I was trying to get through one more full gameplay. I've played at least one complete run but the lag and very few crashes I've had are getting a bit too much for me. I had a few runs where I'd run into bugs or just be testing one thing kind of ridiculously. But on the whole I'm very impressed by the changes and progress from the last open access preview. I appreciate that production carpets and currency exploits are still a thing but I feel like players looking for more interesting gameplay are finding it. 

In brief.

Complaint with the open access. It seems like I have to manual turn down the graphics each time I load the open access.

One of the smaller details I was trying to test was - only one hamlet per city. This felt much more balanced. Maybe one additional hamlet for every 3 admin and/or city centers might work. One of the other tests I don't know that I stuck too all that much - only one harbor per beach front. That radically changed things. I approve of this idea.

I tried to get out of the Neolithic period quicker. I didn't exactly succeed. It's such an advantage to have 6 or more population at the start. I think, tribes and maybe even scouts shouldn't be able to raze outposts. It's something only a military unit can perform. This also serves to push the horseman upgrade into a broader focus.

Possible Bug/Exploit discovered.

Expansionists may be able to buy out / convert independent villages without having influenced them at all - provided no other player has influenced them at all.

User Interface 

I may post up some images with ideas but dang this is still giving me a bit of a headache/neckache. I frequently find myself squinting. I imagine there are planned options for this! 

Runaway Games
I expect this will be evened out in time but I hope that a bit more tuning could be done for these rewards. It still seems to reward growth and expansion. I imagine it's been tested already but what if you could only earn at most 10 stars per era. With the exception being that on the round you earn your 10th star, you can continue earning stars until the end of the round. I don't think it'd be nearly as rewarding and probably (if it's been tested) resulted in people approaching the game looking for the most optimal fame generation not trying out different cultures. 

Overall Experience

It might be getting very interesting. I feel like the combat is still a little swinging where as it seemed in the previous iterations very tight and balanced. I'm liking the different combinations of units and abilities but this brings me back to the UI. I usually think of the Amplitude games as having a pretty solid UI. But this one is confusing. Trying to just use a list format isn't great. I imagine it's pretty much bolted into how the game works and maybe it'll be down to a mod community effort to reimagine it but I will probably stare at the interface some more and maybe try to mock up another suggestion. I'm sure some of that is down to being Alpha but like right now? I wouldn't recommend the game to my step-dad because the reading is a bit ardous. Different font sizes/colors - and it's cut off with a dash sometimes. Like in the force surrender screen where I was able to figure out what was going on because I'd seen it before the but tooltip at the top explaining how it works? Cut off.