I think they were right to flatten the curves after the patch getting stars sometimes felt like much more of an achievement. Dropping the territory capture count - trying to focus on smaller empires. The game still definitely seems best in the first 2/3rds Early Modern to Industrial and Contemporary are pretty wobbly. I don't know if it's possible this is kind of where I'm at like ... maybe once you transcend/adopt an Early Modern or ... maybe Industrial culture then the equations swap to the depressed numbers. Because I have to say even though I'm winning the game I'm playing with the previous district costs I  feel a little bad about it. This scales pretty absurdly.

However playing the post-patch without mods is very frustrating. A city with 2 farmers districts on dry grass. Without farming infrastructure and a plaza on woodland. Exploiting 2 woodlands and 1 stone field. Produces a yield sufficient to make 1 population every 4 turns... with it's sole population unit working as a farmer supported by +1 food luxury in production. That was a game at turn 14 out of 150 and it felt like I'd already lost it. Things got a lot more interesting when a mess of Independent People spawns and I was able to use my Influence and meager money sufficiently to expand and hire enough mercenaries to barely defend my border. It was close to a compelling game experience with a lot of tight decisions but it honestly started to get a little frustrating. With the changes that seem to be for smaller cities with fewer territories suddenly the city limit seemed an arbitrary wall where as before it'd seemed like a soft barrier of bureaucratic capabilities that you didn't want to take for granted. But a district costing 326 at turn 34/150 when I'd barely held onto a positive income...

The price floor over time they added is too harsh in the early game and it only became more problematic. But it might just have been the only way they could reliably reduce scaling across the entire game which might work. I'm not sure I'll be able to reteach myself the math to try and determine what might be an alternative or a smoother ratio. I remain concerned by the time scaling's drastic deflation of monetary value although maybe it's just a glitch in the code. Although I'm chuffed to realize that maybe that serves a dual function to somewhat introduce inflation as well. My weak empire's currency just doesn't have the value in that situation that I continue to come back to as a point of frustration. But it didn't exactly make sense so much as seem like an approximation of that eventual global situation.

The population is wholly not as intuitive to me as the Lucy food system but it seems like one big part of this rework it moving away from megacities - trying to steer you towards having multiple cities with fewer attached territories and not punishing you too much. Unfortunately cities have really weird and unfamiliar population plateaus. Where as before you kind of get your food production set up to keep spitting out units and still gain a population every few turns on the roll over excesses this definitely feels closer to managing a population. There's still the very unintuitive zero population city growth. I try to imagine cities as being more self sufficient and we're guiding future generations of the culture but now the pacing doesn't quite fit a normal game - maybe it fits in the longer game speeds.

Regarding the city stability mechanic I definitely ranged up and down from 0-100 more than I have in previous games. But I will say that as an 'experience' it verged on the exceedingly tedious. While previous games could sometimes have a tedium of 'do I finish this game now that I've got my empire firing on all cyclinders and am cranking out a few stars every 3-13 turns or do I start a new game... this game had a LOT more turns where nothing happened. Personally I felt like I was in my cities all the time micromanaging population. I can tell you right now a mod that can figure out some slightly better placements for populations even 70-80% accurately will probably be wildly popular. Because it's almost depressing when you realize your just trying to optimize things. Maybe for the high apm players who need something to do every second of the game this is appreciable but I found it monotonous.

I think it needed like a Beyond Earth ... health mechanic. Like ... Waste and sewers are kind of belated referenced in contemporary. Pollution is mostly co2 and warming. But for how much emphasis is being put on terrain it seems to have little to no impact on terrain. If infrastructure tied into health a little more and health impacted stability, maybe. If the another Empires city had the trifecta of poor health low stab and followed your faith they might demand to join your empire and that could be a big osmosis event triggered by expansionists as peaceful expansion. Heck that sort of thing might frustrate a player but it could have benefits of increasing the stability for the rest of their empire. Oh - and while I appreciate it sort of seems like the city officials or administrators being bought out should pocket all of the money since it's clearly a sort of graft/bribe situation it also seems like some percent of that money should make it way to the player who's territory was bought out. 

The players are working on fine tuning systems. Trying to find ways to make influence or religion potential decrease stability - outside of the tedious osmosis event. Maybe that could be separated into having more choices. "Let the people decide." depending on your ideology they probably will or won't adopt the civic but either way the stability malus is mitigated to 20 instead of 50. Decline. Persuade (costs influence, no stability penalty). Accept. 

Unfortunately one of the biggest thing seems to still be the strangeness of Builder and Science mode. If I can get a little more familiar with the modding tools I might look at that but there's quite a lot of room for improvement or finessing for personal preference which is pretty cool. But also it kind of brings me back around to realizing that it seems to have a lot of arbitrary systems. I will say though with that old district expansion pricing... it's pretty easy to lose an hour and a half to the game because there's lots of stuff to do and eventually your cities can be pretty self sufficient. Strangely the emphasis seems to be trying to make the cities be about population potentially out scaling districts (especially because of cost) but one of the major balances they introduced on EQ was to strip them of population gains. Which again brings me back to thinking of the word arbitrary. There's some other strange things, like how un-joined admin centers with  forts won't even build palisades - the wall mechanics are bothering me more and more because of how much safety that provides from cavalry and expansionist buy outs. Also the instant buy out of independent people is still a bit of a frustration. That seems to be a lesson they should have learned from Endless Space 2. Especially with the game having 'simultaneous turns'.