So, it's available courtesy of FTL, so I can have a quick look-see. Played ~60 turns, so I'm still learning the ropes, but I think it's enough for a first impression.
That UI is... something else. Sometimes the close button is in the upper right corner (as Lord intended), other times it's centered, for some screens you need to click again on the button that opened it.
My biggest gripe with it is that you really have to strain your eyes to find the important information cause everything looks the same and the logic as to how it's organized is very alien to me.
For starters, it looks very much like the amplitude game, it looks like it inherits a lot of stuff from Endless Space. I like the map, with different elevations etc., even though it makes the world look like a vietnamese terrace farm,
it's a bit more interesting than a typical CiV map.
What I liked so far is how the game handles expansion, the map is divided into regions, you build outposts to claim them, then you either attach it to an existing city, or make a new city, if you can afford it.
I thought the neolythic period is rather clever (other than a bit of eye-rolling at the mighty deer), letting you do some scouting on a mostly empty map, then choose the best spots to settle,
then after a few turns you see all kinds of people settle all over the place.
City management borrows a lot from earlier Amplitude games, basic resources are the typical FIMS (Food/Industry/Money/Science) with the same icons you recognize from Endless Space,
you can build districts (you will be limited by stability) with all the typical stuff like adjacency bonuses, as well as upgrades and wonders, you can also shuffle population a bit to specialize.
I've seen some things that I like here, like being able to make more than one city contribute to building a world wonder.
The game also has event popups which ask you to make some kind of a decision, which is a nice touch to break the monotony of clicking end turn waiting for shit to happen,
to compare, it's much less obnoxious than I remember from Old World.
Haven't done any serious fighting yet, so can't comment on that. Same goes for diplomacy, but the first impression isn't bad. There's a grievance system in place allowing you to ask for compensation for stuff
like minor border skirmishes or grabbing territory near you, or you get an immediate casus belli if they refuse. You seem to get more types grievances based on your civic and religious tenet choices.
When allied, the other guy will drop some vague hints on the map as to what they want to do (e.g. "we need to attack here" or "we have a special interest at this spot"). But as I said, I don't know yet how much of it is really practical.
I like quite a few things that I'm seeing, for example there's plenty of neutral units running to and fro across the map which you can buy out to serve as mercenaries.
The other annoyance so far (apart from the UI) is the narration, which constantly breaks the mood by dropping shit like "soon they'll be worshipping bank accounts" when you're developing your shamanistic religion in the classical period.
The game's relationship with actual history is tenuos at best, but I guess that surprises nobody. Sadly, the overall tone of the narration feels divorced from the game's genre, for example with all this talk of how stories are important you get from the opening slides.
Remember kids, Amplitude tells it how it is, the most important thing about marketplaces is the gossip you hear. Most of the time it's not too bad, or perhaps I just filtered it out after an hour or so, but every now and then you hear something that just sticks out like a sore thumb.