I must have played five games and I'm always disappointed when I have to stop at turn 150.  

Better explanations for some of the mechanics, like religion, would be helpful.  But I love the speed of the game as find civ moves too slow.  I also love how wonders work with the reservation system.  I know I can get a wonder if I invest in it as no other civ can get the wonder first.  

I would like to be able to place unique buildings from previous ages in new cities, but overall, this multicultural approach is great.   

There's two positive things about not being able to build emblematic quarters after their era ends:

1. it forces some interesting decisions close to transition times - I'll sometimes accelerate city creation or delay transition to get one more EQ out
2. it distinguishes the older cities in your empire from the newcomers

Oh yes. It seems most of the features that differentiate this game from Civ are what I am actually loving the most.

In Civ, I never (ok rarely) pay attention to combat. But in this, it's fun.

Then you have regions with appropriate geography which prevents city spam and allows you to actually breathe a bit.

Then you have the elevation, which is just icing on the cake.

Then you have cultures with permanent bonuses so you can mix and match. I'm finding this very fun - it gives you multiple ways to roleplay, for example, do a full production culture run, or do an all Asian culture, or a million different options as they say.

All of the above have some tweaking to be done, as do the base features, but I can already tell I'm going to play this alot more than Civ when it launches for real.

I agree with the emblematic quarters decision close to transition times, in theory.  But I always move to the new era as soon as possible, so for me, there is no decision.  And an option I never pick isn't a real game feature.  But it sounds like others do use this option.  My question is this enough of an option to matter? 

bb33 wrote:

I agree with the emblematic quarters decision close to transition times, in theory.  But I always move to the new era as soon as possible, so for me, there is no decision.  And an option I never pick isn't a real game feature.  But it sounds like others do use this option.  My question is this enough of an option to matter? 

Your comment is an interesting one, because Fame maximization - i.e. victory points - are very much tied to NOT advancing too quickly from one age to another.  But there's nothing in the game to really flag that - in fact the flashy icon letting you know that you can transition seems to suggest that you SHOULD advance as soon as you can.  So that's a big problem in the way a core game mechanic is being presented to new player.  And it doesn't help that the AI still isn't competitive, so players aren't seeing the AI out-Fame them by taking advantage of slow transitions.

But to your question, yes, totally, if you have a good emblematic quarter, it's totally worth getting one or two more out that you will benefit from over the remainder of the game.  The only cost to not transitioning early is the possible opportunity cost of someone else taking the culture you want for the next era, and not being able to research next era techs (which doesn't kick in until you finish all of the useful current era techs, which usually takes longer than the time it takes to get to 7 era stars).  Other game mechanics - Fame production in particular - are designed around only slowly transitioning eras when the time is right.

This is also one of the reasons I think the game pace and the tech tree/era pace is so off.  The dev team expected players to take their time moving through the eras, but most players race into the next era as soon as they possibly can.  Hopefully now that the dev team can see that players are still doing this, they'll adjust - either by creating more feedback to show why delaying transition is often the better choice, or else accepting that immediate transition is going to be the norm and adjusting everything else, especially tech tree costs, to reflect that.