Civ VII is a complete mess. The only civ game that will delete units without so much as a notification (settlers and all civilian units are just fucking deleted on age rollover btw), lacking a demographics screen entirely, won't describe anything useful about the tile under the cursor, all keybinds are removed, the crises you face are entirely artificial and not emergent from your gameplay, the elements borrowed from the games this imitates are made completely irrelevant as mere mild boons and short term bonuses, the UI is bass-ackwards with every seemingly-clickable item a decoy for a secret button that is illegible as a UI element somewhere vaguely nearby, constant re-sync when playing networked (worse than Civ V netcode), UI that becomes unresponsive for long unexplained periods, even the lowest graphics lag the computer when playing unit combat animations, most game settings that would still be relevant in the new play style are just gone, always online bullshit obviously (2K game shit), bugs around the age transition will result in some players being unable to select their civilization while others can, there are no teams and human relations are gamified via point systems so you can't have normal relations with other human players, and I *still* can't even figure out how to build a religion unit after playing for two days.

So in summary: everything good that the Civ team learned in previous titles has been haplessly discarded in favor of a cheap and meaningless rehash of mechanics that work better in other games actually balanced around them.

This game, like many nowadays, clearly needed a few more months in the oven. Not only was this rushed to completion for launch, but it was rushed to completion for time to make day-zero DLCs. On Linux, I can't even close the game gracefully with the title menu quit button, I have to kill it. What a mess. As it is, worst civ game yet, but if it actually got finished (it won't) it would easily be the second best. There is a lot of potential here, but it feels like the game design process was rushed out of fear of the competition. Lots of new stuff would have been really fun in a completed game, like the new army commander system, navigable rivers, civilization specific culture trees, and the distinction between settlements and cities.

So in summary: wait until there is a complete overhaul modpack by loving fans of this bad game to make it actually worth buying, then expect the net code to be slightly worse than Civilization V (huge downgrade from stability improvements in Civ VI).