Notes I made during my Victor playthrough:

-Very lacking in features compared to the Endless series, hopefully that is just remaining development.

-The AI seems to be good at nothing, not able to adapt or specialize, spends most of it's time spamming units and moving them at random.

-Diplomacy is bland, you can't offer any options other than a generic counter, and there is no way to know if the offer is seen as favorable or not.

-Units are too resource dependent, almost all require Iron, which there was only one copy of on the continent, I could have easily starved the AI for it and conquered with that alone.

-Forced into peace when my opponent surrendered to a different AI as a vassal, which made me give back my conquered territory, all of which happened automatically without choice or even interaction.

-No indication of what Discoveries or Curiosities do when interacted with, just a pop-up saying you found x, very boring.

-I chose to focus on production, as that is usually the way to break a 4x game fastest.  It worked here too, I only had to pay causal attention to Influence and Money until my Religion kicked in, then I used that to supercharge Science and took a great lead all the way around.

-The AI seemed like a punching bag, it didn't do anything noteworthy to try to curtail my progress and easily gave into my demands.

-I never saw the AI make a dedicated naval unit, making the 'test the naval combat' idea invalid.

-Terrain needs much clearer indicators of what is a cliff or other impassible hex edge and what isn't, constantly frustrated in exploration and battle due to not being able to see what was a valid route and what was not.

-No clear information on Faith or how to unlock Civics, eventually both just 'dried up' and stopped progressing.

-Didn't see a way to determine where units would spawn with multiple spawn points in a city.

-No clear reason the AI was able to constantly take my population away, nor any way to counter it I could see.

-Dealing with 'neutral' AI seemed pointless as I just had to wait for them to decline and then offer influence to instantly take them over.

-No building or district upkeep costs made spamming them completely easy once the Commons districts were available.

-Too many elephant based units, makes it seem like just another horse... 

Overall it seemed very underwhelming for a game that should have already been released, your other games offer many more choices (units [builds and upgrades], heroes, play-styles, quests, story-lines, etc.), which is why I like your products.  The only interesting choices here are which cultures to focus on, but that boils down to a single modifier, a special district (only available during that era), and single unit per choice, and that isn't enough.  I hope that most of what I am not seeing is coming in the release, and this was just to test bare-bones features.  The game is pretty, and it has potential, but at this time it is inferior to Endless Legend, as well as Civilization, both of which I had hoped you aimed to be better than.

I agree on almost everything you said. I find interesting only the neolithic and ancient era because the speed of the game is good and the difficulty is ok, after thant i just annihilate the gmae by every aspect at humankind difficulty ( money focus i cun jsut buy everything, science focus i can jsut discover everything in 1-2 turns, war focus I managed to vassallage 3 other nations in my continent, culture focus i claim every single wonders, build a lot of religious site and my culture spreads over the entire continent. I think the game needs a lot of balancing at the current state.

I too expected an "almost ready" game with this opendev but now i understand why they delayed the release.

Agree with everything except a few points;

1. Units being too resource dependant. I like this for 2 reasons. Primairly because it encourages trading and war over resources, against players I imagine hoarding iron would make you a prime target for war. Second is that it effects emblematic unit decisions, since you may want to chose a different culture if you can or cannot make their unit, which can make for interesting gameplay.



2. Production isn't actually overpowered at all, if anything you were playing at a modest pace compared to going agrarian or merchant, both of which I'd say are better at producing buildings than builders.

3. The reason you were having population stolen was due to the agrarian affinity ability, it gives you a grievance which you should push against the enemy empire to make them stop.

4. You were confused about where units spawn, when you have a city selected there's a graphic of a purpose within a circle, click it to set that as the unit spawn. If that spawn point is blocked by a full army units will spawn at another.

5. You're wrong quite frankly about elephants, you can never have enough elephants.