I like the initial look of the planet, the colour and texture balance was attractive. But a few minutes later and I was having problems with distinguishing some of the terrains. The greens of savannah and grassland were too similar for me (1200x800 medium graphics), I also had difficulty telling the hills from the plains for these terrains (so that's a fourway mix-up) and no way could I differentiate forested hills from forested plains. The tooltips work well to tell me the underlying terrain but relying on them quickly becomes a pain. Perhaps a change of colour for grasslands (more yellow?) and extra grey or black for the hills. And something for the forested hills.
I found the UI windows for economy, research, etc very smooth and crisp and very much liked the clear distinction of colours for the various resources/psuedo-resources. One option I kept looking for was an ability to adjust the tax rate directly from the city screen but maybe I just need to get over making a couple of extra clicks.
Without being able to comment on balance I really liked the way the technology trees varied from game to game. Good work!One thing which spoiled my fun quite a lot even early in the game was not seeing enemy attacks taking place. (Maybe I overlooked a toggle for this?) This often led to me searching through my units exhaustively trying to figure out which ones had been attacked between turns. Sometimes I really couldn't figure it out.
Overall I found the game very playable and fun although I suspect that I might find it lacking in some depth after a while. Or perhaps more complexities have yet to reveal themselves...
(p.s. Wish I had gotten into the beta a couple of months ago when I had heaps of time to play when other games weren't waiting for my attention; and sorry for the delay in feedback, been away on holidays...)
