Here is a list of thoughts and minor critiques I have after playing thru the closed beta twice, in no particular strict order.

I was sad to see that Nature Reserves aren't actually usable in this closed beta, as they're the single district I'm most excited about. I love the idea of setting up large swathes of protected nature, and I love the idea of doing it in a more free-form way than Civ6's awkward system where they must be made by faith-purchased non-combat units in vertical 4-tile diamonds. But I have some concerns for how it will be implemented.

Please don't make them impact stability. It doesn't seem like it'd make sense for them to do so and it would make it feel too restricted IMHO. If necessary for balance, I'd be willing to have only part of the tile exploitation be accessible, maybe with diminishing returns, if it allows for it to be a more spammable district.

Please let them be placeable on mountains, forests, and natural wonders. I feel like this makes intuitive sense, so maybe they're already planned to work that way, but also that means it'll just be even more disappointing if it doesn't work that way.

Somewhat related - I hope that named forests' borders will be able to be expanded by planting woods on their perimeter, and reduced by removing them.

The way the Cultural Agreement treaty bonus is phrased had me confused at first - saying that Ideological Proximity will "increase" makes it sound like my and my ally's cultural axes will slowly shift towards each other, so if I'm full Progessive and they're full Traditionalist we'll both end up in the middle after like 15 turns. Maybe this could be alleviated be renaming "Ideological Proximity" to "Ideological Tolerance"?

I think there should be previews added to Infrastructures, sorta like the ones that already exist for districts, so that you know how much you'll be increasing your yields by building each one instead of having to either guess or stop and think for too long. Also, there should be a preview of how much of a stability hit you'll take by adding a new territory to a city, or absorbing one city into another.

Screenshot mode! Preferably with a free camera. There were a few times I thought the way I placed a wonder or a series of districts looked nice with the scenery but I wanted to have the picture be from a more north-to-south direction.

Since avatars don't seem to get gendered much in text/dialog, I feel like it'll be pretty easy to not mess up making avatars nonbinary- and GNC-inclusive. Please just let us freely use any combination of body type, voice type, hairstyle, facial hair, makeup, and clothing style. If body models with breasts always have to wear shirts, then that's a perfectly understandable restriction, but if everything else is available in free variation then I'll be happy.

In the final game, the two tiles of empty space at the north and south should get filled in with ice so it's more clear to the player that they're untraversable. Messed me up once and was a minor annoyance.

In the event "The Forgemaster's Sin", there's a typo/grammar error. The text contains the phrase "under one of the custodian's guidance", which makes it the possessive of "one of the senior custodian" instead of "one of the senior custodians", as it should be. I don't know if the proper rendition would be "under one of the custodians' guidance" or "under one of the custodians's guidance". I'd simply rephrase it as "under the guidance of one of the senior custodians" to avoid the headache, personally.

New notifications should be added for when a city's population exceeds its housing, and especially for when an outpost is completed. It's really annoying to suddenly remember I've had a territory to build extractors in and attach to a city after 10 or more turns of forgetting.

Having short descriptions of newly available grievances shown in the notification would be VERY welcome. They're already shown when the A.I. renounces a grievance, too, so hopefully it wouldn't be that hard.

When upgrading an outpost to a city, City Creation, Colony Model, and Colony Plan will all be displayed if they're all unlocked, and they all cost the same price. Either the higher tier ones should cost more, or the higher tier options should remove the lower tier ones when they become available.

When issuing the orders for a unit to move, if you then immediately hit the "skip turn" button, the unit stops in the middle of moving before it gets to where you sent it. This has messed me up quite a few times and I'd like for skip and station orders to be placed after any ongoing movement orders, if not by default then at least as an option in settings.

In the Materials Procurement civic, the Seize Resources option ("The world's bounties belong to those that can take them", +1 city cap) gives points towards World rather than Homeland, which feels like a mistake. I think it's supposed to be the other way around, since you're essentially saying "if my country takes this land and gets these resources then we get to get it all to ourselves." Also I could maybe see the other option, Trade Resources ("We are blessed in some things, lacking in others; trade makes sense", -20% Required Resource Deposits to be able to create Wonderous Resource Deposits), being changed from Individualism to World, especially if the bonus gets reworked, since that's the only thing there that seems like it's any more necessarily Individualist than Collectivist due to Luxury Manufactories (presumably a privately owned capitalist company) being involved.

I love the concept behind Settlers, but as-is they feel a bit useless. I've never really had much of an issue having enough influence to expand on new territory, and using a settler skips that point in time where an outpost is able to purchase Resource Extractors and Harbors with influence, which in my eyes is a major downside.

I'm not sure what Thoroughfares (from the Supply Lines tech) are supposed to do - they seem to have the same description as Roads (from the Wheel tech), so is it just there in case you skipped the Wheel? If so, I feel like that should be made clear, and if not, then evidently it's not doing a good job of explaining what it does. If it makes more roads, then that should be made clear, and in any case, I think that having both Roads and Thoroughfares should result in even better roads for your territories.

Railroads are really cool and well-implemented, but they really ought to have a special animation where the units become a super fast-moving train that follows the railroad perfectly. As-is, having my Harappan Runners that I never upgraded Tokyo Drifting across a bay and a cliff just looks a *smidge* too silly.

The Human Carnvial event has two Progress-aligned choices which feel weirdly sort of mixed-up - the last one, Educate, states in the text of the choice that money will be spent to educate the public, and applies Celebrating for 15 turns; while the other one, Rehabilitation, says that they'll close freakshows and get medical/psychological care for the performers, and applies Science Investing for 10 turns. What's weird is that it feels like both should provide the effect of Science Investing (+20 science, -15 money), and the one that doesn't is the one called Educate which specifically mentions spending money. Maybe they could get switched, or smooshed into one option?

The new continent on the other side of the world NEEDS more to do. Discovering it was super fun until I realized all there was to do was found some okayish cities & outposts. There especially needs to be more luxuries - both in general all around the map, and especially on the new continent. The only two luxury nodes on the new continent are of luxuries that already exist on the old continent, which is infuriatingly disappointing. The only entirely new luxury I remember finding was one node of coffee on the island with Lake Hillier which felt bittersweet to find. Cool, I found a new luxury, on the last island I check, and it's only one. The experience would feel so much better and more rewarding if new luxuries were more common to find, and would make rushing to settle it feel worthwhile.

Also, I feel like the new continent could stand to have some pre-existing peoples spawn there. Maybe just independent peoples, maybe whole A.I. players that start playing a few eras later, maybe A.I. players that start playing at the same time. I feel like the optimal solution would be having this be a matter of what map type you choose and what parameters you select when you go to generate a new game.

And a final thought in this post - I think a canal district would be super cool, even if it's niche and barely sees use. Maybe you could get a competitive deed for making a functional canal of a certain minimum length (think China's Grand Canal), and maybe you could lock building canals on terrain of a certain elevation behind a later tech (think Panama Canal). Also, they could make it be something that goes through preexisting districts and use a modified version of the graphic for when a river goes through a district.

Edit: meant to include this the first time around but I forgot. Sorry!

All in all, the game is amazing and I'm sure I'm gonna love playing it when it comes out fully. I listed a lot of stuff, but honestly most of it is either really minor or at least something I could totally live with being in the game, especially at initial release. Super hyped for this game, and insanely grateful to the devs for being so open to feedback and willing to listen to us fans! ^_^