- Sometimes I could attack nomadic tribe scouts, sometimes I couldn't. It said i am not at war, but I didn't find a way to declare war on them. Ransacking the outposts was possible. They should be better protected, especially on higher difficulties. 

- Retreating changed. I prefered the old system, where you lose half of your health. This made retreating also more of a tactical choice. Later in the game I had a situation where I couldn't move south, because there was a stack of units in the north, and every second turn they returned and retreated again. It was kind of annoying, it would not happen with the old system.

- Quarters need to be balanced. There are various problems. First of all, Farmers Quarter seems very unimportant. In one game I got 850+ population at turn 150, without building any Farmers Quarter. Also without Farmers Quarters, the Market is very sad, since it relies heavily on adjacency to Farmers. Harbors are very strong in comparison. I like the 2 range. They make more money then Markets and enough food replacing the Farmers. So everything is about Makers Quarters and I ended up only building Makers Quarters. In every city. Every city ended up doing the same, since there is no strategic choice left what to build first, and what not to build. 

- In addition, the infrastructure you build in a city is too cheap. They are so cheap (especially because everything is about industry) that most of them are built in 1 turn or less. I ended up randomly building everything in every city. Only very early the choice matters (first 2 buildings) but after that production is high enough to build everything. Again, there is no strategic choice left, and every city ends up the same. 

- Cap on quarters/building costs. The -5 stability makes sense, but maybe it should be even higher, about -10. Spamming quarters is still too easy. I would also prefer a high raise of the production cost for all infrastructure buildings. This would lead to a forced strategic choice. With a better cap on quarters and higher production cost it should be impossible to build everything everywhere, and you would maybe end up with a city focused on science, another one on money, etc. As it is now industry is the only way to go. Maybe also a maintenance cost for buildings would help for a more strategic city planning.

- When my enemy offered to surrender, I was not able to click the vassalize checkbox, even though I had enough warscore. Maybe this was a bug. I had to reject, wait a turn or two and only then I was able to force the enemy to surrender and vassalize. I don't understand why I have to wait to make a peace offer. Shouldn't it be possible once every turn? There is a lot I like, especially the warscore, but maybe it needs some rebalance. Keeping a city plus vassalizing the enemy was always too expansive, hence impossible. (Maybe its different with demands, that would be fine.) Some things were difficult to read: A city with many attached outposts; what's the outpost, what's the city? Do I give the city, or do I get it? When taking a city has 80 warscore, shouldn't giving a city has -80 then? 

- AI in battle. So many times the enemy stepped on a river tile only to attack me from a low ground. It should not be too difficult to calculate the result of such a fight. Tactical moving might be difficult for an AI, but it should indentify unfavourable fights, and decide to wait, protect flag or find a better position... As it is now the AI is superdumb and makes really weird choices. 

- Hunting down the remaining units of a conquered enemy seems too much. What if there would be a timer of 10 turns after the last city/outpost is lost? In my playthrough a AI had two units left and kept asking me for treaties, alliances, etc. the whole game. I can already see this being a problem in multiplayer.

All in all, thanks for a fantastic game! There is so much which is done right. The game is beatiful, i love the cutlures, the units, the map, ...

I'm just gonna answer to the things that I think are bugs, your balancing concern are taken in account and we are currently working on it don't worry ^^

sirujan wrote:
- Sometimes I could attack nomadic tribe scouts, sometimes I couldn't. It said i am not at war, but I didn't find a way to declare war on them.

This is a bug, this bug happen when you try to attack a nomadic army inside his own territory, I won't go into the details of why this ask for a war because it is not a wanted behaviour in any case.

sirujan wrote:
- When my enemy offered to surrender, I was not able to click the vassalize checkbox, even though I had enough warscore. Maybe this was a bug. I had to reject, wait a turn or two and only then I was able to force the enemy to surrender and vassalize.

This is clearly a bug and I think it was recently addressed ? (I'm not working in the surrendering myself so I can't assure you anything

sirujan wrote:
- Hunting down the remaining units of a conquered enemy seems too much. What if there would be a timer of 10 turns after the last city/outpost is lost?

Actually we changed that, now when someone lose all of his cities in a war he will be forced to surrender next turn !

Thank you for this quick reply! 

As for my experience. I started another game on serious difficulty and restricted myself to a one city challenge. With higher difficulty I could definitely feel the tensions growing. I absolutely love the early game, first steps, exploring the continent, fighting mammuts. Building order and choice become more important as there was some real competition. 

With 118k money/turn and 245 districts in my city, the game started to crash. VOC Warehouses are just over the top.

Here are some random notes I made during the playthrough:

- Player icons should have icons to show different relation status, like vassals do already. Alliance, peace.. Also the red dots are hard to read when you get the notification that something changed in diplomacy. They could have different colors to differentiate between trade/agreement/crisis, important/non important.

- I wish avatar names (or name of an empire) would be more present. In the diplomacy I can only see the colored icons and I tend to forget who is who. It wold be more memorable with names. (I propose randomly generated names of all mythologies :)

- I can see that the overall strategy is to reward the player with positive effects for good play. Personally I wouldn't mind more penalties. For example overexpanding an empire could have some negative effects. Population adding to negaitve stability, etc. Or combining positive effects with negative ones for events. +25% faith production, but also -10stability. Middle game events trigger effects like -10 production, which is nothing in a 1k production city. What if instead it is -10% production.

- Bug: During a fight, the selected unit on a new turn is always set to attack, instead of move. Clicking away, and on the unit again solves the issue. But it should be set to move first, right?

- Food needs some balance. Right now I am not building any Farmers Quarters, so the Market is very weak without its adjacency bonus. Could there be a +gold adjacency to luxury resources? 

Performance feedback.

Playing on a Macbook Pro 16inch 2019

2,6GHz 6-Core Intel i7

16GB Ram

AMD Radeon Pro 5300M

Bootcamp Windows

The game is playable, but not running smooth. Graphics are set to fastest. Sound is always cracking, ended up playing muted. 

Previous opendevs were running smoother. Sound was also cracking back then.

I experienced no crash until turn120 on my 1city-run, and no crash on my previous run, finished 150 turns.

Performance update:

So I realized that by default game.exe decides to use internal graphics only. After changing to AMD Radeon Pro the game is running much better, even on highest graphic settings. 

sirujan wrote:
- Player icons should have icons to show different relation status, like vassals do already. Alliance, peace.. Also the red dots are hard to read when you get the notification that something changed in diplomacy. They could have different colors to differentiate between trade/agreement/crisis, important/non important.

While it's discreet you actually have something to know your relation with other empire: the border of their icon, when allied you'll have little laurel around and when at war swords.

sirujan wrote:
- I wish avatar names (or name of an empire) would be more present. In the diplomacy I can only see the colored icons and I tend to forget who is who. It wold be more memorable with names.

The avatar names are something we added right on time for the TGA (right on time mean here that it was added at the last minute ^^) and I think we will show it more in the future yeah.