Greetings everyone,

Just wanted to share my experience with Victor OpenDev. Keep in mind that due to limited time, I've only managed to complete the game two times. Also, I played it pretty amateurishly.

For the first play (medium difficulty), I choose Babylonians, focusing on science and food production. As it was my first gameplay, I struggled a little, but it went fairly well. I used the Scientific trait only once per era, and I built their signature building in every city, but I felt I was still struggling for numbers of tech researched and I felt a little behind in the tree for era I was in.

For some reason, every single AI was "tracherous" and they were all hostile, but only one forced me to go at war, and it was still my choice, not theirs. The other AIs just stood watching the conflict, never taking advantage (which was good for me, because my army was very little).

I have always transcended Babylonians, until Medieval era, when I switched to Franks, and I discovered Wonders (maybe they need a little more advertising in some tutorial tooltips).

The game finished and I found out I was outclassed (twice as much) from a civilization that I barely met and that was a vassal to another for the majority of the game. That was a bit weird at first, but then I thought about Rome and the Greeks in real world history, and how Greek culture "won" over the Roman one even if Greeks were subjugated.

In the second play (difficulty medium +1), I was more familiar with the system, so I struggled less. I choosed Harappans and went full food, gaining a crazy amount of pops and sacrificing them to complete buildings and wonders. Even so, I never reached the 3 star Agrarian medal, even with 4 cities, all overpopulated.

This time the AIs were more friendly, so I discovered the joy of commerce.

At the beginning, I had an hard time raising influence to claim territories and building cities/adding territories, but in late game, even not focusing on influence, I had so many that I didn't know what to do with it. I even claimed all the wonders.

This time, I won.

In conclusion, I felt that the game was really good, and very nearly finished. There were some bugs, but nothing too dire. The real thing this game needs is some balance polishing. Struggling with science with a science oriented civ was frustrating. Having huge loads of influence with zero effort also felt weird.

Also, the rythm of the game was somewhat off: one needs to be very careful the first turns, but then you can pretty much go in "auto-pilot" mode. Also I never managed to have the "right" techs for the era I was in (that was justified in my second game, but maybe not in the first).

Keep up the good work, and work on balancing!

I forgot:

I was sorry not to had a chance to try naval combat. As other people already pointed out, it was not necessary to have a fleet, being on a continent with other 4 civs. And the AI never built one.