Base game mechanics are good. City planning and building is satisfying; it's not a massive adjacency checking time sink like in civ 6 or boring like it is in civ 5. Combat is fun and challenging, the AI doesn't stop producing units after killing the first wave of them like in civ 6. Having to capture multiple walled districts to conquer a settlement and setting up your own fortifications within it makes it feel like an actual siege of a city. I don't like how the AI can go insane in the ancient era, settling new towns right after you capture a few of their settlements and fill up your settlement limit. You are forced to raze their new towns if you want to eliminate them, permanently decreasing your war support score for the rest of the game or you accrue massive happiness penalties. A good fix would be that razing cities only decreases war support in future wars against only the enemy and allies of it. Civ switching keeps the game interesting and historically accurate, it should be region locked though, seeing a European leader become an African or Asian civ breaks the immersion. Minor game mechanics like religion and art collecting seem half baked. Religion only involves spamming one unit with no theological combat abilities. I opened the art window like once or twice to see that I have one thing in there and never bothered to open it again. A lot of the features seem like they are artificially going backwards from the additions of civ 6 just so they can improve them later in DLC. The government and civic mechanic is less refined for no reason, you can't switch governments and the civics aren't themed anymore. In the modern age I couldn't tell if I had adopted an ideology or not or if I just had the civics associated with them.