~18 months after release it still feels undercooked?
I genuinely like some of the changes, I think merging barbarians into city states is brilliant, and sailable rivers are cool. I think the espionage system being orders given through influence points is a nice smoothing of micromanagement over the previous iterations where you needed to actually move spies around. That said, they also made traders require MORE management now, so 1 step forward 1 step back on that front. Commanders are really neat.
That said... really BASIC functionality that I'd expect to be here just... isn't, and that feels weird to me? You can't shift-click to queue techs or civics. You can still "queue" them by picking something further down the tree, but the game won't let you decide the order, and you can't say "finish this one research here THEN go research this" and I can't understand why something that fundamental would be missing. Lafayette's leader ability, when prompting me as a recipient, in both instances seemed to have the "support" option show up in middle slot with "accept" on the left-hand side, when I think... every other offer I got was the opposite? I almost picked the wrong choice a couple of times on that and I don't know why it's reversed only for that. The game's graphics are visually very pretty but this has come at the cost of parsability, I find it much harder to tell what buildings are which at a glance, which can make understanding what a city is (especially enemy cities) take a lot longer as I need to mouse over each tile.
I was glad to try it for a week, but after 1 finished game in the Exploration Era (starting difficulty too low, won "Crushing Victory") and then making it the modern era just before the trial ended... I'm pretty meh about it. I wouldn't pay full rate and I'm not williing to pay 50% off now, because I don't think I'd play it if I didn't have the looming limited time to try it looming over me. I hope it gets better because I've been playing since Civ 2 but this doesn't feel like it.
