I played the Victor OpenDev for about 20 hours, but it ended before I could complete the scenario. I was midway through the Early Modern era. I took notes while I was playing, looking forward to sending feedback at the end, but I never got the chance. So I guess my first feedback is that the OpenDev was not available long enough! :)

Generally, I really enjoyed the game. City development is constantly interesting and rewarding, and the pace of technology unlocks and new options felt good. Combat works well -- it felt like I had definite influence over the outcome, and the terrain was interesting most of the time. The "era stars" system and fame victory condition seem to work well, though one game isn't really enough to form a strong opinion.

Some of the balancing needs work. Certain religious tenets, in particular, seem to completely unbalance the game. I had enough science from holy sites to make building science districts feel completely extraneous. Market quarters seem objectively useless -- they give maybe 10 money, when I had almost a thousand in income without really trying. A lot of the city improvements seem pretty weak. Adding 1 to anything tends to feel mediocre -- even if applies to 10+ tiles, it feels like a waste of production when so many other sources give much more.

I didn't like how the game uses culture names to refer to your opponents. They change quite often! I was sometimes confused about who was who, or at least had to think about it. The colors and icons are fairly memorable, and each leader has a name. Could the game use the leader's name instead of the culture name? I think that would give each player a stronger identity over the course of the game.

UI Notes

• Please add an animation speed slider! Waiting for unit animations while moving or in battle quickly becomes very tedious.
• Several screens ask the player to choose a territory by name, but there are very few opportunities to learn the names of your territories! They should be displayed on the map at the higher "paper map" zoom levels. It would also be helpful if these "choose a territory" prompts included a minimap showing the location of each territory.
• There's no way to see what an output is building or whether an outpost's build queue is idle without clicking on the outpost.
• Quick save (F5) doesn't give any feedback that it worked
• Sometimes, I would receive spurious notifications about things that I did myself -- the most frequent was "world deed locked by another empire" after I completed a deed.
• I could not find a way to see the "raw" yields of a tile that is already exploited. Often, when I was trying to build a science district, I would have to mouse around the possible placements to see where the science yields were "hidden" under an existing food or industry exploitation!
• It would be nice if FIMS and district borders were toggled on automatically while placing a new district.
• I like the icons in the city panel constructions list, but I also wish I could see more choices at once. Could we get a middle ground between the "item" and "list" modes?

I was a bit rushed earlier and forgot to talk about the city limit and how it made the early midgame feel extremely limited. During the 2nd and early in the 3rd eras, my expansion completely stalled because of the proliferation of independent peoples. I had defeated and vassalized Yellow early in the game, severely limiting their expansion. At least four or five of the territories to their South and West were quickly settled by independent peoples, and by the time I was ready to expand more, they had all developed into cities! Now I was in the awkward position of not being able to conquer those territories at all -- my only option was to capture the independent city, but that would put me over my city cap. I have a few questions:

1. Do you have plans to add a "raze city" option, giving the option to conquer territory without taking the cities?
2. Is there any way to resolve this problem and unblock my expansion that I didn't notice?
3. Later, I noticed an "absorb" option appeared, allowing me to merge cities (at a huge cost of influence). What exactly triggers it? Was it a particular technology or civic? (It seems like some civics have hidden effects on game mechanics that aren't fully explained by the UI?