VargK wrote:

One thing I noticed in my last playthrough, where I went the military route and had cities with small population numbers:

Issue:

Population becomes more and more insignificant the further you get in the game. You can have cities with 0 population and thousands of FISM. That makes no sense at all. After all, you need workers/farmers/traders/scientists to work the facilities you built. Additionally sacrificing population lets you instantly build districts or infrastructure that give you 10-20 F/I/S/M per turn at the cost of 6-12 F/I/S/M per turn. You essentially produce ressources out of nothing.

Suggestions

- Don't allow cities to go to 0 Population. Units founding outposts must stay at that outpost until it reaches 1 pop (helping it to gather food). The more units on the tile, the faster this food is gathered (multiply food output of the outpost by number of units until it is founded). This solves the issue, that currently only industry is important for founding an outpost.

- Tie most FISM income to population. If you have 10 maker's quarters and only 5 pop, every FISM you get from maker's quarters is halfed. So you'll need population in order to take advantage of your districts. 

- Population may still be freely distributed as farmers/workers, etc.

- Remove the population cap

- Introduce techs that lower the amount of pop needed for districts to gain 100% output. For example machines could lower the amount of needed pop to half a pop per district. A tech of the last era called mechanization could remove this obstacle entirely.

- Infrastructure may still provide FISM without population (well, as long as you have at least one pop). That makes infrastructure more meaningful than it currently is (since most infrastructure just adds to your districts)

Not sure I agree with this.  The Population number is your excess population, available to be recruited for your military or assigned to general tasks.  It's not your entire population.  There are good and fun game play decisions related to the current system where you can get yields from exploitations, districts or specialists in your city centre, and there are therefore different ways to build up your city.  There's a current balance issue (discussed elsewhere on this thread) related to stability being too loose which makes districts too easy to spam.  If that gets solved, I don't think there's an issue with the value of infrastructure, and more Pop is already >> less Pop, so we don't need new rules to make this even worse.  Such rules would just make Food >> everything and push every city into a single, optimal development path instead of multiple options to consider.

During my playthrough, I decided to go all in on building. I thus went with Egypt, then Mayans, then just stuck with them for the rest of the game because all my unique districts and production districts soon reached the point where I could build even wonders in a single turn so why not just get the fame boost? I did like how the stability feature works now, it makes it very obvious what the positives and negatives are of building new districts. That said, I feel like it could use a little more, like maybe a district costs 15 or 20 stability instead? Especially if you are trading with your neighbors for even more stability.

Anyway, going that route also led me to becoming a cultural and religious powerhouse, at the expense of not much money and science. I got all the way to the last era and I think I had at most one or two medieval techs. Not that it bothered me what with my high production and population making me the mightiest military on the planet. Basically, I definitely felt like it was a valid playstyle. I can't say whether a different route would have felt equally overpowered, especially since I plan on playing on a higher difficulty next time. I hope so, having everything make you feel like you're overpowered would be the best way to go. That said, I did find it strange that I was getting to those eras so early (early modern before 0 A.D.), and I think part of that was because my influence boosted so high just from setting the religion to boost it as much as possible and building the few buildings I had the tech for that boosts influence. Seriously, I barely had to do anything to get 3 stars, so that should probably be toned down perhaps. Of course, I didn't go over the city limit until fairly late game, so that probably also had something to do with it. If I had realized sooner that all that would happen was a slight decrease in influence I may have not merged so many outposts.

Compared to Lucy, the game pace was already much better, but not ideal yet.

I found the Ancient era paced well (40-45 turns) but that could also be because Phoenicians have a super slow start now and that for other cultures it's much faster.

Once I picked up Carthage, things spiraled out of control. Money generation became very good, but I could buy out districts so fast that getting builder stars and even agrarian stars became so easy. With science stars coming in naturally, I could move up eras very quickly. Classical, Medieval and EM only took 20-30 turns, but again, that could be because of the Phoenician-Carthage combo.

Mainly focusing on trade, I bought every resource from everyone; most of my economy was built on it. Religion helped though. Even though numbers became very high in the EM, it didn't feel like too much of a snowball; it only did because I could buy out so much stuff. So I think economy rollout is in a good place.

Notes on specific stars:

• Expansionist stars seem SO hard to get and the threshold is very weird. First, influence generation in the Ancient era is so low I cannot imagine anyone getting their 3 stars without extraordinary luck. Naturally, I didn't expand much. Then, when I got to EM era, I had 13 territories. For my first star, I had to bump that up to 22. Then 30 for the second star, and 42 (!!) for the third. I needed to colonize about a third of the map for that, it seemed, and I would never have been able to if I didn't pick the broken Tier 3 influence tenet and had Franks & Venetians as cultures for influence generation.
  They need rebalancing.
• I noticed that the thresholds for stars are not fixed. They depend on the player status at the time of moving up an era, I guess? This seems very hard to balance and also renders me unable to criticize it since I don't know what's behind it :) All I know is that once I had my money generation up and running I could buy out most things and I could move up very quickly. And that I only got expansionist stars when I was overproducing influence in the EM era.
• Science stars start to come naturally at a certain point and that feels weird. I feel like getting a star should require some investment. Maybe make the research tree less linear (similar to EL) and increase the cost a bit further? 
• I could build most of the wonders, which seems weird... But again, I took the broken Tier 3 influence tenet. 

I like to roleplay and enjoy. Like using attachment and built a city with 90+ population. 

The hamlet district is amazing, I really enjoy building them to create the sense of realism of small towns, villages and city centres coexisting inside the region. They also provide decent employment (4 pop slot is great!).

Albeit I would expect first getting those hamlets to exploit the natural yield of a region, then go on to expand the city centre to provide more specialist resources. That would be much more historical. With hamlets, agricultural quarter seems a bit odd as building hamlet feels more like cultivating land, you always want to find some fertile empty land to put them on, and they cultivate the land around them, in comparison, building agricultural districts feels like building a city, they look like a city, and they must be kept together, the opposite of agriculture.

TravlingCanuck wrote:
Not sure I agree with this.  The Population number is your excess population, available to be recruited for your military or assigned to general tasks.  It's not your entire population. There are good and fun game play decisions related to the current system where you can get yields from exploitations, districts or specialists in your city centre, and there are therefore different ways to build up your city.  There's a current balance issue (discussed elsewhere on this thread) related to stability being too loose which makes districts too easy to spam.  If that gets solved, I don't think there's an issue with the value of infrastructure, and more Pop is already >> less Pop, so we don't need new rules to make this even worse.  Such rules would just make Food >> everything and push every city into a single, optimal development path instead of multiple options to consider.

If population number is your excess population (a point of view I do not share), then building districts should cost one population in addition to their Industry cost, as you're putting people into permanent employment. I don't feel that more Pop >> less pop is true once you get out of the early game.

Food atm is only good because the conversion to Industry via sacrifice is extremely good (not to say OP). Once you get your economy up the influence of population is pretty neglectable. I don't know if stability alone is enough to regulate this, since forbidding you to build districts (because you can't affort the stability cost) would cut right into the fun of the game, that advertises building huge cities. I feel that increasing the costs of districts to include a food cost (and maybe even a monetary upkeep cost) would help delay the exponential growth of FISM in Humankind.

Since Humankind strives to be the best historical strategy game, it only makes sense that Population is power. Cities and Empires were extremely dependant on their food supply. In Medieval Europe 95% of the population were farmers. China was the Asian powerhouse for ages because of their land that allowed the growth of more crops. Same is true for Egypt and mesoamerican civilisations.

Food was historically important for way longer than the game currently reflects. I feel an effort should be made to incorporate that into the gameplay.

I like the game, am enjoying the experience and looking forward to release. That said, here is my, hopefully constructive, criticism about economy and pace.

My 2 main gripes are :

• snowballing comes early and easily, then decisions become mostly inconsequential since you can have all of everything
• era stars accrue too quickly and easily, I had to delay era transitions just to enjoy my latest developments

More specific observations :

• there are many scaling yields, all across the economy spectrum, but almost no scaling costs
• religion effects on the economy soon become dominating
• there is no real money sink, all money you make is available and you make considerable money even as a non-merchant culture
• instant buying multiple items in a turn, coupled with high yields in money or people, removes the need to prioritize and the sense of deliberate growth
• stability is quite easy to maintain after the initial era, it is not really curbing rapid growth (even if you care, since consequences in the wide 30-90 range are quite murky)
• most of the era stars comes automatically, only expansionist and military require deliberate efforts (suggestion: maybe this is the key to slow star accrual?)
• there is no incentive (fame apart) to try to obtain 3 stars in an area before transitioning, no sense of accomplishment

Some suggestions :

• make stability matter more, lack of stability effects should be more visible and also graduate in harshness, tune stability earns
• make rapid growth affect stability (e.g. a temporary and fading stability hit when you build a district)
• increase influence cost of being over city cap, make it progressive
• introduce money upkeep for infrastructures, maybe a scaling upkeep
• maybe introduce food upkeep for non food generating districts, allow food to be moved between cities or partially pooled
• use techs and/or civics to mitigate (or even harshen) the growth limiting effects
• nerf religion effects on economy, at least until a complete religion system is added that produces drawbacks not only advantages
• make earning stars require active goals (e.g. build certain districts, build a wonder, etc.), maybe change the goals per era
• once stars require efforts, reward getting the first 3rd star in an era with a small permanent perk

My feedback on economy and game pace:

1. Star progressing is too fast compared to science. In my playthroughs my research progress was always 1 era behind (except playing science cultures), especieally it moves too slow in ancient era. I would suggest to return city exploit from all FIMS and to decrease science cost for technologies a bit.

2. Fame stars are not balanced well. Builder and influence stars are the easiest to get, while agrarian stars and expansionist stars are pretty hard to get (if you don't play agrarian culture). In my 10+ playthroughs almost in each era I reached 2-3 influence and districts stars, 1-2 economy and science stars, 0-1 population and territory stars (except agrarian culture). Military star progress was depending on my playstyle, so it's ok I think. I suggest to increase the amount of district and influence to reach the fame star and to decrease the amount of population and territories to reach the fame star.

3. Scaling mechanics leads to hard snowball. I personally don't like the scaling mechanics at all, nor "per adjacent", nor "per pop/district/follower". I think that is the main issue why game is getting out of control hardly and progressing too fast. I would suggest to remove all scaling features from distrits and increase their base production quality. But I'm afraid it's a basic game design feature so it won't be solved in that way, so please balance emblematic buildings at least. Some of them too strong (celt's nemetons, for example), some of them a bit useless (Assyrians, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Poles, English). Also emblematic buildings must be balance not only between cultures, but compared to simple districts as well. Some of emblematic buldings can outperform 10+ districts just by itself.

So I've played a few games now and I really like the way the economy works in this game for the most part. You start slow which I like since it gives a great feeling of accomplishment when you really get the ball rolling. And it gradually builds up into this crescendo of resources by the end of the game. Now I do think that the number of resources I was getting was a little too high for early endgame, but if the curve could be flattened a little to crest that wave in the modern era it will be perfect. The economy does need work but I think its moving in a good direction and mechanically the ways in which you get your FIDSI is enjoyable and satisfying.

Positive:

-I actually enjoyed the science pacing in this opendev. I will admit I found myself lagging and developing slower in the early game but every time I have been able to quickly catch up and eventually pass the era I was in. This was due in large part to the insane resources and stability from holy sites, which I have talked about in religion, but that is something that can be tweaked in balancing. I think the amount of science you get and the costs are fine until the very late game (of the opendev).

-Food changes were nice and it felt really good to have rapid growth in the beginning of the game. It did feel like food is still the best resource by far because of the importance of population. I maxed food production before worrying about anything else in the game. I did wish the tracker at the bottom would warn me before a entire unit of population starved to death rather than after. It seems like somebody would say something if they were really that hungry.

-City expansion is by far my favorite aspect of this game as it was in endless legend. I love everything about it from building districts, to placing wonders, to combining territory; expanding cities is amazingly fun. I especially love the amount of districts that you can build and I hope you keep it this way as it was super enjoyable to stretch a city from one territory to another in gigantic super production chains.

Negative:

-The building tool-tip explains very well what the building is and does but it doesn't do the math for you which I found someone irritating as I was playing. When choosing what to build I don't understand why the building tool-tips doesn't give you the exact FIDSI gains the same way that a district does before you place it.

-Speaking of buildings and districts I kind of don't like the disconnect between them. It sort of feels like cities have 2 separate systems and the game is insisting that I interact with each of them individually rather than as a whole. I doubt there is time to change this but I think it would have been much cooler if buildings were built inside of the districts that you construct at a 1 to 1 ratio. That way you wouldn't simply take building all available buildings for granted like you do now and would have to make some more complicated and interesting planning choices when building districts. Maybe some of the core starter buildings could all be built within the town center to make things more feasible.

-I've noticed that when placing an outpost if there are no particularly good yields in a territory it doesn't suggest placement anywhere. This is really annoying because all I want is to plop down a structure to claim land and resources but I have to manually find a good yield by mousing over every tile in the territory. I feel that the game should automatically suggest the best tile yields in any territory that I am mousing over after clicking the build outpost button.

-On the note of expansion I've noticed there's very little in terms of choice in whether to build wide or tall in this game. It seems like in the early game all of your influence goes into claiming territory and expansion. You can spend influence to upgrade to more cities and claim wonders but without the territory to expand those cities you'll never be able to build them anyway, and if you don't have to production to build a wonder quickly its not that useful to claim one. So the only real feasible option is to claim territory for future expansion and then build cities in that territory, which is all wide game play. I think it would be pretty cool if you could use influence to upgrade district as well as claim territory. Then at least you'll have a choice between making more cities or making better one city better. To be clear influence doesn't have to be the only cost, it could just be something you can build in your city that costs influence as well as industry. But I definitely think there should be something a player that has been boxed into a corner can do other than try to get overseas or killing the neighbors.

-Unit upkeep is a joke compared to the amount of money you get. My entire army cost me less than 50 G to maintain and yet my one vassal is paying me 900 G per turn. The cost vs reward of maintaining a large army is pretty much a no brainer in terms of upkeep. Though there is the opportunity cost to consider.

I must say I think you guys have done a stunning job so far of improving the game since Lucy and I'm glad to see that you delayed launch as while I feel the game in its current state is quite fun there definitely is room for improvement. Thanks for working so hard to make this game a great one.

Thank you for letting future players take a stab at the game in final development stages. Here some of my thoughts and comments:

1. I found it really easy to grow a solid number of scouts in the neolithic era, like between 14 and 18 so that I could bully, expand, protect my lands early on. I thought that was maybe due to difficulty but even at Humankind level it was the same. I don't care that much about which first culture to claim as the foothold put in place with that number of scouts will allow me to move on in an era really quickly. I could opt to add my scouts to boost the people in a city quickly growing that or use it in the surrounding lands to pillage, uh i mean ransack, the various AI owned territories. They often move as single units so even as they are stronger I can easily win as i have the strength in numbers. 

2. Adding additional territories is too easy I feel. I don't think coming out in the neolithic era and the ancient era I should own like 6 - 8 territories. Maybe the solution is to have the independents settle in territories sooner. This will force players to make faster decisions as to where to start and what other territory to claim. But then the independents need to be a little tougher to get hold off and maybe even develop an attitude that harasses both AI and human players. Fewer influence and more stability issues when you expand too soon could be a possible solution. Then maybe use army strength to influence stability (or more as i actually don't know if that has any effect atm). Military presence seems like something that historically was a proven method of ensuring province stability. Or maybe even instability if the province is not part of your culture? That would be interesting.

3. You can occupy countries but then there is nothing left to do aside from dealing with population that rebels and needs to be put down. Or I missed something there. I've culturally won them over but still they rebel. Feels like there is an opportunity there to make influence play a more important part as you start to claim more territory or conquer territories, including those of independents. This would be a good add-on to #2. Adding new territories should feel like a real accomplishment on Humankind level. Note that this is also true for the AI. The world is claimed way to fast.

4. The BIG differentiator for Humankind is war and battles. This is already a strength and really enjoyable. Even with some of the glitches and annoyances. Making it more strategic by improving AI's use of military and increasing the cost of maintaining armies would evolve this to an even bigger differentiator. You could introduce chops by military units on forests to build siege weapons. And maybe those forests can grow back over time. More tactical and strategic thinking on the war front also make you want to revisit parts of your empire and think ahead during a turn instead of just clicking next.

5. UI wise adding a territory label to various cards and hoover overs is a must. Using a touch screen with keyboard has been challenging at times (ipad and Shadow) so it would be nice to have a fully touch capable interface and for example not require a right mouse button click. In cities when building a district or addition it would be great to require double click, or single click to select and see an improvement/discrict/unit and an additional click to place/choose it. There are also cards/events that you claim, the ? for example on the map, that give you a little description and seem like something important but the card doesn't say what happened, like you got a star or money out of it, or just a nice addition for your museum/palace/temple.

Overall I'm really looking forward to later this year sink my teeth in the full release. Keep up the awesome work. Love it.

I didn't play nearly enough to make qualified statements about balance, but a few more general reflections on the economics system in the Victor build:

+ Overall, I like the combination of quarters and buildings It's a nice mini-game to think hard about where to settle, where to expand, and how to link different quarters together effectively.

- I'm sad that the ability to build quarters from extractors or harbours is gone. Probably necessary for balance reasons, but it was quite nice and offered good synergies. Maybe that ability could be unlocked further down in the tech tree or through a building or civic? Or a a special ability like a revised expansionist generic ability?

- I'd want to see a more granular and impactful treatment of stability. At the moment, the 30% - 90% range is very wide, so it seems to them that 40% is just as good as 80%. If so, that seems like a wasted opportunity to make stability matter more. If the difference between 40% and 80% actually does matter, then the UI needs to bring that out more clearly. Plus, if the only difference of 90%+ is a higher chance of positive events that seems weak and quite indirect.

- It might be interesting to limit infrastructure buildings to one per associated quarter. If needed, one could make them a bit harder. As it is, there are just so many of them. It may be that it's meant to be a choice. That we're not suppose to ever build all of them for a "normal" city. But then they also clutter up the screen soon. The limit might be a nice way of making that choice element more explicit and emphasise the tall/wide strategy. "Want to be able to build the latest, most powerful infrastructure buildings? Well, either forgo some earlier buildings or invest in several quarters." Might even help specialise cities, in making it more attractive to build clusters and enable the associated infrastructure to boost them.

- When I converted an outpost to a second city, it took 10 turns and I saw no option to speed that up. That seems fairly long.

- Not strictly economy, but I am a big fan of the more radical civic choices that offer something out of the ordinary, rather than another +x% to one resource or another. More of those please. Or more with powerful benefits but also costs.

First time playing, and the pace seemed fairly fast.  Even on my second playthrough, it seemed like I would move to the next era before really "finishing" the tech/opportunities of the current era.  This may not mean that it needs to slow down though, but it felt hard to go into science without really committing.  My first playthrough was science/influence heavy, and I had no problem keeping highly tech-ed.  My second playthrough was more industry focused, but I would often be 2 or 3 layers of tech behind the next era as I changed eras.  For instance, I gained javelins as a cultural unit, but never ended up building them as by the time I reached that tech I was already into the next era (with a better, new cultural unit).  With two playthroughs it's hard to say whether that is a pacing problem or a learning one, but either way I was dominating the AI.  In that sense, both playstyles held up well.

It really felt like the majority of a city's food/production would come from infrastructure based on strategic resources.  Since this scaled to the number of overall resources available, gaining vassals (of which I had 2 both runs) made this effect explode to the point where other infrastructure was largely just "gravy" on top.  I'd like to have a better understanding of how a money/market quarters path works, so I'll probably try that in some future opendev.  It was not immediately clear how "exploiting" resources worked, but the UI was pretty good at making decisions for me before I was able to make them for myself.

All in all, I think having a limit to the number of cities is very good, but I had little to no incentive to diversify my districts.  It meant that districts that weren't strictly aligned with my current goal (such as market quarters and research quarters) were often overlooked in favor of food, industry, or unique cultural districts.  Food and industry were often required (since they have obvious, immediate benefits), and if I were pursuing other tracks I would usually have a cultural district that did it much better.  Hard to say if that is really a problem at this point, since both times I played it was a pretty easy win.  If nothing else, that means multiple paths are viable, even if some districts get neglected.  In theory, this may even encourage diversity across eras as you select a more scientific culture when you are ready to really invest that direction just to get the unique district.  Without much external pressure from the AI, I didn't feel like that was necessary to win or enjoy the game.  And in the end, I did enjoy the game!

Now that the open dev has ended, here are my final thoughts on the economy and balance. First of, regarding pacing I'd like to say that while research was terribly imbalanced in this game (either insanely fast with science holy sites and/or science cultures, but without it too slow), I find that a slower pacing of science is generally better. Also, it's better when, like in victor, you get the era stars are too easy to get than the other way around, since even when you've got all stars, you can just stay in your current era for a while (it needs to be clearly communicated to new players though, maybe add a hint on the "choose a culture" screen saying that it might be a better choice to wait. And the AI should consider the same).

In general, I did very much enjoy district placement and yields from adjacency. It feels rewarding to find a good spot. Yet in Victor, adjacency yields weren't important for the most part and paled in comparison to OP yields from other sources. In general, I do not like all the "per pop", "per follower", "per copy of resource" yields. There's literally no way of balancing them and they always feel insanely snowbally. Even the "+x of Y per farmer/.../scientist" should be used with care and be reserved for important infrastructure buildings, maybe a few civics and cultures. If you really want to keep "per pop" and "per copy of resource" yields, please only use these for some key infrastructure buildings (cannot be stacked & can be build by every culture). For the "per copy of resource", I'd say to keep it somewhat balanced, it should only apply to copies of that resource that are extracted by the city itself, e.g. the stables could provide food for every horse tile in the cities territories. Definitely, these "per pop/... per resource" yields should not come from stackable resources and I also don't like it coming from (emblematic) districts, as those with such yields are then inherently stronger than all others by orders of magnitude and it makes adjacency boni irrelevant. So I'd wish for such kind of yields to mostly be gone.

Instead, adjacency boni could be buffed to make up for the need of yields sources. I'd also like to see a few more adjacencies based on terrain, as this gives planning the layout of each city a more individual touch due to its unique terrain environment. Currently, my main gripe with adjacencies is that it encourages spamming the same district next to copies of the same district, which also doesn't look that good on the map. Giving more district an adjacency also for some other types of district or based on the adjacent or underlying terrain could help with that. Oh, and in particular, wonders & holy sites need to get adjacency boni (from districts/terrain), I hate to put them at the edges of the city just so that they don't disturb my other districts. Tile yields from base terrain could maybe also see a little buff, I am not a huge fan of cities in the snow/desert without river being essentially as good as those in fertile valleys.

And by the way, in general cultural and natural wonders felt underwhelming (which partly comes from all these "per pop", etc. yields that make everything else totally irrelevant). For natural wonders in particular I'd wish to see them to be more unique, even giving them a small "special" yield (science/faith) would help a lot. Maybe their influence yield from being in a cities territory should also be removed in favour of fairly dividing this yield on the actual tiles of the wonder (together with some wonder specific faith/culture/money). That way, you'd actually have to settle close to them and not just in the same territory to get the majority of their benefit.

Another thing that bugs me is the unimportance of influence in the mid/late game. While the civics that let you replace influence for territories/cities/patronage are currently some of the rare civics that actually provide a meaningful benefit, I'd prefer them to be gone, so that influence stays important (I mean, the game also doesn't offer you to replace science with money, right?). You will have to rework a lot of the civics anyways, so I'm sure you'll find something else for these civics. And btw. using the settlers ability should cost influence as well.

I like most of the changes made in Victor compared to Lucy, with a few exceptions and I think overall the game pace has been improved, but still needs some work.  The game still feels quite "snowbally" once you get going and your infrastructure is built up.  As an example Neolithic and Ancient era took about 40-50 turns for me usually and then I was done with the scenario, completed Era 4, between turn 100-110.  Though this is a somewhat realistic experience, as technology and progress tends to be stacking and exponential, it's not a good feel gameplay-wise.  It would be nice if the eras were more evenly distributed so in the case of a 150 turn game, which I assume this OpenDev was scaled to, each era lasts approximately 25 turns.  

On a similar note, the disparity between science progress and era progress in this build was pretty severe, as has been mentioned many times in this thread.  I think the Science pace was better, but the era stars need to be tuned down.  They come too fast in the later eras, which could be alleviated by changing the numbers or possibly requiring more stars in later eras.  I also think the stars need to be rebalanced.  Many of the stars are very passive and easy to get, while the Expansionist and Militarist stars are difficult and require a concerted effort.  Expansionist stars espeically, feel really hard to obtain, especially early in the game where you just don't have the resources to attach that many territories.  I also think the influence cost of producing Cities and attaching cities (once you get that option), is too high.  Outpost placement and attachment cost is fine, but cities are far too expensive and scale too quickly in terms of their influence cost.

As far as science goes, I do not like the change that the city center does not exploit science.  It makes science early on completely dependent on population and I find it more valuable to have pop working food and industry early to grow the city and build infrastructure.  Also, the early game infrastructures for science are still weak and should give more of a flat bonus in my opinion so it is not so important to place population on science.  However, there were some religious tenants, cultures, and later infrastructures that caused science to snowball like many other resources.  A more gradual pace would be nice.

For infrastructure buildings it might be a good idea to reduce the number of options and/or balance what is there.  There are some money and influence related infrastructures late in the tech tree that give a flat bonus (+2 or +3) when I'm making hundreds or thousands or that resource already, so those feel useless.  It would also be nice on the infrastructures that grant resources per terrain or district (e.g. Lumber Mill) for the tooltip to tell the player how much of the resource they would get for building it at that time, as it can be hard to determine the value of those buildings sometimes.  And as mentioned in this thread previously, city buildings should probably cost some upkeep since money can get really out of hand later in the game.

I really love the food changes and the unique district changes.  As a note on Emblematic Districts, I think since most can only be built a limited number of times now, it would be a good idea to consider allowing players to build them even after advancing to the next era to a different culture.

I want to conclude by saying I love the game and am really looking forward to it.  I think everyone at Amplitude is doing a great job with it and I appreciate you taking all of our feedback to make it the best it can be.

Infrastructure: a lot of buildings seem weak/redundant. +2 gold/+2 influence in plaza seems too little to be worth it. Some of them are too good (horse ranch +5 food/horse, with 5+ horses)
I personally had a hard time understanding the bonuses that infrastructure gives (what is plaza, why there are 2 adjacency bonuses for makers district that make the same think, etc)

I like to bribe barbars with culture/gold and take control of their cities. This increases the limit of my cities, so I just attach them to existing ones.
But in turn 100, I needed to spend 11K gold to attach an empty city to another. This seems absurd IMO, considering that it takes 26K to attach 2 of my largest cities (30+ pop)

My proposed tweak for the gold buy-out issue would be to only allow you to buy-out half of the total build time, only allow one buy-out per city per turn, or to change buy-outs altogether and make it so when you buy-out a project, rather than it completing instantly, it is added to your build que but causes it to be built at the normal build speed for your current production value.