I didn't get to finish my play-through because grad school is a thing, but in the three hours that I played, these are my thoughts.

For combat, my first impression was that the combat was fun and engaging, but the movement and mechanics of reinforcements was confusing.

For the rest of the game, the changing of cultures between ages never seemed like it would be beneficial to me since the special areas of one civilization require a very specific city architecture that can take upwards of 100 turns to implement. Also, the Cush had a fantastic unique unit, and switching to another culture would keep me from being able to produce and maintain my army of powerful archers.

The mechanic of changing cultures between ages is the most interesting and intriguing part of this project to me, but right now it seems like sticking with your original culture would be the optimal play in the vast majority of cases. I am not sure what you would need to do to make switching cultures work well (I ran out of time and didn't actually get to try a culture swap), but I do think that the 'guilding a culture' and keeping it for the next age being an option takes all of the weight and depth away from the decision. I think that in order to properly deliver the culture change mechanic, it either needs to be mandatory or nonexistant.

To make the changing of cultures feel cohesive, it might be a good idea to allow for one or two aspects of the ancient cultures to persist throughout the game so that the foundation is never truly gone, but you get to change the flavor.

My first impression of the UI was that the colors and things were nice, but the controls and placements were not at all intuitive. I had trouble figuring out how to enter and exit menus, accidentally commited to combat multiple times, and accidentally assigned an outpost to the wrong city. Also, the battalion and city management screens are confusing. I had trouble forming and dispersing battalions and the movement points of my units seemed to get confused a lot. The resource production values and population cap values were not displayed. In order to find them I had to look at the bar that is away from the rest of the city management screen and move my mouse over an icon. That information should be prominanly displayed like it is in your other games and in other games in this genre.

Every border on the unexplored map looks like ocean, which is kinda annoying because I feel like I am being catfished constantly while exploring manually.

What do the influence circles mean? I got a few neutral cities under my influence and almost got an enemy city, but that didn't seem to do anything.

Tormex wrote:

The mechanic of changing cultures between ages is the most interesting and intriguing part of this project to me, but right now it seems like sticking with your original culture would be the optimal play in the vast majority of cases. I am not sure what you would need to do to make switching cultures work well (I ran out of time and didn't actually get to try a culture swap), but I do think that the 'guilding a culture' and keeping it for the next age being an option takes all of the weight and depth away from the decision. I think that in order to properly deliver the culture change mechanic, it either needs to be mandatory or nonexistant.

To make the changing of cultures feel cohesive, it might be a good idea to allow for one or two aspects of the ancient cultures to persist throughout the game so that the foundation is never truly gone, but you get to change the flavor.

It's actually more optimal to change to a culture in each era rather than stay with it for the rest of the game. As one of the other posters of this thread has said, if you do transcend your culture, you will gain a fame bonus, but you would miss out on legacy traits that could be more optimal in your strategy of winning the game. 

In addition, in my experience doing eight playthroughs of the Stadia OpenDev, changing cultures actually helped me with what I need in my strategy for each playthrough. In one of them, I wanted to become the Huns because I wanted to increase my martial capacity in my early game - something I wasn't able to do in, say, Civ, when it would take me into the medieval era to even have a proper standing army that can conquer cities. When I did use their Hunnic hordes, I had lots of fun invading and conquering independent peoples, and I was actually surprised and delighted that I was able to do that early in the game! Transitioning into different cultures allows you to become flexible with your strategy as your present needs permit, while not losing sight of the bigger picture of winning lots of fame.