Hey Soren, thanks for interacting here.
I just bought the game last night and wanted to give my 2 cents to help you accomplish your goal of making this the best game it can be.
First, I’m playing on a 2020 iMac (27", pretty loaded except for the video card which is the standard choice). It runs a little choppy here. I significantly improved the performance by switching from “High” graphics quality to “medium”. (The default was high and I started playing with the defaults just to size it up).
About every 12 turns I am having slow-down issues, inspiring me to quit and restart the game. I’m not technical but maybe a memory leak or something?
(Regardless I am very grateful to you guys for making this available on the Mac).
I’m not having serious problems with the learning curve situation; I read Tom’s article before purchasing and the thing about having to decide what your kid studied made me roll my eyes, but as I’m experiencing it in game it’s just a roundabout way of leveling him up a la Diablo.
There were definitely more than a few occasions my playing ground to a halt while I try to figure out which choice to make on a quest decision. The one that comes to mind is I had a choice that lowered legitimacy and so of course I wanted to know what my current value was on that marker, and it took me forever to find that it was down in the lower left. (I was looking up top with the other resources, and so on, everywhere but the bottom left next to the portrait.) It’s just a bunch of petty stuff like that that is making it challenging for me. Same thing with “culture” or whatever its called, the column icons – spent a bunch of time looking for it and finally came to understand (I hope) that it is a city-level rating and only displayed on the map for each city.
My advice is to get someone who is quite experienced with Civilization, who has never seen this game before, and sit next to them, and listen to them complain and say nothing, just take notes. Seriously – because it’s just a bunch of tiny interface things that create (for me) the sense of not understanding what’s going on, rather than “what does money do?” (Though that might come later, I’ve only got a few hours in so far).
I’m excited about this game; it has a lot of good stuff going on. Not entirely crazy about the way I was forced into a war with Assyria in order to stay friendly with Babylon, but then again they probably weren’t happy about that in real life either.