This game is DREADFUL in just about every gameplay element. This HAS potential, but please wait a year or two for them to fix the user interface, add DLC and balance this game. This review was originally 30k characters, issues listed are JUST a couple of major ones.

The entire game feels like everything has 100 background statistics, a major example of that is combat. It's awful. Whatever this game classifies as units which can or cannot be considered inside a battle has no visual indication and is such a mess, It just feels like a total diceroll for whatever's considered in a battle. Units can be a single tile away from another and not be considered a part of the battlefield, with no UI indication on why. Civilizations you don't expect to randomly attack you, will, and consistently snipe off your units, and civilization grievances can only result in you having a direct war with them. There's nothing for an AI to have some level of mistrust with eachother as a result of certain actions, though the whole point of the game is meant to be an implication of your actions having consequences; If you or other players being unreasonable, it never leads to anything other than future justification, it's like this game WANTS you to just end up having a domination victory, because the science victory is just so improbable to ever happen, and that's the only two victory conditions this game has. Another problem with the UI is that units have seemingly random defense bonuses, they're all considered as unimportant background statistics. In the case of manual battles, you have to sit and do literally nothing with your units in most elements of combat because defense is always the best strategy.

In seemly evenly matched fights you will more or often than not loose and it's frustrating because there's no numbers to indicate why. There's little to no UI elements to indicate any statistics of something as simple as movement or strength. Moving troops to attack and opposing troops instantly retreating has no feedback of said retreat whatsoever, and it's a VERY consistent problem with user input and feedback from it. There's not even a way to turn off slow movement, it's mandatory. The user interface for troops is oversized, I don't see any definitive numerical punishment for attacking up or down hills because there's no numbers to indicate it, it's always just bars that don't mean anything to me. UI elements overlap each other a bunch when you're messing around with troops. Encampments just don't have an icon above them all the time and I don't know why. There's no visual indication in which troops can and can't go into battles and there's very little user feedback for battles, and at the current time, moving down a hill will always take up more movement points than going up. The list goes on and on, and on. Everything just feels so unsatisfying and it's a constant problem for everything.

A little personal note for having war; If you forget to use a war justification, it doesn't matter how many battles you win as wars are auto resolved through a peace screen which you can only get access to if you win the war. The only way you win the war, is by getting your opponents war support down before yours does. Let's say... For example, you started a war 20-30 turns ago and just completely forgot to justify, they are basically pre-determined to win. So even if you win all the battles, they can demand most of your stuff from you just because you didn't fit a war justification that you forgot to go through 3 sets of UI to find.

Landscape. It's almost the a good feature, but the current implementation is just... super tame. Even with ramped up chaotic settings with tough terrain, only TINY portions of the map may be like that. And, because of your civilization being based on adaptability to your landscape, there's no generation bias for where you spawn. Not that that is inherently a problem, but if you have an idea of a game you have in mind, or a civilization you kinda wanna strive for, there's nothing you can do to enforce the game to generate a world to your bias other than luck because the world generation bias is just straight up ignored most the time. There's no "restart", and the game shouldn't be as simplistic as "adapt" because every time the game always runs down to growth and science, because there's only two victory conditions; science and domination. If I want to make the game difficult or have a certain start, I should be given the choice rather than be forced in a corner of how I should HAVE to play the game.

There are "random" events, but in most instances you will just end up taking the same actions every time because they're all temporary buffs and don't have no domino effect like the game makes you believe. There's also very little means to actually spend money in the first place, because production is so easy to gain. Most of the buffs you get are "a small science debuff for 10 turns", which really doesn't mean much because of the means of spamming districts. And the only element to prevent you from spamming is that, in which you can get civics to prevent rebellions, or simply give you stability. And these civics are VERY EARLY GAME, and their counter proposition isn't even anything substantial to having way more resources.

The way how city settling works is REALLY bad, on world generation there's a predetermined county system, that's generated on map generation. You can't adjust it. You can only settle one encampment in each county. And as a result, you will always end up settling in the same or similar positions because there's always going to be an optimal spot of city bonuses and the land around it. With a county system you can't adjust, how on earth is this adaptable gameplay? All this is, is the illusion of choice on where to settle. You can settle one city in a predetermined area, in an area the UI hints to which would be the most optimal spot, in a county with a specific temperate regardless of whatever you do, in an area you can't adjust mountains or natural landscape and there's also no workers or builders. The only options you're given in the entire game is to micro manage your cities or micromanage your units.

Even things like the production menu are way too large, and turning the menu into a list makes it a 2 column grid. The UI is designed in such a way where there's not enough room to indicate how much you can buy these things for and to to counter that, there's toggle for purchases. But all this does is add another toggle for choosing between money and spending population to buy the building or district. What's the point of spending population? Why would I want to spend 7 population for a farm I can build in 3 turns because of tiny production costs? It's literally impossible to skim and read the UI because of the useless elements and dumb scaling. It's insanely consistent of a problem that I cannot find any information. There's literally no UI element for what the current science production is unless you go into the damn city view. Why? And Faith doesn't even have any numerical values anywhere other than the damn ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map view! The faith UI doesn't show religious pressure, and no numbers to indicate ANYTHING. There's literally room RIGHT BELOW my culture and gold income, use the damn space because nothing else uses it.

The most enjoyment to be had with this game is a world to take advantage of the unique terrain and to have a proportionate amount of cities to fight over and manage. And you NEED a large map for that. Insert a badly done county system, awful notification tab and a lack of a mini-map, there's never any immediate indication of anything ever happening. Anything bigger than a measly 8 county empire is a massive pain to manage. In a game that promotes expensive and quick adaptability, it's near impossible to do absolutely any of it.