1. They need to look at the Emperor difficulty setting. With it being a little more difficult to site cities and get good food production in the early turns, the start bonus the AI gets, coupled with the added aggression of the AI, is too much of a step up from King. King is a snooze-fest and Emperor is frustrating. You can win on Emperor fairly easily if you get an isolated start or have good choke points, so I end up serially restarting if I play Emperor. Maybe they just need to tone it down a little. I can't believe that Immortal and Deity involve similarly large leaps in difficulty.
2. The maps are still lack-lustre and boring. I was playing with the detailed world mod, and got used to it. I can't get over how few islands there are on a normal map. Also lakes very rarely have rivers running through them. They have improved the old map generation because mountains and rivers are much better. Why couldn't they have taken the time to do the rest while they were in there, instead of just working on what they needed for the expansion?
3. Civs are far too willing to trade away diplomatic favor for luxuries and (more happily) strategic resources. And it seems easier than ever to be suzerain of a lot of city states. It is very easy to get to thousands of favor without working too hard. The Diplomatic victory seems a bit too easy.
4. The space race victory has been made too long. It isn't easy to speed up the exo-planet expedition, and 50 turns is just way too long when a diplomatic victory is so easy. To get to 10, just build the statue of Liberty, research the tech and the social tree things that give you one each then win the vote for diplomatic points in the first 4 congresses. If you have a science lead, you will win a diplomatic victory long before you do all the space building.
5. The culture/tourism victory, with rock bands, seems a little too easy now. My first game I went for a science victory and despite not having a religion or much faith generation, nor building many theatre districts or getting many great works, before I built my spaceport, I was able to run neck and neck with Canada for a culture victory.
6. If you build multiple dams in a city you can only power one of them to produce hydro. Also there should be a way for cities on the same continent or landmass (or linked by a road?) to share power, or you should be able to have military engineers build power-lines.
7. Aluminum seems really scarce compared to all the other resources. Luckily, you only need it to build planes which are useless anyway. If you have aluminum it is worth hundreds of favor late in the game, and if you don't have it, no worries. On a side note, it seems really odd that the distribution of geological strategic resources seem to be affected by vegetative growth on top of them. You never seem to find any of the resources in wooded or rainforest tiles. That is simply bizarre. If I get a rainforest start I just restart, it is going to be a disaster. Similarly oil seems to be very scarce in desert and prolific in Tundra, which is odd to say the least, when you think of how the oil got there in the first place.
8. I also don't like that rock bands can't put on concerts in their own country, why not? They should not be allowed to perform in another country without open borders just like archeologists.
9. They don't seem to have done a wide enough sweep of everything that has been affected by the new expansion. A lot of the pantheons are underwhelming, some are too powerful. Same with some of the Civs, some of the religious benefits, some of the governors, some of the wonders and so on. I like that they have enhanced the building game, but the new meta means that we are back to, even more than before, "Just survive the first 200 turns and then snooze out the rest of the game".
