This new city growth system is a fascinating puzzle game. It does seem to inherit the problems the EL system had though:

1) You place one piece, and then move on, and return to that city 5-30 minutes later and have to pick up your train of thought again.

2) The game-world graphics muddle the important elements of the puzzle game.

Both these issues will be drawn to the forefront now that the puzzle has deeper mechanics.

The solution I propose is twofold. Firstly, a puzzle game needs a puzzle game UI, not a repurposed strategy UI. There's no need to be subtle. Some option to toggle into a highly abstracted UI specifically for city expansion, in the vein of the hacking UI in ES2, would be fantastic. I'm thinking something as abstract as the game Hexcells: https://store.steampowered.com/app/265890/Hexcells/

Secondly, within that UI it should be possible to pre-plan a city if one so chooses. Throw down the tiles, with their build order, upgrade order if pertinent (I didn't play OD enough to see if that was a thing), and then in the city's build queue there will be "build next blueprint piece" and "build next blueprint piece (repeating)". This is not to say it will always be ideal to fully blueprint a city immediately, but if we're going to play a puzzle game we should have the opportunity to fully solve it and execute that solution without holding it in mind for dozens of turns. The blueprint can always be overriden, of course. It will be necessary to let the player queue up district types that aren't researched yet, but there are easy UI solutions for that.

If anyone is unconvinced, consider how much better it felt to play the Vodyani after the patch that improved the UI for their ark upgrades. Now apply that to every match and playstyle, and make it something new players will be dealing with before writing their steam reviews. Besides, if there's a neat puzzle game hidden in here, I'd like to play it without the 4x feeling like a constant distraction.

Yep +1

Not sure we need to go as far as Hexcell example, maybe still having some transparency of the tiles, but having a real clear thing when putting a quarter yeah

Also being able to plan the city would allow to try a few combinations to seee which is best. Could be something as simple as civ6 pins but really being in the city with the numbers showing is better

I agree. The aforementioned quality of life features come off as things that would significantly help players better understand the thought process that would go into city placement. Although I have trouble invisionimg how pre defined city layouts would work in the game, considering how emblematic quarters vary from culture to culture--making it difficult for there to be a universal, optimal, automative precet order to be used on every culture--not to mention the need to deal with bonuses given by varying terrain, or even the agecency bonuses(some of which only unlock in later technology stages). Maybe on the theoretical spacebar screen allow the player to paint tiles to the colors of the coinciding districts(Brown = Industry Dostrict, Blue = Science district, etc) and have the player be able to save that colored layout to paste it in another city down the line. once placed, the A.I prioritizes building those districts in coinciding order.

i think its easier to just consider current quarter/ quarters of the era

Then you can adjust next eras

There is no need to plan 3 eras ahead

@Waykot 

You're certainly right about explosively branching culture variants. Without knowing all the details of the Emblematic Quarters (I was pretty busy during OpenDev) I assume a checkbox saying "substitute in EQs when appropriate" would mitigate that somewhat without further acknowledging future EQ options? Either way, I'm glad this is on people's radar, I'll leave further discussion to people with deeper knowledge of the mechanics.

Thanks for the replies, all.