Maddjinn's a better player than I'll ever be, and I'll be interested to watch, but Faction Strategies seems pretty simple. A waste of his talents. FI = get culture/free virtues. Kav = go wide. Polystralia = trade routes. Brazilia = war.
I think there can be more to it than we see at first glance.
In regards of the topic, I have a number of questions, mostly revolving around one mechanic: Improvements
(1) Do some improvements grant benefits even when not worked? Certain tooltips in the latest Live Stream implied this. If that is the case, it would be a significant change with a wide range of (positive) consequences.
(2) How important are health and food? If improvements really give benefits without being worked, I suppose that food, pop numbers (and the related health) could lose some of their (dominant) importance from CIV5.
(3) How important is terrain? Are certain terrain types (e.g. grassland) still vastly superior to others (e.g. desert), or can the available game mechanics (like techs, buildings and grower specialists) mitigate the disadvantages of desert/tundra enough to make them more desireable (or even equal) compared to CIV5?
(4) Is it possible/feesible to have different economic development strategies? For example, in CIV4 we had the Specialist Economy and the Cottage Economy as two valid strategies that had a completely different approach to the game.
Some examples that came to mind during the last stream:
(I) A CIV5-like food/pop focused approach, with large cities and maximized yield from worked tiles and benefits from Virtues (+science/culture per pop).
(II) An improvement-based economy that utilizes output from unworked improvements, with smaller cities but lots of workers to fill all tiles asap (and maybe focuse on culture to expand the borders quickly).
(III) A specialist driven economy that uses the buildings slots to shift towards specialists instead of tile yields (maybe again making use of automatic benefits from improved, but non-worked tiles?)
(IV) An energy-focused approach that focuses on maximizing energy output (maybe in combination with the interest virtues) to rushbuy whatever is needed later into the game.
(5) Do we again have a tall vs. wide aspect in the game? What balance mechanisms can we expect in that regard?
(6) Is the maximum culture range for a city still set to 5? Will improvements that grant output without being worked only benefit within the first 3 tiles of a city? If a tile is within the overlapping inlfuence of two cities, can I assign it to a certain city without assigning pop to work it?
