That's something that puts me off in the newer iterations of popular strategy games. They keep getting more complex instead of deeper. In case of EU it means more regions, more nations, more often useless options that don't add much. Now they added pops like in super-complex Victoria...
I think the trade system where you can't steer trade away from the predefined nodes and into the predefined direction was one of the main critique points of EU4 by many of its regular players. That this would end up more open was a sure bet for EU5. Similarly, that produced goods were only good for making money, and not for anything the actual goods would be used for. So, that this would end up more complex would also have been a sure bet. Whether the new systems are actually more interesting to play with and not just more busy work remains to be seen. I'm generally a big fan of simulating wares in other games (Anno), and I also like dynamic prices and markets in other games (Patrician). Whether they fit a game that is played on global scale... I'll look forward to trying it out, but I'm not convinced. Similarly with pops – I really like when complex games model each pop (e.g., Workers & Resources, Foundation). But it fits the scale of these games (even if W&R can stretch things with several thousand pops).
What I really like about the Civilization series is that it's still relatively simple and more casual. But maybe I'm just getting old
I agree. Civ (especially since 3) always had a ton of mechanics but is relatively easy to learn. That's also part of the setting and keeping things rather superficial and simplified. Yet, that doesn't mean the underlying game cannot be complex, especially if the mechanics interact in a meaningful way. For my taste, especially civ 6 had too many loose things. I think some basic mechanics like modeling citizens' cultures, some internal affairs, and migrations would be beneficial for civ though.
I think that 7 might have scared away many of the people that expected a simple and casual game, actually. While it is probably the easiest civ game of all times, I see in the reviews that many people have not played across the reset multiple times. Hence, they might have played antiquity (which feels super familiar to anyone who has ever played civ), were confronted with losing units/cities/civ, and were driven away by that mechanic that felt "unnatural" and "complicated" to them. It's a pity, because if you are not used to reset mechanics, I can see why that happens. And of course, many people that left a negative review played for many hours, so they presumably played over a lot of the era changes. So it's not just being used to such mechanics, but also actually liking them. Yet, I think playing 10ish games could change at least some opinions just by having experienced enough resets and civ changes. But of course, playing 10ish games is a huge investment (100h+) which you don't want to commit to when the game doesn't appeal to you (and exceeds the financial investment, which is probably easier to "write off" personally than having committed a hundred hours to a game that you don't like).
Re: player stats. I'm curious why Monday was still so high. I wonder what the 'new' weekly curves will look like. Will lower counts during the week mean higher counts at the weekends? Or simply less concurrent players in general? Will active players also drop (currently still at ~118k, but it's too early to see any changes)? I guess we'll see a general (slight) downwards trend in active players until they drop the patch and 2nd part of RtR. Whether this will have a long time effect depends on the patch, I guess, and less on the RtR civs. Curious when we'll see a new roadmap of some sort. It would be very helpful to see the themes for rest of the year, imho – for major patch content as well as for a likely new DLC civ pack.
