After playing a couple of hours in the new OpenDev, it feels so damn bad to play anything else that is not centered around gaining and farming the sh**t out of influence compared to the other betas......

So there's some BIG changes compared to the other OpenDevs around influence, and to make it more useful, but the problem is that  some gameplay options are just gone, instead of making influence points more useful on their own.

So, now:

- You have to spend Influence Points to acquire new civics (no other option to gain them)

- You have to spend IP to build districts or luxury/strategic exploitations on Outposts ( no other option available, before you could just damn build (or buyout) those things with the outpost production) So outpost now just feel so damn bad, you want to attach them, create a city or exploit it's luxuries, and ALL those options are behind IP. You just have to wait for the influence just to do something useful with any of these options now.

- Proposing a new treaty to an IA drains IP too, although no tooltip for that when proposing something.

-Creating a city from an outpost cost IP too, instead of production associated with the yields on it

So you put that on top of the usual outpost creation, outpost attach tax, wonder claiming with no boost to IP gains to compensate for this huge influence grind.

Compared to the latest Opendev if you're not playing an Aesthete/Expansionist Culture, it feels like you just have to wait around for Influence Points to come by, just to do one thing at a time with the little influence gain you have in the early game. 

I don't know in terms of balance, if in the grand scheme of things everything is balanced out from other perspectives, but it feels so damn bad to play and grow the empire if you don't have access to buildings/world wonders providing Influence early.