch to purchase, find repair items between all the other purchase options and click the next building.)
- I have no idea how I am suppsosed to play the adjacency bonus game, because it is impossible to see where which building is located and what it wants once it is placed. (actually once you are in the placement screen you alos loose the info what adjecencies the currect building is looking for, especially since most of thos things are Civilization boni which are hidden somewhere in a submenu. Thats all nice and fine on governor but when you need to reach 40 yield on a tile all thois things count.
- I needed to convert wonder citíes for my cultural gameplay and the only way I could find those was by finecombing the map for the fineprint tile by tile. and we are talking about the wonders of the world here.
- I don't think there is any information about numbers in combat. and I am not even aware of the combat strength of my own units after 8 hours of playing wiht them quite extensively.
- I keep forgetting where the age process is hidden, although slowly I am getting the hang of it.
- Now with the new age I want to overbuild and I can't describe how lost I am in that process, when I try to make any informed decision, on where to start. You do not see what you loose when you overbuild, which buildings are warehouses and which are yield buildings. Which are the weakiest old buildings, where your wonders are etc. I will probably have to switch to painting city maps on a notebook to get a hang of this.

 

[James_Champagne]

another little annoyance: sometimes when there are two units on a tile it can be REALLY difficult trying to select the one I want, because the icons are so small.

 

[V. Soma]

Very jealous of all of you! All I get when I try to open is a crash report

I also cannot launch - what CPU do you have?
I read that some AVX2 compatibility might be the issue for proper CPU...

 

[Kulko]

another little annoyance: sometimes when there are two units on a tile it can be REALLY difficult trying to select the one I want, because the icons are so small.

I found just clicking twice cycles through the units so I find that handleable. What I found more annoying is sending my treasure fleet to a location a whole ocean away only for the interface to belive I meant to click on another location in the target hex and switching focus zoom and context of the click. so you have to do the whole thing over again.

 

[Von Falkenheyn]

First impressions from the deluxe version of the game:

1. This is not a finished product. This is at best an open beta. For a 100 Euro price tag, there are too many rough edges here for the end product to be acceptable. I've been on Humankind's closed testing group and it was better than this and I've played Age of Wonders IV from day one and it was better than this on release.
2. The developers have tried to do too many things at once and they've come short at everything. They've tried to make the game available for too many platforms and the PC version seems like a poorly knocked off console version.
3. Although the artwork is of a very high quality, the graphics rendering seems sloppy and rushed even when you run the game on high quality.
4. There are no visible keyboard shortcuts, there is no unit cycling and there are a ton of quality of life features missing. They've tried to run the whole game on mouse clicks which for PC users is really awkward, not to mention, a bit senile.
5. The reporting system is horrible, it is very difficult to gather vital information for your civilization. Two examples here: you have to guess that if you click with your mouse on the top line where your resources are stacked, a report will pop up showing general information. Leaving aside the extremely poor quality compilation of this report, you have to again guess that scrolling to the very end will give you a list of your army units and their upkeep. There is no separate military reporting tool. Also, to the best of my knowledge, there is no visible sub-menu or report to manage your diplomatic relations with minor powers. As for relations with major powers, you can ascertain some information from the leader avatars to your upper right but not all necessary information.
6. The UI is generally very poor and sloppily done. Two major gripes here: a) When you're trying to gather information about your city at any point other than when you're expanding: you want to know which hex does what in your city. Well I had to really squint hard upon my screen to deduce that green rimmed hexes are tile improvements and blue rimmed ones are city quarters. b) the city information menu, apart from being a click - fest is just a comfused jumble of numbers. It kind of reminds me of ARA upon release; there is no meaningful way to gather useful information.
7. The choice of font sizing is really poor and selecting font sizing from the options menu doesn't really improve things. Also, in several places, there is a confusing use of multiple font types.
8. The starting menu is a mess. There is very little choice offered with respect to map customization. When selecting your leader - civilization combo, you have leader animation interfering with the display text (I'm talking about you Augustus and your damned scepter) making it difficult to read.
9. The much touted and advertised diplomacy overhaul is, so far, just AI Spam the second the game detects that you've accrued 170 influence (the threshold for befriending a minor city).
10. Differences in elevation are not easily discernable. You have to really zoom in to understand some of these. Graphics rendering of mountains is poorly done
11. Great works gathering is just really poor as an implementation. The same can be said so far about the cultural aspect of the game.
12. The game has been considerably dumbed down even with respect to CIV VI vanilla edition, never mind Civ IV which set the benchmark. Here are just a few gripes here: if you want to abolish workers, fine, do that, at least give me a choice of what to build on city tiles just like Age of Wonders IV does. Monolithic offering of farms on plains and mines on hills so to speak is just a dumbing down of game mechanics. Pantheons feel just like a tack-on in the first age. Governments feel tasteless as they stand today.
13. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no way to speed up combat animation which is super annoying. There is no way to rename units or generals, cities and so forth.
14. There is no unit cycling feature, no auto-explore and you have to guess that some unit abilities are hidden behind another sub menu. To the best of my knowledge (and I may be wrong about this), there is no way to manually unpack your units from an army when arranging them for combat.

The game does have potential and there are some great ideas in there. One has to consider however that CIV IV (which I had bought as a traditional physical copy) would have never released in such a state. For the life of me, I can't understand why it is acceptable to offer a 100 Euro game on such a poor state upon release with the promise of future patching based upon customers buying DLC content. I'm starting to think that they've spent way more time and resources on advertising this than actually performing meaningful Q&A. Comparing previous vanilla releases, this one is the absolute worst that I can remember which is really a shame. I'll be keeping my copy of the game but if you're short on cash and are on the fence about this, wait for a few months worth of patches and/or a sale.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Are there no barbarians in this game? I haven't encountered any and didn't see an option when I was setting the game up. I'm not super-concerned about that as I usually turned them off anyway in previous Civ games, but . . .

Yes there are, you've been lucky as hostile Independent Powers have been a real issue for many of us!

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Just went through my first age transition - was much better than I expected, still feels like the same game but really mixed things up just when an older version would be getting stale. So far so good - my expectations were very low so maybe that's the key lol as I'm loving Civ 7 so far.

 

[MonkeyPaw]

Differences in elevation are not easily discernable. You have to really zoom in to understand some of these. Graphics rendering of mountains is poorly done

I've noticed this too. Cliffs look like a pile of rocks.

 

[Taefin]

I’m disappointed that even with -20-30 happiness in 6 of 11 settlements, I ended antiquity will all 11 (actually I may have had 9 at the start of the crisis). It seems like this crisis is more about going to war with the neighbors your towns will flip to, to get them back (and then some) and finding a way to get cities positive in happiness so you can do anything but repair. Gold production absolutely tanked once all improvements were burning though. I’m playing immortal, it’s possible deity would have made that dangerous. Looking forward to updates and mods to get this feeling right.

 

[bladex1200]

Just finished Antiquity as Rizal of Han, and a few points of criticism come to mind:

1. The UI, especially when it comes to explaining information and breaking down information, is atrocious. It's unbearably atrocious. The only reason why this doesn't ruin the gaming experience for me is I enjoy the game's new mechanics enough to put up with playing essentially on "vibes" ("granaries increase food from farms, I have a bunch of farms, I guess granaries are a good investment") rather than making decisions based on concrete information.
   
   1. There's no tooltips that break down base production for each tile to indicate to me where it is coming from. When I hover over a rural district, I'd like to know the reason why there's random +1 science +1 culture modifiers on it (was it a wonder I built?) and why it's producing +2 production. Sometimes I build brickworks and other warehouses but I don't see the corresponding yields update on the rural tiles I hover on, and that makes me extremely concerned I'm either misunderstanding how these buildings work or that there's a bug with either the UI or the underlying implementation of calculating tile yields.
      
      
   2. There aren't even tooltips at this time that tell me effects for wonders or buildings I just created. I'll be honest, sometimes a wonder will finish and I'll have just read the description from the build menu the previous turn to know what it does, only to blank out and then hover over the completed wonder's tile expecting a description and getting... nothing. This is especially egregious once I've built up my urban quarters and now I'm trying to understand why a combined amphitheater and library aren't producing as much culture and science as I expected.
      
      
   3. Now that units no longer have promotions, they belong to the army commander, I cannot see at a glance what a unit's actual strength is until I select the unit and hover over and enemy unit to propose combat. I get that a lot of promotions are attack-only or involve commander proximity but would it be too much to ask that I at least be able to see the unit's modified strength value when hovering over it (or on the unit card) including all permanent narrative-related and mastery/research-related bonuses? This is also a problem when enemy units are in my territory - I can't gauge whether my army is up to fight theirs unless I have a specific unit selected that I would theoretically be going into combat with.
      
2. The AI is still awful at combat. I played on Viceroy difficulty so I didn't expect it to be amazing and field gigantic armies, but when faced with my armies the AI appeared to spaz out and repeatedly ran its warriors and phalanxes up to mine before realizing it was outmatched and turning them around to flee, allowing my archers to pick away at them without retaliation. When facing numerically-equivalent or just a handful of my units, the AI fared a lot better, but especially since bringing large groups of units is easier now than ever with armies, it's important the AI be able to deal with them effectively.
   
   
3. The plague crisis is flavorful, but a bit too easy to avoid. I was top of the scoreboard by the end of Antiquity and got the plague crisis, and effectively all it did was act as a money drain. I was able to wage a war, rush a bunch of units and buildings, and still slot the crisis policies (IIRC they were called "Prognosis" and "Health Cults" or something like that) that traded gold for stability, to ensure I didn't have any settlement rebellions. Any plague outbreaks just reduced yields for a turn or so while I waited for the plague effect to stop so I could repair my settlements buildings.
   
   
4. Age transitions are ill-explained (partially due to the UI issues above) and confusing to work through. When I was plopped into Exploration, I was confused why my building yields were suddenly so low. I get that buildings from prior ages are no longer as effective and should be overbuilt, but given a bunch of my urban districts were quarters with multiple buildings it would have been nice to see a breakdown of what outmoded buildings were giving which yields. Also, random resources disappeared and while I get this is an expected mechanic, telling me with a popup or some kind of blurb *why* resources were disappearing and highlighting which parts of my empire now lacked resources would have been nice. I get I was gone for like 500 years but nobody bothered to give me a report on the state of the empire, really?

 

[Giskler]

Played a little under 40 turns so far. Hatshepsut/Egypt, Viceroy difficulty, Epic game speed, Continents Plus map (no True Earth sadly ), Standard map size (while on the subject: no big maps? Standard seems to be the highest option), moderate disaster intensity.

Some random thoughts:

I like how you can select what other civs/leaders you want to face off against (as you could in previous entries in this series), but I made a mistake just selecting the leaders and leaving the civs as random (because in some cases I wasn't sure what that leaders preferred Antiquity civ was, and the game wasn't telling). So as a result now I'm seeing weird things like Machiavelli in charge of the Mississippians or Augustus in charge of Han China. I won't make that same mistake next time.

As other people have mentioned, the UI is pretty bad. Also kind of bland. A good example of this is when you choose a government. In CIV VI each option had a nice little graphic attached with it, but here it's just text.

Happiness/settlement limits? I'm having bad flashbacks to CIV V.

Don't like how there are no builder units. Some of us like micromanaging.

Are there no barbarians in this game? I haven't encountered any and didn't see an option when I was setting the game up. I'm not super-concerned about that as I usually turned them off anyway in previous Civ games, but . . .

One thing I liked about CIV VI was how Gathering Storm introduced the naming of geographical landmarks to the first civ that found them. This game only seems to do it with the rivers (I think?), but unlike in VI the name isn't displayed on the map (unless there's an option you can select to do that, I don't know).

I miss CIV VI's timeline. Does this game have something comparable?

I see that pantheons are in here, but does the game have religions? I saw no mention of them in the dev diaries.

Is this the first CIV game to replace the BC/AD designation with BCE/CE? I prefer BC/AD (yes, I know this is a VERY petty complaint, but I'm sorry).

I don't care for the leader interaction screens. Prefer the VI model where it seemed like they were directly talking with you.

As others have noted, it's lame you can't name/rename cities.

I'm glad they kept the CIV VI model of not only playing the music for your civ, but also the musical themes of other civs you encounter. THAT is something I wholeheartedly endorse.

Camels as a resource! Yay! I do like that.

When do we get cat scouts?

Not sure how I feel about Gwendoline Christie as the narrator, as I'm just so used to Sean Bean (yeah, I docked a LOT of hours on VI). Nice to see another GOT alumni being represented, though.

I can't comment on things like combat or trade routes yet as I haven't run across them at the moment.

Game crashes for me a LOT, and it can be everything from completing the construction of a granary to trying to move a scout from one tile to another. Also notice a lot of lag time when I select a unit or hit "next turn." Or when I try to jump to a spot using the mini-map. Also, despite having pretty much everything set on the lowest possible settings, I'm seeing weird glitches on the map, like pixelated bodies of water or these giant black smudges, and it seems to depend on how closely I'm zoomed in or out. Maybe my computer is just too old for this game. View attachment 718361

The artifacts showing on your map means your graphics card is dying bro.

 

[bladex1200]

Now for the positives:

1. Despite their poor communication, the age transitions themselves are a breath of fresh air. Being able to have a soft-reset that reorients the gameplay goals, introduces new systems, and flattens out yields and snowballing that may have occurred in the prior age is a godsend. I especially like that my units were already-upgraded to their Exploration-era counterparts and I even got some free units to get myself started in the new age, as though despite my empire's stagnation at least somebody was keeping the lights on in the military.
   
   1. I also really enjoyed picking legacies, although I'll confess I didn't really understand how important being able to golden-age buildings was until I realized how week they became when you didn't golden-age them from the prior era. It feels rewarding to be complimented in-game for playing a good early game and to be rewarded consolation after being knocked down a peg via yield-flattening. Feels like a good balance between an unfulfilling hard-reset and no reset at all which would have resulted in severe snowballing problems.
      
2. I love the unstacking of cities with urban districts. I do wish we could put 3 rather than just 2 buildings in them, as personally I do feel cities are a little too urban-sprawled right now, but I do enjoy the push-pull of needing towns to feed larger cities both food and gold for maintenance costs. It feels very natural to expand settlements to feed your growing capital before eventually promoting a secondary and then a tertiary city while keeping your towns around as resource extractors. I do wish it was clear where the food was going when town focuses are selected - I know it goes to cities, but breaking down how much goes to which city would be nice information to know - but I enjoyed the hands-off nature of towns that cut down on build queue micromanagement.
   
   
3. Speaking of micromanagement, I'm SUPER glad that workers are gone. I genuinely thought I would miss them as they've been a mainstay since I joined the franchise with Civ 3, but it's so much less busywork just being able to build improvements and buildings directly via the city and not having to track both a build queue and a worker's actions at the same time. Even playing at epic speed, 200 turns flew by and I didn't feel tired at all, and I think not having to micromanage workers was a huge part of that.
   
   
4. Armies are great. I think that using armies to stack and move units around before deploying for combat really cuts down on useless clutter on the world screen, which is especially necessary given how much the graphics all blend together (they're very pretty, but not very readable at a glance unfortunately). The emphasis on army commanders as opposed to individual units also cuts down on micromanagement as it basically brings back all the benefits of having stacked units while retaining the (in my view, unnecessary, but I get this is the series' direction from now on) tactical 1UPT combat from Civ5 onward.

 

[Giskler]

Oh man, I just realized that when you are converting cities to your religion, the two icons represent urban and rural populations and to fully convert a city your missionary has to perform the convert action on both urban and rural tiles. You can do it on just one tile when you are converting a city for the very first time, but after that you need to do multiple conversions for it to stick.

 

[UWHabs]

Just went through my first age transition - was much better than I expected, still feels like the same game but really mixed things up just when an older version would be getting stale. So far so good - my expectations were very low so maybe that's the key lol as I'm loving Civ 7 so far.

The age transition itself was ok, but I will say, with the tutorials on, the last part of the age is just a mess.

What happened for me is that I slotted in a resource to reach that milestone, which must have triggered the crisis. But since I was on the resource screen when that triggered, basically it immediately popped up to bring me to the crisis policies. But at the same time, a bunch of tutorial windows popped up as well. It was only after I cleared all of them away that I got the "a crisis is upon us".

They absolutely need to move that to trigger in the off-turn. Let me end my turn and then at the start of the next one, give me the big introduction to the crisis, walk me through what is going to happen, and let me set everything up myself. At least for the end of the age, I got a "this is your last turn" message, but I would have liked more like the countdown timer from civ 6. Tell me I'm 10-20 turns away, and then when it triggers the last 10 turns, give me a full countdown for that. I figured that once the age counter reached 90% I probably had 10 turns left, but it would have been nice to know that so I could plan.

 

[Haig]

So far loving it, my biggest problem is that I cant use max graphics, pc too old. Might get it for Xbox One.

I can already say that diplo and warfare are maybe best in the series, love the interactions with empires and IPs.

 

[Head_North]

First 40 turns as Hatshepsut/Egypt.

Not going comment on UI, a lot has aleady
been said.

What annoys me most is the deattachment of competing civs. I play against Xerxes and Napoleon, but it’s not immediately or clearly obvious to me witch civ they represent. I just play agains the persons. To be clear I have nothing agains civ switching or the idea that any leader can lead any civ, but when I first meet a new civ I really would like it to be more clear which civ I met. Maybe the civ can be presented first in some way. Before the leader. Maybe som screen that sais “You just met Greece” and then a new screen introducing me to the leader. (Oh, so it’s Xerxes leading Greece this time!)

Apart from that the game looks great and I like the exploration a lot!

 

[ThERat]

First impressions from the deluxe version of the game:

1. This is not a finished product. This is at best an open beta. For a 100 Euro price tag, there are too many rough edges here for the end product to be acceptable. I've been on Humankind's closed testing group and it was better than this and I've played Age of Wonders IV from day one and it was better than this on release.
2. The developers have tried to do too many things at once and they've come short at everything. They've tried to make the game available for too many platforms and the PC version seems like a poorly knocked off console version.
3. Although the artwork is of a very high quality, the graphics rendering seems sloppy and rushed even when you run the game on high quality.
4. There are no visible keyboard shortcuts, there is no unit cycling and there are a ton of quality of life features missing. They've tried to run the whole game on mouse clicks which for PC users is really awkward, not to mention, a bit senile.
5. The reporting system is horrible, it is very difficult to gather vital information for your civilization. Two examples here: you have to guess that if you click with your mouse on the top line where your resources are stacked, a report will pop up showing general information. Leaving aside the extremely poor quality compilation of this report, you have to again guess that scrolling to the very end will give you a list of your army units and their upkeep. There is no separate military reporting tool. Also, to the best of my knowledge, there is no visible sub-menu or report to manage your diplomatic relations with minor powers. As for relations with major powers, you can ascertain some information from the leader avatars to your upper right but not all necessary information.
6. The UI is generally very poor and sloppily done. Two major gripes here: a) When you're trying to gather information about your city at any point other than when you're expanding: you want to know which hex does what in your city. Well I had to really squint hard upon my screen to deduce that green rimmed hexes are tile improvements and blue rimmed ones are city quarters. b) the city information menu, apart from being a click - fest is just a comfused jumble of numbers. It kind of reminds me of ARA upon release; there is no meaningful way to gather useful information.
7. The choice of font sizing is really poor and selecting font sizing from the options menu doesn't really improve things. Also, in several places, there is a confusing use of multiple font types.
8. The starting menu is a mess. There is very little choice offered with respect to map customization. When selecting your leader - civilization combo, you have leader animation interfering with the display text (I'm talking about you Augustus and your damned scepter) making it difficult to read.
9. The much touted and advertised diplomacy overhaul is, so far, just AI Spam the second the game detects that you've accrued 170 influence (the threshold for befriending a minor city).
10. Differences in elevation are not easily discernable. You have to really zoom in to understand some of these. Graphics rendering of mountains is poorly done
11. Great works gathering is just really poor as an implementation. The same can be said so far about the cultural aspect of the game.
12. The game has been considerably dumbed down even with respect to CIV VI vanilla edition, never mind Civ IV which set the benchmark. Here are just a few gripes here: if you want to abolish workers, fine, do that, at least give me a choice of what to build on city tiles just like Age of Wonders IV does. Monolithic offering of farms on plains and mines on hills so to speak is just a dumbing down of game mechanics. Pantheons feel just like a tack-on in the first age. Governments feel tasteless as they stand today.
13. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no way to speed up combat animation which is super annoying. There is no way to rename units or generals, cities and so forth.
14. There is no unit cycling feature, no auto-explore and you have to guess that some unit abilities are hidden behind another sub menu. To the best of my knowledge (and I may be wrong about this), there is no way to manually unpack your units from an army when arranging them for combat.

The game does have potential and there are some great ideas in there. One has to consider however that CIV IV (which I had bought as a traditional physical copy) would have never released in such a state. For the life of me, I can't understand why it is acceptable to offer a 100 Euro game on such a poor state upon release with the promise of future patching based upon customers buying DLC content. I'm starting to think that they've spent way more time and resources on advertising this than actually performing meaningful Q&A. Comparing previous vanilla releases, this one is the absolute worst that I can remember which is really a shame. I'll be keeping my copy of the game but if you're short on cash and are on the fence about this, wait for a few months worth of patches and/or a sale.

really appreciate your in depth analysis. Lots of substance here. Have you played into the 3rd age?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

play against Xerxes and Napoleon, but it’s not immediately or clearly obvious to me witch civ they represent. I just play agains the persons. To be clear I have nothing agains civ switching or the idea that any leader can lead any civ, but when I first meet a new civ I really would like it to be more clear which civ I met

I would like to separate cultures and civs - especially in the later ages. So you're always playing against Augustus of Rome but it's something like Augustus of Rome (Roman/Norman/Italian).