I really don't like the new city building, and feel that this patch is a huge step backwards (sorry).
I liked how the player got to build more of an improvement as their city leveled up; it gave the player something solid to look forward to when their city leveled, and it gave players with low civics research a reason to have higher level cities. I also don't see how more studies/temples/etc. are redundant, they actually give you more of something you need (resources), while more command posts on the other hand would be redundant because you don't get anything new from more of them. Also, now all you get from a higher level city is more tiles (and better improvements, but only for high level civics), and unless you put all of your research into the civics tree you don't even get to use those tiles. Some people are also mentioning that this will change when the other tech trees are unlocked, but I disagree. Unlocking the other tech trees would only disperse the players research focus; this would cause less research to be finished in the civics tree in a given amount of time, and I doubt the other tech trees will give as many improvements to be built as the civics tree does (the tree that is completely dedicated to providing improvements).
It is also much too easy to get higher level cities now. I actually liked how one farm couldn't get your city to level five before, and if you removed infinite gardens food would have actually felt precious as it should in a post apocalyptic setting (I actually played without spamming gardens and thought it worked very well). I also think it will be good if the player must look for food resources to build a city on if they want more food so that they actually have to explore and spread their kingdom out. I know this will give the player less food overall, but not all cities should able to get to a high level (which causes you to actually have to think about which cities to build houses on).
These changes have also done nothing for micromanagement for me, and I think people are looking in the wrong places to reduce micromanagement. If you really want less micromanagement I think you should improve the UI instead of drastically changing gameplay. A few UI improvements that would reduce micromanagement:
* Allow the player to queue improvements to be built next to other queued improvements
* Allow the player to queue houses to be built after a farm/garden/etc. is finished
* Maybe? Allow the player to queue improvements to be built once resources become available
The goal of these changes is to allow the player to queue as many improvements as possible at a time so they don't have to look back at their cities every few turns.
Sorry if this post is a little hard to read, I kept thinking of things to add as I went (its also very hot in my room).
