Didn't even see the UI. Effectively an in-game cinematic trailer.

Hope there's more forthcoming soon. Civ's gotten to a point where I have to know if there's enough to chew on in the vanilla game if I'm going to buy in early.

Wish it didn't require a 2k account. don't need another account to play a video game.

I look forward to maybe buying this in 5-10 years when it's on sale with dlc for a reasonable price.

Civ 2 is still peak for me, although I did like Leonard Nimoy's contribution to Civ IV.

My first impressions:

• I like the art style, I'll have to see about the leaders.
• Gwendolyn Christie is a really good choice for the narrator.
• I don't like the sound of there only being three ages, but maybe there's more to it.
• Also not sure about switching civs mid-game, but being able to do things like a French Cleopatra might be fun.
• Are they going to restrict this to avoid potentially offensive combos, especially in multiplayer? I'm thinking of things like using real-world colonizers for leaders of places they occupied (like an English ruler in charge of India and stuff like that.) At the very least it seems like they're inviting trouble unnecessarily.
• The prices are completely bonkers, nearly $170 CAD for the Founders Edition! This is gonna be the first Civ game in a long time that I don't pick up on launch day.

This looks like the live stream of the gameplay reveal, starting now:

https://www.twitch.tv/firaxisgames

I'm a bit torn. On one hand it seems like a step back from the Civ 6 cartoon garbage. On the other hand the ground textures still look like blurry paint vomit. It's kinda weird because the foliage and mountains / rocks seem to be in a higher resolution and much more detailed. I guess it might be WIP and a remnant from Civ 6. The unit sizes also seem gargantuan? I guess that part would not be as hard to fix via mods but that was already a compatibility nightmare before, especially when the mod authors quit.

So, graphically it might be a buyable Civ game again, but... Picking a new civ or mismatching leaders makes me worry though, because that sounds awfully familiar to another game that had a similar terrible feature. The Aztecs turning into France while being led by some Japanese dude just does not feel right.

The FOMO unlocks to bait you into signing up AND buying the cartoon shit are a hard pass for me though. Selling that as a "thank you" is nothing but insolent.

they took features from humankind and added them in for some reason

At 15:05 it isn't clear what is meant by a "full campaign", but it does sound like you can set up games to be only one age. I hope so, as I am skeptical about swapping civilizations. It was actually the primary thing that put me off Humankind, rather than a selling point. Resetting not only your Civ's identity but also the world's resources, map size, and the tech tree is concerning. If one age isn't an option, I am sure mods will save us at least.

Mod support and multiplayer are huge interests for dedicated fans, so hopefully we will get more information soon. VI improved a lot from V, so I expect it will be good.

I prefer the new graphics to Civ VI's overall, but I don't want to say it actually tops V until I've played it myself. A few screens seemed visually unfinshed. Story events, navigable rivers, leader skill trees, and the calamities at the end of ages seem intriguing at least. No mention of a world congress, hopefully they have a better system in mind than VI's.

Still curious about culture progression. They didn't show a card system like VI, so that at least makes me hopeful. Ideally I would like a permanent unlock/upgrade tree and a way to temporarily boost something at a cost in another system, like edicts in Stellaris.

Looks like districts and wonders still take a tile to build, but now other buildings do too? Cities sprawl out a lot, and are diverse within. Perhaps we will be able to build duplicate buildings that were previously one per city, especially since they mentioned city specializations. It also seems like workers/builders might be attached to a particular city rather than movable units.

Overall, I'm a bit less excited and more worried. There were a lot of changes from V to VI that I was disappointed with from the onset and honestly they did not grow on me.