TLDR: A really fun game being held hostage by a frustrating UI
First, I played a Marathon standard size map game with the default Age length. I quickly realized that Marathon's economy is broken. Everything costs too much in Science, Culture, Influence, Gold, and Production. I didn't get anything done before the end of the Age, and neither did the AIs. I quit at the end of Antiquity.
Then, I restarted with the same leader and civ at Epic speed with long Ages. This felt really good by comparison. I got to explore the whole landmass and enjoy the whole tech and civics trees without feeling overly rushed to meet Legacy quotas. That's where I'm going to live now.
Knowing that Continents and Continents+ maps are boxy, I went with a Fractal map (in both attempts). It's much less boxy, with plenty of inlets, bays, and even a few landlocked seas. It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.
Hostile IPs are a pain, just as much as barbarians. Ignore them at your peril. I lost a Town to an IP at one point because I wasn't paying attention. Hostile IPs will cross the map to come be a nuisance. I think this is good.
The core gameplay loop is quite good and definitely feels like a Civ game, even though you don't have Builders/Workers now. It's satisfying to plop down a settler, make improvements, extend borders, gain resources, etc. It's fun to explore and pick up goodie huts.
COMPLAINTS:
Almost all of these are going to be about the UI.
When an AI proposes Open Borders, this is not a bilateral deal. It's also not clear who is receiving the open borders. I thougth they were offering it to me. No, they were requesting Open Borders from me. The tooltip for the treaty, both in the menu and active say "The civ will open their borders to you", but this is not true. Only the other leader's borders open to the proposer. Charlemagne asked me for Open Borders. I agreed. the active treaty's tooltip said "The other civ's borders are open to you." But they weren't open to me. Mine were open to him. Clarification is needed. I became quite frustrated with this.
I frequently get notifications saying that my relationship with a leader has changed. Um okay. Has it improved? Has it gotten worse? I sometimes get these in conjunction with a separate notification that says the relationship is now friendly or hostile or whatever. That's useful. The one saying that the relationship changed is ambiguous and frustrating.
Changing resources. There are too many clicks involved in this. To move a resource, you have to click the resource and then click on an open slot. Okay, that's fine. But if you want to swap two resources, you have to move one out to a vacant slot, move the second into the slot vacated by the first, then move the first to the slot vacated by the second. I should be able to simply click both resources and they swap places.
Social policies. It's a little better, but basically the same complaint as changing resources.
Manually unloading units. I'm not fond of the way the Commander automatically unloads units. I prefer to micromanage this. But the number of clicks it takes to do this is too many. You click the unit from the Commander's interface, then click the unit's unload button, then left-click the tile you want to move to. In my opinion, if I select the unit in the Commander's interface adn then right-click a tile, that unit should immediately unload and move into that tile.
When your tiles get pillaged, the Repair XYZ options are scattered throughout the settlement's Build and Purchase menues. They should rise to the top as priorities.
In the same vein, I'd like to know what damage natural disasters are doing to my cities and units directly from the notification. That's how Civ 6 was.
I've noticed mroe than one instance where descriptive text in the UI is doubled. Not a huge deal at this juncture, but a glaring indicator of where UI polish lands on Firaxis's priority list.
When you start a game, it shouldn't let you launch until you've chosen your momentos. It's too easy to start without picking them.
I have a Twitch drop. It's claimed on Twitch. It isn't showing as unlocked in the customization menu in-game.
In city and yield overview interfaces, there are a bunch of yields in the "Other Yields" category. I assume these are being spotted to me on account of the low difficulty I'm playing at the moment. But it would be nice if these could be delineated.
I'd like to see a line-item report on a city's happiness when I mouse over that number, specifically so I can figure out how to relieve Happiness maluses besides building more Happiness buildings and Improvements or moving resources. I discovered that sometimes citizens are unhappy when their tiles are pilalged, there's hostile units attacking the city or a natural disaster is occuring. Probably? This needs to be spelled out.
When I'm trying to decide what to build and consider a warehouse building, I like to look to see how many future tiles will be modified by that building. So it would be nice to know what kind of improvements go on what resources. Just a little bit in the resoruce tooltip will be fine. Example: Gold (requires a Mine)
I really miss Civ 6's city-state list. There should be a similar list of known IPs.
It took me quite a while to figure out where my leader's attributes are in the interface, other than clicking the number on her face when she had a point to spend. It would be nice if there was a button on the main interface instead of digging through the leader/civ list of bonuses interface.
Several of the relationship modifiers come off as very passive-aggressive.
It turns out he was upset because I settled too close to his Capital, but it makes it sound like he was irritated that I forward settled some
other leader.
Town Specialization. It's pretty great that you can increase your Trade Route range with Trading Hub Towns. Unfortunately, that range goes back down when you convert them to cities, and you lose any trade routes that fell into that longer range.
Speaking of Trade Routes. Okay, it's pretty useful that you can see in Red or Green what cities you can trade with when you have a merchant active. I'd like to be able to see that layer without building a Merchant. I'd also like to see what active trade routes I have going. maybe that exists and I haven't found it yet.
MAP PINS
MAP PINS
MAP PINS
(unfortunatley, you can't summon a feature into existence like Beetlejuice)
Anyway, that's my impressions from the first several hours I played last night.
