Well to give you a brief summary: if you have played Civ VI on Switch before, you kind of already know what to expect. I would argue that they put a lot of optimization into it. Loading times for example are faster, as well as turn times. I have not timed this, but I would say it is noticably faster but of of course still way slower than on the other plattforms.
They also put a lot of thought into the user interface imho.
In Civ VI there were linear menus assigned to the L- and R- Buttons, which you then had to navigate using the directional pad, with icons arranged in two vertical columns. Now the L-Button directly opens the map lense panel, so this is much quicker to access than before.
The R-button on the other hand opens a new radial menu, wich basically displays all the buttons from the toolbar in the upper left in a circular, clock-like pattern. There you select an option using the analog joystick and the A-button. This radial menu also has a second page, which is accessed by pressing the R-button a second time to access diplomacy in a similar clock-like pattern.
Using this new radial menu, the various interfaces panels can be accessed much faster. For example, to open the techj/civics/government/religion/etc panels you press R to display the radial menu, point the joystick in the appropriate direction associated with the screen you want and press A to open it. This vastly reduces the number of clicks you have to make. I hope you get the idea.
Other things work like in Civ VI. For example, when you have a unit selected, you use the D-pad to select special unit orders. This works basically the same way as before.
There is only one thing in the UI, which I consider a downgrade. You still move the map view using the R-Joystick. But in Civ VI you could click the R-Joystick to quickly select the tile/unit/city that you have centered in the screen. This is no longer possible, you have to manually move the cursor over the whole map using the L-Joystick. There seems to be no way to quickly jump the cursor around the map. I hope they bring back a similar feature, because I really miss this, especially in the later ages when the map is larger and you want to move around faster.
Also, in the current version there seems to be a bug in that the tooltips showing the details of the selected option are sometimes not showing up. This will probably be fixed eventually, but this is annoying. When this happens a workaround is to open and close the map lense panel, this somehow seems to reset the tooltips. But this bug is present quite frequently and I wonder why they did not catch this during internal testing. I noticed this bug on day 1.
The graphics are ok, definetly less detailed than on PC, which of course is to be expected. But it still looks quite beautiful in my opinion. I would say that the art team put a lot of effort in the graphics and you can see this.
What I also noticed, the new UI seems to be optimized for the Switch being docked to the TV. All panels show more info than before and all UI elements are smaller than before, so you can see more of the map. It seems to scale accordingly in handheld mode, but some panels seem to be cut-off in handheld mode and do not scale properly. I almost exclusivly play on the TV sreen however, so everything I said above relates to the TV interface. Some things might be more cumbersome in handheld mode.
So to sum up: if you considered Civ VI playable on Switch, than you will find Civ VII to be noticeably better. But in the end it is still the same hardware, so you cannot expect any groundbreaking performance improvements.
But in a few months we will have the next generation Swtich. I would expect that it will run much faster on the new hardware then. And hopefully Firaxis will lift the mapsize restrictions then as well. Currently the Switch versions is restricted to small size (this you should be aware of, if you want to crossplay with other plattforms)
www.nintendo.com
as Nintendo Switch CIV VI can be a slog.
