So this video explains lot of mechanics which we have partly seen yet.
Both Housing and amenities are responsible for city growing, nothing new. But Ed just speaks about it, that the lacking will of both will slow down city growth. It is uncertain still if a lack for example of amenities give mali to production/science/culture/combat strength etc.
But he didnt give a hint that there might be such mali. He says it is a completly different abroach than in Civ 5, so I think those mali might not be in place.
Merchants/Caravans are your early game road builder. Nothing new here too, but now he explains those numbers behind the sword symbol in the First Look: Egypt (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlWRx6vJNvw).
Those numbers are not just the distance of the road, but the duration of the trade route too. So if you found your second city about 6 tiles away of your capital, you can use your first avaible caravan to build a road in 6 turns.
This changes quite a lot the early game. It seems to be faster to build roads between your cities, at least the build time of one road. Before you needed to sent your worker to those 6 tiles and build on standard speed without social policies or wonders 2 turns per road per tile, so you needed 12 turns to build a road with one worker in that example.
Plus, during that time you give a bonus to your city (both?). You could do that too in Civ 5, but I personally didnt use it that much early internal trade routes, because you needed a granary/workshop and it took 30 turns. Mostly I needed gold early on and as bonus the science of different civs.
So there is still decission questions. How fast can I get the caravan, do I rush it in the tech tree? Will I use it to push early on my city growth and enstablish a internal road network? Or do I use it to get extra gold? I just saw now in the Egypt Video, that districts in other cities give a bonus to their ressource to the trade route. (You can see in the video, that a trade route gives one time 7 gold, 1 culture, 1 faith, the second time 7 gold, 1 science, 1 faith, the first version of washington has build a religion district, by the second washington you can clearly see that it has build a religion and science district.
So it is an important decision, how I will use my caravans early on and it highly depends on the circumstances.
The other think what Ed explained a little bit was the appeal. It influences the output of tourism you have. But the appeal is depending not only on the natural landscape, but from districts and buildings (and wonders, we already know that the Eiffeltower gives a bonus to appeal).
In the first look video of america, we see the victory screen of the culture victory and there, there are only two values, domestic and foreign tourists. So culture itself doesnt influence directly that victory, but it can be related to the production, but how directly is still uncertain/unknown. I assume that domestic tourists are the new defence mechanic and foreign tourists the offense part of that victory.
So overall, if you build a production/military focused civ, your tourism will be quite low. But I hope, you still can defend yourself a bit, if you play on a big map and want to achieve a domination victory, I hope not that the farest away civ can rush their tourism and beat you easily, only because you cant reach them in time, even if you are clearly leading.
And last but not least, airports itself wont push tourism because they give a malus to appeal. There still might be buildings later which push tourism or the airports help on it differently.
But it seems that airports are now mostly for strategic/military purpose. We already now that we have to specialize encampment districts in infantry or cavalry. So if you want to have a big flexible army, you need more districts for it and airports play their part for air units it seems.
But we already have seen an hangar tile improvement, but I think that is just to station your planes there to have a higher range for them.
