It encourages you to adapt to the circumstances of your enviornment.

Boosts make research more complex than simply queuing up 10 items.

It makes sense people don’t want to live in a swamp.

Traders form roads, like how roads appeared historically.

I like the little improvements here and there, such as completed techs stating they “just finished” instead of “0 turns remaining.”.

It allows the player to experiment and learn what policies work best for the current situation.

I like how easy it is to swap out policies.

It makes them feel more lifelike than the old preferences system.

The overall look and feel of the game is very classy.

I actually enjoy listening to the music in their games, while most other developers have minimal, often repetitive soundtracks. The art style is beautiful, and characters have a lot of visual personality.

I’m reminded once again of the fantastic art and sound team at Firaxis.

In contrast, vanilla Civ 3-4-5 each felt like two steps forward, one step back - especially compared to all the innovations of Alpha Centauri. This has lots of features for a vanilla release of a new Civ game. I watched the trailer for Civ 6 a long while back, but avoided reading anything about the game after that so I can form unbiased first-hand impressions.

Civ 5 production bug