Pretty much agree with Acken on this one. The community aspect is missing and the release of this expansion will only fragment the community more. Those like myself who pre-ordered civ:be were treated to some bonus maps, cool right? wrong actually. It caused game crashes with those who did not pre-order. I am not talking about playing on those maps either, simply by virtue of owning the DLC, it caused problems.
Civ4-complete had netcode so amazing you could be forgiven for forgetting you are playing online, it was smooth like butter. Then we got simultanious turns in civ5 and it began to fall apart.
Then the DLC(nations) came and those who didn't own it/them, were not even allowed to play games with people who owned the DLC unless the owner turned it off/didn't use it, fragmenting online even more and needlessly punishing both groups of players for no valid reason.
Civ:be has taken no strides to fix MP so it might as well be sold as a single player game at this point. What's that? A new expansion pack? How exciting! Pray-tell what upgrades will it feature for MP? Nothing announced.
Not even a bone, in fact no mention of if the new diplomacy system will impact MP at all but thats okay as long as the netcode is improved right? No mention of improvements to the netcode either.
Now you might be a SP kind of person so you may read this and think to yourself how you don't really care because you only play solo offline and I can respect that. But no scenarios for SP? I admit they take time and resources that could be better spent on other things within the games design but if you haven't played a scenario in civ5 I highly urge you too as they are good and
fun.
All the changes in the world are not going to stop you trading Titanium for 8Ept or equivilant trades whereby you have played the game so much you can auto pilot x for x trades.
If anything, trades should be a fixed sum in order to be more transparent for newer players. Most of us know we can trade a lux resource at best for 8gpt so why let newer players have to guess? Just do it for them. Which ties in nicely right back to civ:be, while the new(er) trade system is a mystery right now it will eventually reach the same point of 'this is always worth that unless they are mad at me' so I hope civ:be tries harder to be beginner/SP friendly even beyond the tutorials.
As an avid MP player, I can tell you from my experience that a lot of players I have met have spent next to no time trading with the AI and when they insist on including the AI in games they found it 'amazing' that not only can I trade with the AI but I can effectively milk them for gold. Probabaly because their attempts at asking for 50gpt for a horse, failed miserably