Also posted on Reddit, but wanted to make sure this feedback made it here as well:

In past OpenDevs I've kept a running list of feedback and written 4+ pages. This time, I just have a few critiques that I hope the devs will take a look at. Before I start though, I think it's important that we as a community acknowledge how receptive to feedback Amplitude has been in developing this game. I thought that the OpenDev process was going to be more of a marketing ploy than anything, but the devs truly have done a great job of taking the community's feedback and using it to improve the game significantly with every build. I'm so excited to finally get to play the final product. Bravo to Amplitude!

Now for some things that they need to fix, in no particular order:

- War resolution is still pretty unsatisfying a lot of the time. The UI is at least more clear, but the rigidity of the system just makes for a crappy experience. I can't resolve a war in the way that I want to, I have to resolve it based on how the game wants me to. I like the idea of using war support as a currency to make sure that players don't get utterly destroyed by a single war, but I wish that the terms we resolved upon could be negotiated in a more dynamic way.

- Calling allies into war is a bad idea in the current build. I was warring with somebody over a territory that I wanted because it had resources that I needed and it was under my influence. I conquered the city and was nearing a war victory when my ally who I had called into war vassalized them. This automatically peaced me out of the war and kept me at "occupy" status in that city for the remainder of the game. I could do nothing with the resources I wanted to exploit and had to fight incessant rebellions. One more turn at war with them and they would have ceded the city to me. I was unable to build air units in this game because this territory was the one that had the second access to oil that I needed. This left a really bad taste in my mouth.

- The changes that they made to influence did not achieve the stated goals of giving you a meaningful place to spend it late game. I found that the increases to influence costs early game neutered my planning much of the time, but that I still had tens of thousands of it just sitting around late game. I was able to claim every single territory off of the main continent (both islands and the entire uninhabited continent) on Empire difficulty. It was way too easy to do, I had all of that land within like 10 turns of deciding that I wanted it.

- Similarly, the influence penalty for being over the city limit is laughable. I was far above my city limit late game and it genuinely didn't matter. Maybe instead of causing penalties to influence it should cause penalties to stability? Also, to make colonization of foreign lands more interesting, I think that the farther from your capital a city is, the more you should have to invest in stability infrastructure. Colonizing an entire continent over the course of like 10 turns feels way too easy. I should have to worry about those colonies rising up against me. Maybe there could be civics that make it easier to go wide in this way too or something...

- A solution to the two aforementioned problems: Get rid of the city cap and just have every city (and maybe every outpost?) cost a certain amount of influence per turn. This makes sense from an immersion standpoint, right? The central government needs to exercise its influence to keep its people under control. This would give players an interesting way to debate tall vs. wide, and would act as a more effective "soft cap" than the current city cap system. The farther from the capital a city is, the more influence per turn it should cost to mantain. This would also give the player an interesting reason to hit the "liberate" button on cities. Not generating enough influence to accomplish a goal, but you have a relatively unstable city on some island somewhere that isn't doing much for you? Liberate them and get a big chunk of influence per turn back.

- Spending pops to complete production projects needs to give an immediate stability penalty in order to balance it, as right now it's too strong and immersion breaking. Think about it: the government forces labor so harshly that a significant number of people die. This would cause stability issues in the short term that would improve back to the baseline over a period of over time. The more people who you sacrifice to finish a project, the greater the immediate hit to stability should be.

- Another thought could be to have a minimum number of pops required in a city based on how many districts that city has. A giant sprawling city shouldn't be able to have a population of zero with no stability issues; that much abandoned space would cause serious issues in a real city (Just look at Detroit, Michigan).

- Vassalization is just downright stupid in this game. In every single playthrough that I've done in Victor and the Closed Beta, it ends up with two superpowers having vassalized every single other player. This just isn't interesting. Every time somebody is vassalized, it is one less AI to have interesting interactions with as you need to interact with their liege instead. I'd rather vassalization not exist than have it in its current form.

- If vassalization is something that sticks around, there need to be more meaningful interactions that vassals can have with their lieges. Lieges should be able to demand that their vassals pay more in exchange for a diplomatic penalty that might result in the vassal rebelling. Maybe keeping a vassal should cost influence based on the size of the vassal? Lieges should be able to pay to develop their vassal's resources. Lieges should have specific responsibilities that they need to accomplish for their vassals. If an independant people attack my vassals, they should be angry at me for not defending them. As my vassals settle more land, they should come to me and ask for independence, and they should go to war with me if I decline. The more vassal units that die in a liege's war, the more angry a vassal should become. Etc. Similarly, I need to be able to interact in interesting and meaningful ways with the vassals of foreign powers, otherwise it's just not fun to interact with the AI once they begin vassalizing each other.

- I've asked for this during every single OpenDev, but I'll do it again: There needs to be a diplomatic relations web showing you in one UI how every AI feels about every other AI.

- I'd like to see the game go back to completely hiding strategic resources from future eras, but having strategic resources showing up in greater abundance on the map.

- Rather than having the production of units depend upon the availability of a certain number of resource nodes, I'd rather see a Civ VI style of doing things where you accumulate them over time on a per-turn basis. Early units have you spend some of your accumulated strategics, and later-tech units have you pay per turn for them in addition to costing some up front.

Totally agree with you about the war resolution. I also posted a big thread about what happened in my games.

I won, but it was a real pain in the a** because the game just impose me to do some stuff.