Quality of Life proposals and other small suggestions

[Leyrann]

Figured it might be a good idea to create a separate thread for all the minor stuff, just collect it all in one spot.

UI stuff should probably go here instead.

-Jose Rizal's longer celebrations seem like more of a penalty than a bonus to me. I don't know exactly how progress towards a new celebration is measured, but I always get my new celebration on the very turn the previous celebration ran out, so presumably the game keeps counting happiness while a celebration is ongoing. Thus, if celebrations were shorter, I'd still have 100% celebration time, but now with more social policy slots. Alternatively, if celebrations were to be changed to refresh if you reached your next celebration before the last one ran out, this would also be fixed - although the longer celebrations would be pretty meaningless still.
-Treasure resources can spawn near lakes that have no access to the ocean, leaving no way for those resources to be used.
-Speaking of, it would be nice if there was a way to get treasure resources to the coast if the city that has them isn't inland. This would greatly reduce annoyances with AI city placement that might bar you from transporting them.
-A way to get resources from allies, allied city states or both would also be nice, and provide alternatives to conquest to obtain treasure fleets (which, after all, count towards economic victory, not militaristic).
-Please allow cities to swap tiles if they haven't yet been improved.
-It would be nice to have a few options for peace deals that aren't settlements changing hands. For example, war reparations, enforced open borders, free resources (without having to build a merchant and without the civ that provides them getting money for it), etc.
-Frankly the AI just needs to get better at settling contiguous empires. It's almost as if it just picks a random spot somewhere on the continent and settles there, in a way that can't be explained by resource richness and the like. Mainly it should better consider the value of shorter travel times between it's cities, e.g. if it gets attacked.
-Gold seems far too plentiful, although this may be biased by me starting as the Mississippians (who get a free gold adjacency from resources on every building from a social policy tradition). I'm sitting at thousands of gold despite liberally buying buildings and units, and I actually misjudged how useful towns are and am sitting at near-exclusively cities because the gold cost to upgrade them simply wasn't relevant (which has led to me having pretty slow growth rates in cities due to there not being any towns to support them).
-It feels to me like hostile independent powers are by far the most common, at a rate of 2/3 to 1/3 if not worse. Playing on Sovereign difficulty for this game (although I'll have to up it as I'm completely snowballing away from the AIs). I also noticed this on some of the pre-release content I watched from streamers but at the time I figured it might be a Deity thing. Oh yeah and they took the capital of an AI in my game. It's funny if it happens to PotatoMcWhiskey, but I'd prefer that the AIs get some bonuses to stop stuff like that from happening so that they can provide me with more of a challenge.
-There should be ways for borders to grow to touch each other if the city ranges just barely don't touch. Singular unclaimed tiles or strips of unclaimed land just look weird, and aren't worth settling (and in fact a settlement there would be severely harmed by the lack of expansion options due to the lack of tile swapping, as well as the number of tiles a settlements needs to be useful in the first place).
-There is an imbalance between city happiness and empire happiness due to non-local happiness sources. Although it's difficult to say as I'm playing Jose Rizal this game (see the first point), I suspect that this effectively leads to celebrations being permanent or near-permanent even if you exceed your city cap as much as possible without local unhappiness causing issues, making non-local happiness a near-worthless resource.
-There seems to be an imbalance between science and culture in the Exploration Era. Based on my science and civic progress, it appears as if that may be partially intended, as I've completed roughly equal percentages of both trees, so my higher culture numbers were necessary to get parity there (as there are more civics than techs). However, I originally made my decisions on the assumption I would require equal numbers for both, and as a result I prioritized science quite a bit stronger than culture (from past games in the franchise I have a tendency to view it as slightly more inherently valuable as well). For example, I would often build Observatories and (once unlocked) Universities quite early for cities, while usually only building Kilns later, if at all (I haven't unlocked Pavilions yet), and I'm not sure if I ever put in any policies that grant either (except for the Reformation ones), but if I did, it would've only been the science policy. With this discrepancy in priority, I would expect to be ahead in science, rather than even. I'm playing the Inca as Jose Rizal, so I have no science bonuses, and the only culture bonus is from narrative events, which I don't think is all that major. Oh, and I also have the free tech from suzerainty from a city state, which popped three or four times. Without that I'd probably even be slightly behind on science.

 

[Leyrann]

I've been writing stuff down that I came across while playing so here's a bunch more:

-Legions are far too strong. 1 combat strength per tradition is more than enough (based off of a playthrough where I was not playing Lafayette).
-Religious gameplay is extremely tedious. Also, the AI seems to barely build Altars or Temples from what I can tell, making it very difficult to obtain relics from Reliquaries.
-The AI currently seems to overprioritize coastal settlements. This is generally a superior choice, but with the current weight given, the interior of continents remains empty even while the coasts are completely cluttered with cities and towns.
-Why do victory path thresholds in the Exploration Era provide more age progression than in the Ancient Era? Assuming every path is pursued by at least one civilization, the Era may end in as little as 100 turns, and this is with the Long Ages setting enabled! Also, this causes the crisis to pass by extremely quickly - age progress reached 98% by the time my first city got infected by the plague!
-Future tech/civic provides too many age progression points. A runaway science or culture civ may force the era to end extremely early despite this not necessarily being indicative of general era progress.
-The religious game in Exploration is extremely tedious. You are constantly trying to re-convert your own cities, but there are no defense mechanisms against conversion and you constantly have to micromanage an entire horde of missionaries if you want to actually get relics and convert foreign settlements on top of that.
-Machu Pikchu is overpowered.
-Units damaged by plague are not woken up.
-Crises don't seem very impactful, this may be in part because the game progresses too quickly however, with everyone hitting milestones left and right pushing age progress up.
-Please allow us to separately choose the number of home continent and distant lands civs.

 

[99-percent-sure]

- I strongly agree that the Exploration Age religious gameplay with missionaries feels unfinished, and in its current state gets tedious. You wind up having to keep missionaries stationed everywhere to re-convert your settlements when they get zapped, since there are no apostles this time out. Plus, if a town (though not a city, because its banner is slightly larger) has a unit garrisoned in the city center, it blocks you from seeing what the prevailing rural religion is, at least on my display. So I wind up having to constantly move units out and back in again to make sure I still have full religious control of the settlement, since there's no info screen that lets me do that. This is partly a UI issue, but also bleeds into being a gameplay issue because you can't really ignore the situation.

The pigeonholed use of religion in Civ VII seems to need modifying, though I'll admit I like collecting relics/great works/artifacts, and in Civ VI I often gravitate toward the Kandy strategy (especially with mods that add natural wonders) or cultural victory paths because I enjoy that gameplay dynamic. Still, there must be more they can do with it without repeating the religious victory process of Civ VI. It shouldn't be totally irrelevant and locked-in during the Modern Age.

- Another big one is definitely not being able to swap unimproved hexes between towns, or to reallocate specialists to more productive hexes (or even look at them, outside of "growth" moments), along with the inability to extract some resources and/or build over them. I've been unable to build anything outside of my city center (aside from a fishing quay on an ocean tile) in one of my towns in the game I'm currently playing because of the way resource tiles block me from adding adjacent districts, combined with other map features that can't be built upon, and a bug involving inaccessible hexes that the game thinks are still owned by an independent village that disappeared 60 turns ago. I need a fourth cotton resource a lot less than I need a fourth (and fifth, and sixth) building in my town.

- There's also the matter of the way units sometimes move in a silly circuitous path, even through impassable ice on the ocean, to get to the hex you're aiming for. It seems like the AI is "wasting" movements in order to use up all of the movement points a particular unit has, but I'm not sure if that's really it. I notice it the most with missionaries when I'm exploring, as well as any embarked unit trying to navigate around other objects in the ocean. Combined with the issues we're seeing with graphics being misplaced or lingering after an object has moved/been destroyed, it makes moving around far less smooth than it should be.

- Not having a ready list of wonders that have been built, or access to previous notifications, can cause players to pursue tech/civic paths that unlock wonders that have already been constructed, instead of going in a more promising direction. There ought to be some way to tell what's been built, aside from scrolling all over the map (which can't even be revealed fully until deep into Exploration). It's hard to remember everything, and sometimes you'll click away a notification before absorbing what it said, because you're focused on something else at the time. I guess one could try to keep a written list, but who wants to do that?

- I think the game is going to need options going forward to not only customize number of opponents, which leaders show up, map details, settlement names, etc., but also to turn off some of the victory conditions in various ages, especially in the final age (currently Modern), if only to allow more variations on gameplay. Having to devote time to stacking explorers and running off searching for artifacts isn't everyone's cup of tea, to be sure, and the mechanics of that whole situation aren't very good right now either. It worked a lot better in Civ VI; this is a step backward. You can't really ignore the artifacts even if you want to, because the game could end very quickly if an AI collects enough of them. (I'm sure this will be tweaked going forward, since they'll be adding a fourth age anyway.)