TheLostSwede
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Just different is a good way to describe it.
My biggest issue with the game right now is that there simply aren't enough resources, as you might find two or maybe three of a resource on a very large continent.
Say you managed to find some horses, you domesticated them by building a horse ranch and this allows you to make Scout Riders.
However, once you advance and you can make Horsemen, you need two horse resources, which means two physical territories with horses in them, as you can't produce more horses at a resource for whatever reason and there's nothing like a horse farm you can build, despite having domesticated horses.
The next upgrade is Knights, which still require two horses, but also two iron.
After that, you'll get to Dragoons, which require three horses and one saltpetre, which is just impossible.
But here's the kicker, horses aren't just needed for units, but they're also required for a lot of key infrastructure.
The first one being Animal Barns that increases food production and later on things like Stock Exchanges and Customs Agencies, which all go up one in the count of horses needed.
You also need horses for various special units unique to the nation you're playing, although these have similar costs to the regular units for that era.
The same applies to all strategic resources, but unless you have horses, you're more or less not going to be able to progress and your people are going to starve to death, as that's how important the Animal Barns are early in the game. The other two key resources you need is copper and iron. Salpeter, coal, oil, aluminum and uranium are the other ones, but they're not as important, largely because they arrive much later in the game and at a point where you've hopefully already managed to build a fairly successful and working nation.
I haven't really managed to figure out how trade works, as it's not like Civ where you can send a trader to another city, it's all sort of just automagic in the background.
There's a lot less micro management overall, but it also takes some of the "fun" out of the game.
Another issue is that everything takes so long time to do compared to Civ. Even if you play the research focused nations, after the default 300 turns, you're lucky to reach the industrial era before the game is over. This seems a bit odd and I just finished a 450 turn game and even at, I only got to the early contemporary era.
Things that are very different to Civ is that you have Stability and Influence points. The latter is used for building outposts, cities etc. and you don't gain a lot of them early on in the game and the cost goes up exponentially as you gain more points. However, once you figure out what to build, it shouldn't be an issue to get enough points.
As to Stability, this one is tricky, as I would say close to 90% of what you build, be it a Farmers Quarter or a Makers Quarter, cause minus points towards stability. The only district that improves stability is the Commons Quarter, although several other infrastructures can improve stability, such as (and weirdly enough) a Public Fountain.
Things like food, production, money and science work in similar fashion to the Civ games.
Oh and there's a city cap, if you have too many cities, you get a decrease in Influence points and you get hit hard with Stability loss.
One thing that took me a while to figure out during the beta and which is a feature that I hope the next Civ game implements, is the support for Outposts that can be linked to a City and become part of its territory. This way you can expand a City outside of it's initial borders, which I quite like.
Battle can be more advanced if you like it to, but is overall quite dull, just as in Civ. The AI opponents are quite different and obviously change as they evolve as well, which can be both good and bad.
The graphics are very impressive and detailed though and overall it's a decent game, but it's going to need some more work imho. It also feels faster than Civ, in the sense that it takes less time to create the world map before you can start to play and each AI turn seems to take less time than in Civ, especially after a few hundred turns.
Overall it's an engaging enough game, but it still needs a good bit of tweaking to stop being frustrating.
And that's a lot longer reply than I was going to write
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bOOOObs 
