I'm not sure I even like this game. The opening moves are slow. The mid-game is even slower. I can only assume the endgame is glacial, because I've yet to be bothered to wrap the thing up.

Why does it take so long to destroy neighboring civs? I raze a city, and the next thing I know they send along a galley holding a settler and an archer and they rebuild in the same damn place, while my army is busy marching to the capital.

Why don't I get food bonuses from food resources? When you roll over the icons, it says "+1 bread, +1 health", but I'm not getting that extra bread. The same with production resources, no extra production. What a gyp.

I think the game penalizes too much for building a large number of cities, and for building a large empire. In the early game, you simply can't build a distant city without excessive taxes and the very high risk of being crushed by barbarians.

To counteract this I have developed "The X Strategy": build your cities in an X pattern, three squares away from another city. This is the minimum distance between cities (what is up with that?) but it nearly maximizes the geographic area of your empire, makes the most of resources (sharing only two squares for each neighboring city), and makes trade routes easy to connect. Plus it eliminates over-thinking those strategic decisions about which square is better for the next city — "optimized" city locations tend to be unbalanced in the long run anyway.

And let me complain once again about the number of glitches in this game, even with the latest patch. At random intervals, the refresh rate goes way down. I think this is a video memory buffering problem, like Firaxis built a home-brew garbage collection routine that gets clogged. I have figured out that I can Alt-Tab back to Windows, and then back to the game and the refresh is back to normal.