Since the roadmap only addressed some specific changes, any chance we could get a look at the vision for the gameplay as a whole? The art and narrative has a clear and satisfying direction, but I can't say the same for the gameplay. It even seems like it's just trying to be "good enough" to support the art and narrative.

The economy is one example. You can spec into each of the FIMSI so surely there's gameplay implications for each of them and each combination of them, with playstyles and PvP implications? You can build districts for different yields, surely there's a reason to? Nah, it's the production dominance from ES2 on crack, and district cost scaling means that farmer/merchant quarters might even be a net negative when they inflate the maker's quarter costs. You've got a ton of production? Cool, in a few turns you'll have a ton of everything else too. You're producing a ton of money? Buyout costs are so high it's not life-changing, and the other uses for money can be handled without going out of your way to produce money. Lots of food? You wait a few turns before it turns into pops and then use it to get a more useful output at a progressively lower ratio (and it helps with religion... but come on). Science is the closest to what you'd expect it to be, but still pretty production-throttled (later in the game production can be somewhat throttled by science, but only once you're already snowballing out of control). Influence is surprisingly useful because so many things were repurposed into influence sinks after OpenDev but I wouldn't call that satisfying.

All that's kinda, technically, functional as a game. But it would never be someone's vision of a game economy. Is there an actual vision or is the gameplay gonna just stay emergent chaos?