K and I are currently playing our first game, 2 hours a night before bed, so.. it might take a while before I've tried the game out enough to fully post.
BUT.. my first impressions..
1) Religion is a neat addition. You build your religion from the ground up, getting to pick up to four benefits for your religion. Then you spread it, via Missionaries.. and via the Inquisition. It doesn't seem to be as game changing as it was in Civ IV in that I'm not, yet, seeing people go to war over Religion. It just feels like an additional mechanic you can use or not (you probably will. I don't see why you won't.)
2) There's a bunch of minor additions that just feel right. They added some additional units.. like the Composite Archer, which is stronger than regular old Archer but less strong than Crossbowman. And a Galleass which is a tougher shallow-water naval unit than the Trireme. These feel like natural additions. They've also given city states a one dimensional graph so it's easy to tell how much they like you and how much they don't without clicking on them anymore.
3) There are bugs. I'm not sure if the fact that you can no longer actively garrison in a city is a bug, or if just being in the city makes that unit garrisoned. But we did find a bug where the game seemed to crash once.
4) We haven't done enough with spies to tell you much about them. But this looks interesting...
no subject
BUT.. my first impressions..
1) Religion is a neat addition. You build your religion from the ground up, getting to pick up to four benefits for your religion. Then you spread it, via Missionaries.. and via the Inquisition. It doesn't seem to be as game changing as it was in Civ IV in that I'm not, yet, seeing people go to war over Religion. It just feels like an additional mechanic you can use or not (you probably will. I don't see why you won't.)
2) There's a bunch of minor additions that just feel right. They added some additional units.. like the Composite Archer, which is stronger than regular old Archer but less strong than Crossbowman. And a Galleass which is a tougher shallow-water naval unit than the Trireme. These feel like natural additions. They've also given city states a one dimensional graph so it's easy to tell how much they like you and how much they don't without clicking on them anymore.
3) There are bugs. I'm not sure if the fact that you can no longer actively garrison in a city is a bug, or if just being in the city makes that unit garrisoned. But we did find a bug where the game seemed to crash once.
4) We haven't done enough with spies to tell you much about them. But this looks interesting...