Influence is currently way more useful than other basic resources, leading to unholy abominations like 1 influence per religion follower being way more powerful than industry multiplier or money multiplier. In my honest opinion it could do with ES2 way of halving its outputs from common sources.

Another thing is science, which can be easily forgotten due to very high outputs early. Storing science is good and all, but it allows players who stay behind in era to just amass enough knowledge to buyout all research instantly upon ascension. Maybe a cap on stored science could do as was with automatons in ES1.

And lastly, industry. This one is a feisty beast. Since it's so easy to come by industry in current version it renders any decision making from point of 'if' should I build it to 'when' shall I build it. With one infrastucture built it's completely sensible to output even 100 industry per turn, racking up higher and higher with consenquent turns, leading to spiral of hyperproduction. Good thing military is limited by pops, elsewise it'd be a no-brainer to just throw endless armies at opponents.

But I still love this rendition of mechanics, even though it's far from ideal.

I personally think that the key thing that is allowing such fast growth and game pace is that stability punishments are not harsh enough.

Its far too easy to spam out districts and outposts without much/any penalty. I think its what -5 stability for each district? Thats 10 districts I can plop down before stability finally hits rock bottom. That's a huge city in my opinion, particularly in the ancient era which should probably have cities consisting of 2-3 districts max. We can actually create more than that because of constructions, policies, religion traits etc that increase stability.

It doesnt need to be capped, but I think each district needs to cost a lot more stabilty, such that any stability improvement I unlock is well desired. As technology improves and more things that improve stability become available the larger I can make my cities and the more I can expand my territory. Historically, empires that grew too quickly didnt last very long before breaking apart again. I think stricter stability penalties could help here.

The stability cost of districts is too high, not too low.  0% stability isn’t the threshold, 90% is...otherwise you can’t get any civics points.

Sure, but it doesnt stop me from generating other resources like food/science/gold in obscene amounts. There needs to be something to stop me expanding like crazy from the get go in my opinion.

Krikkitone wrote:

The stability cost of districts is too high, not too low.  0% stability isn’t the threshold, 90% is...otherwise you can’t get any civics points.

You can still get civics points when between 30% and 90% stability. It's at 90% stability or higher that the civics point gain is maximized, if I was reading the tooltips correctly. Currently I think the range of 30%-90% stability is too wide for there to not be any major impacts at the city level, unless there's something going on behind the scenes that I'm not aware of.

I find the overall pace too fast, but I also play Civ games on longer game settings like Marathon usually. The main thing to me is that I want to have time to actually use things I research before I research their replacement. As far as districts and infrastructure goes this is pretty okay, mainly because most of my cities quickly get to the point where they can build like 3 different infrastructures per turn, but I often had to deliberately avoid certain techs to actually get to fight a war with a particular level of units.

Just going to add my 2 cents to everyone above me, most of the specifics have been said by someone else.

Progress is too fast, science costs need to be scaled way up

food is worthless and too easy to come by.

districts are too cheap and I don't think it can be solved with just scaling their costs, I think there needs to be some other limiting factor, spending influence or soft capped based on population or something

Some specialty buildings are way too strong

The only other thing I would add is that I think part of the problem with districts is how strong the map yields are vs how weak population yields are. It's easy to have a city with 500-1000 production with a population of 1. But even with a population of 50 without districts, you'd only have 2-4 yield per pop (assuming they had jobs), I'd say cut the resource yields on the map in half but then move some of the bonuses into population yields.

BTW the game is still a lot of fun even though the snowballing borks things :)

Agree with the general theme of what people are saying here, the economy can snowball too easily and early and the pacing suffers for it. I think even pegging districts to popsize a la Endless Legend might do a world of good, right now it's all too easy to plop down some extra districts - sacrificing pops if need be, and in return get tremendous passive yields. I was playing pure harrapan and the food income I had was simply crazy, I could fill the Agragian special ability in <10 turns and could get 20+ pops for free that I could chop for even more free districts and faster special abilities. I was playing quite non-committal to any sort of strategy as it was my very first run but I think I effectively won way back in the ancient era and have been mopping up since.

Yup, snowballing is out of control, second play through I finished tech tree 59 turns before end.

Also I find it annoying when there are so many small buildings, with little impact, which take 1 turn to complete. The later era buildings cost more, but they are often behind some unlockable. Maybe once I unlock second or third level, I don't need to build the previous levels? That would also add some strategic choices, of when to upgrade, where to focus.

In my opinion, expansion is way too fast and too abrupt. Creating outposts is very cheap and territories can change hands very rapidly, be it through wars or diplomatic demands. I would like to see more gameplay around contested territories, main these mechanics slower and more fluid. Also, I am not sure how happy I am with the current implementation of cities. We quickly end up cities that occupy very large territories but are in fact very small in size. It would make more sense to me if attaching territories for example would be dependent on population... 

One consideration to addressing the above issues would be to make the territories smaller (along with other balancing tweaks). This would slow down the expansion, make the conquest more gradual and make the cities more dense. 

Like everyone else has said, snowball is the biggest issue right now. I think a huge part of fixing the pacing would also be for there to be a legitimate incentive to wait on moving eras to get the stars (or even have the star threshold set much higher to move up eras). Lock certain sciences behind era-walls and make it harder to move between eras would slow the game down and allow players to explore each era fully.

The game is to fast in beta, with too many abusive mechanics and snowball effect, especially from Classic Era.

I strongly feel that the ability to merge territories breaks the game. The quick jump in production capabilities propels any city beyond what could reasonably achieved with districts alone. It certainly breaks the food mechanic. Or does anyone bother to build farming districts?

A scaling food threshold for Plentiful and Abundance could work indeed.

I think attached territories should be more balanced in the final game by how vulnerable and hard to defend they are. Currently the AI doesn't pose that much threat so you can basically completely ignore defensiveness of your territories.

I like the public ceremonies, they are an interesting idea - but their reward doesn't seem to scale very well. It's sometimes just enough, but, I definitely like the idea of compensating for infrastructure or changing cultures by just throwing the right kind of celebration.