A few quick points, based on my (fairly limited) playthrough with the Bonnie beta:

1. Are luxury resource deposit also meant to have more than one copy of the resource? If so, some of the cumulative effects seem pretty strong. The one I recall was from papyrus I think, +2 science on city centre (?) for each copy. Though maybe people with more gameplay experience disagree.
2. I quite like the larger deployment zones for land battles. Really gives a lot more flexibility to adopt an offensive or defensive set-up and take better advantage of the battlefield.
   1. It seems to me that this tends to make ranged units stronger because I get more of a chance to position them for clear lines of fire. Not necessarily an issue but may be good to be aware for balance reasons.
   2. I'm not sure the AI can cope with the changes that well yet. I had several instances where I the odds were against me and so I deployed towards the back of the zone in a more defensible position. In response, the AI did ... nothing much. It took the flag but, honestly, who cares. It would have been more effective to push its advantage. In one battle it even engaged with units piecemeal and didn't use 60% of its forces at all, allowing me to pick them off one-by-one. I think that will need further work.
3. Not sure the malus for not having enough strategic resources is enough. I missed half the horses for Egypt's EU and "only" got a 30% increase. (But then, I think I had all the bronze, so maybe that factored in). Similarly, on the more advanced pre-beta game I loaded, I also didn't see maluses of more than 20% - 30%, although I was fairly dominant and thus had pretty broad resource access. I sort-of expected something more severe, but again, more experienced players can probably give a better view on this.

Thanks for the feedback.

Shadowhal wrote:
Are luxury resource deposit also meant to have more than one copy of the resource? If so, some of the cumulative effects seem pretty strong. The one I recall was from papyrus I think, +2 science on city centre (?) for each copy. Though maybe people with more gameplay experience disagree.

Well, yes, but actually no.

Luxury resources can have multiple copies per deposit, but the average and maximum vary by resource type, as does the rarity of deposits. For example, as far as I know the "+1 on relevant district type" resources like Silk always have a maximum size of one with at most 5 deposits across the whole map. If this is balanced is something we'll have to judge as more feedback comes in.

Thanks, that makes sense, as those are the resources where it's most at risk of being too powerful.

It's kind of academic but will it say anywhere in the game that some resource can only ever have one copy per deposit? In case people are wondering or looking for bigger deposits and getting frustrated at not finding any.

As far as I know, it won't be called out explicitly in the game.