nyefan.org

TL;DR

This game is not finished. Give it a few months and a UI overhaul mod or two, and it will likely be excellent, but it’s not worth the price right now.

Civilopedia and Tooltips

The Civilopedia, tooltips, and ui generally are not complete or sufficiently descriptive. Regularly during the game, I did not know why something wasn’t working, what were the conditions to get the result I wanted, or if something was supposed to work the way a tooltip said. For instance, the Port building tooltip (in the build menu only - the Civilopedia entry is incomplete, and this tooltip cannot be recovered from the built port any way that I could find) says that a railroad+port in a city creates a railroad connection to the capital, which is a prerequisite for the factory building. This does not seem to work, making overseas factories impossible to build - that could be fine except that it’s completely unclear whether this even should work.

District Placement

The ui is both incorrect and incomplete with respect to overbuilding old districts and replacing rural districts with urban ones. It is incorrect in its display of the yield difference as it only lists yield improvements, and it does not list net yields or total yields, making it not possible to determine the actual result of building (without manually calculating the results before and after from the base yields, any adjacency bonuses, any terrain bonuses, any civ bonuses, any city or empire wide wonder bonuses and any policy bonuses). It is incomplete because there is no marker for ageless or current age buildings to distinguish them from previous age buildings. It also is not possible to decide which building in a tile to overbuild nor to determine why the game chooses the left or right building in the tile to overbuild.

The Modern Age ???

The gameplay in the modern age is just bizarrely not thought through. Why are we earning legacy bonuses in the modern age? They literally do nothing. Why is it only possible to research future civics once while future technology is infinitely repeatable? Why do both of them give bonuses to the “next age” technology and civics even though there isn’t a fourth age? Why is there even age progression in the modern age if there are no crises? I accidentally finished the game due to age progression and some (unlisted?) win condition several turns before completing either the science or civic victory. Why do exploration age religious buildings and bonuses still affect the modern age if it’s not possible to build missionaries? This could be an intentional balance decision to encourage long term strategy towards winning the modern age even if you’re not able to win the exploration age, but it’s not possible to know because the Civilopedia and tooltips are incomplete and incorrect in so many places.

This is Secretly an Essay

Overall, this game should not have been released yet - a 3-6 month delay would have been sufficient to round off these edges, but Firaxis instead chose to release a 90% baked game at a 120% baked price. Do yourself a favor and wait until the post-game patches and maybe the first dlc clean things up a little.