Random Notes I took while playing a couple 200-turn runs.  Not in any particular order, apologies for readability.

Ransacking should have a much, much larger icon so it is obvious when an army is ransacking your outposts/deposits.  Its easy to miss right now.

Also, Ransacking is only indicated by a little icon - why not have an effect to make it even more visible/obvious? district on fire? You zoom in close enough you can hear people screaming? etc

More on Ransacking:  Having it be a multiple turn, all or nothing mechanic is just weird.  Ransacking is a process in the real world - why not display it as such?  sure, razing an OP might take 7 turns but certainly I can get some gold and stuff out of it before someone shows up to stop me.  This might give more credence to the Huns and Mongols as economic powerhouses, though i am not sure they need that.

Clear Ruins is still ambigious, why not have a Ruins tile that is marked on the map so you can clear it?  

Merchant Ability is lame and underwhelming.  It HELPS, yes, but only at the beginning of the game.  By Era 2 it is worthless, and its worthless if i have a scarcity of influence

Sometimes, the Preview screen for battles sticks to the map instead of vanishing.  It also creates a small bit of lag every time it appears - perhaps there should be some optimization to speed that up? Or an option for just the MY TEAMS SCORE v THAT TEAMS SCORE instead of the battlefield and score 

Every time i close the game via the Exit To Desktop button, it goes to a black screen, then either crashes (giving me the option to close it due to no response) or I have to manually close it from task manager.  This has occurred in all the OpenDevs

When sending units on multiple-turn paths, the end turn button will show them as an idle army instead of moving them with the *move armies* button.

In addition, if you manually move certain idle armies, you cannot end the turn until they finish moving.  I have not perceived a distinction between those that stick to the end turn button like this and those that do not.

When starting a save, I can change the leaders of each nation.  Not sure if intentional.  Kinda cool implications for SP, maybe weird shenanigans for MP

I can hire armies from a specific independent city and then use those armies to siege and conquer it.  Is this intended? Sounds dirty

While i like the subtle changes in the top left to each AI's portrait, I wonder if there is a better, less subtle way to indicate that you are at war or allied with someone.  or even in NAP

When a turn starts, and the popups come up along the bottom, they do not lock you out from moving armies or other actions - so if i right click to move a unit, ill both move the unit and acknowledge the notification, which sometimes means the notif will grab the camera, which means my movement of the unit will simply not be where i want it to be.

Neolithic: 

It is much more difficult to spam out Tribes and start engulfing the map - though I put that down to changes in this map vs the previous one, but i could be incorrect here.  Outposts are definitely more expensive in the neolithic, which is good.  It prevents snowballing to an extent.

The AI also pumps out some Anti-scout spam units early, which is smart.

AI seems to prefer food cultures for some reason.  This is especially annoying.  I think it is intended and i approve.  It is very difficult to provoke an intense hatred in a silly AI during these games, but this mechanic is getting close.

Naval combat is also incredibly meh until at least Era4 with the speed of research - yikes.  I want more naval dammit