Spent some time on this game this weekend. I liked it and its been fun to play but it didn't blow me away. It feels very complicated, and occasionally makes me (a player who has played all installments since 2) sometimes feel lost. It also is not nearly as intuitive visually as the previous game. I cant tell what's going on in most tiles. If I've got all these urban districts in my capital or whatever, I currently have no idea what building I built in them without hovering back over all of them one by one, I cant even really tell the difference between a district that still has an open building slot vs a completed quarter. Its also very hard for me to tell the difference between rural tiles in the same way, but the big problem I have is I have no clue looking at terrain right now what kind of tile improvement the game will want to put on any particular patch of terrain until I build a settlement there and enter the tile selection once the settlement begins growing. I'm sure experience will rectify that somewhat, but other than what resources are around and what water features and mountains exist, its very hard for me to tell what kind of rural settlement a town will end up having, and I feel very reliant on the AI telling me where to place a city via the settler map lens.
There's also still some annoying quality of life issues. Sometimes the UI icons that appear above a tile are unclear about which tile its on unless you zoom in. Its also annoying that it sometimes reminds you to do things in very inconspicuous ways, like if you start a memento that allows you pick a leader trait, there's just a tiny arrow over your leader portrait, it never reminds you to actually assign your leader trait. I've played multiple games where I forgot about assigning that until I earned the next trait upgrade in game.
