After one go, some thoughts

[Councillor Milquetoast]

Alright, I finished my first game of Civ 7, and my thoughts are:
* It's going to be good. It's not quite good yet.
* The core fundamental game design choices are very good. Splitting the game into eras works. Disaggregating leaders and civs works. The crisis system at the end of each era works - the first time it happened was catastrophic and great and provoked a really good storyline in my game. A bunch of patches and an expansion or two and it will have something really interesting going on. The final era ending at around 1960, in real-world tech / civic equivalent terms, is interesting but a bit craven - it means once again failing to grasp the nettle on more recent trends like environmentalism, mass media, and social disintegration.
* The trend towards these games being very, very long continues. Am I misremembering or was it possible to play a full game, soup to nuts, of Civ 3 in like six to eight hours? You could DEFINITELY crack out a whole game of Alpha Centauri in an evening. I guess that's one part game design, one part tech 'advancement' - SMAC had end-of-turn processing that resolved in seconds, while end-game Civ 7 turns can take upwards of a minute to work through on my decent-to-good laptop, presumably just because it's all so much more CPU / GPU intensive. But it's also just everything being a bit more bloated - more micromanagey, fiddly decisions, more unit maintenance, dumber automation. Civ 7 gets rid of auto-explore buttons on explorer land & naval units, for example - why, why would you ever do that. Resources have to be allocated to cities manually and it's a decision you have to remake every couple of turns. Do not get me started on the religion aspect - if effin blows. At least you can't lose the game over it so you can just ignore it if you want to (you should). Anyway I wasn't hyperfocused on it but steam has my first full game clocking at an obscene 20 hours, which shouldn't be legal.
* People are going to moan a lot about the AI. It is still going to be a game that is, at its heart, not that hard to beat. If a stiff challenge is your metric for whether a game is worthwhile or not then, idk, go play Dark Souls. You can beeline to victory even at higher difficulty levels.
* The UI does suck. Tooltips being missing, hover-over information that doesn't explain itself, yes, but also a massive stripping back on information availability and accessibility. There is no single screen where you can see all your cities, for example; there's no screen where you can find all your units (if you want to upgrade everything you have to do it laboriously, manually; see above re: 20 hours), no real info on trade routes, no-where to go if you want to work out why your Distant Lands cities can't build Factories. As usual, the game ends with little to no fanfare (I feel like I've been piping up at every Civ release for the last two decades to remind the devs that, actually, yes, we do like the little graphs at the end of the game, we do like the map replay, it is nice to get a quick cool down after the game to review what was happening under the fog of war for the past 20 hours). The game demands a lot of micromanagement but gives you very few tools to do it.
* The narrative design. Ah, look, I don't want to lay into this too hard, because there's something there that needs teasing out. But there is some tension between Civ, the game where stories emerge naturally from gameplay, and Civ 7, a game where a pop-up occasionally gives you a sentence and a binary choice between two bonuses that you resolve by picking the bonus you need more in the moment. If you want your Civ to be more CK3 then you really need to look at CK3, think about how they made choices meaningful, because even after one playthrough I never want to see another +250 culture / +300 happiness to a golden age choice again.

I booted up a second game and I'm looking forward to playing it. I'm going to give it a thumbs up review because, on average, I think there's more good than bad here. I think it's launching better than 5 did, maybe a bit worse than 6, and they both ended up great games.

[DeLusion]

I agree with every word, and my feelings so far are same as yours. I'd add, that most annoying thing for me is that the eras are ending too quickly. I can barely invent all the techs and civics, let alone put them to use (like new units or wonders) and the era is ending already. But that could be solved with pretty easy balancing - techs and civics quicker to invent, and era score building up slower.