They are adding battle viewer, so that has still to come.

I find the governor and citizen planet mechanics a more interesting step forward than what was in GC3.

I also agree. Like this system way more than GC3 so far.

Personally, I think citizens aren't landing as much as I like (I like it but it lacks the umpf I was expecting). I really like different species on planets and citizens having different things that impact their approval. It's the specializing process that feels soft.

But I have been surprised how much I like the District mechanic for making it so easy to visually read my planets and specialize them.

And I do like the governors a lot, though I'd love to see more done with them.

I think planet management is a major net positive. Do I think citizens could use more "oomph"? Yes. Do I think that the penalty for firing governors is too severe? Yes. The thing is that as I approach 100 hours in this game, these "balance" issues are nowhere near the top of my gripe list. The large number of mystery mechanics are a far greater concern. There are 5-10 key mechanics that are completely unexplained and dozens more that, while explained, either require mental calculation or guessing. These issues, if not corrected, will doom the game to failure no matter how good the mechanics are or how pretty the game is.

Love all the leaders… of course, I’m expecting that the dev team will enhance their uses. I think commanders are very cool, diplomats are mehh as they don’t seem to make much of an impact except for the diplo gain. Factions seem to be just noise to me for the moment… maybe I’m just not understanding their uses ?

As for governors, I think they’re very fun and have a huge potential for becoming  very useful and fun. I love the option to present them with Harmony Crystals to upgrade their loyalty. Of course, it’s currently unbalanced as there seems to be too many crystals avaible and the cost is too low, so I now have ALL my leaders at close to 100 loyalty, but I’m sure that this will be better balanced out by launch

I would suggest that at the end of the day - its all about what the dev team is going for.

I will tell you now, this game as it is crafted is not going to be a 9/10 game.  Its good.  I love this universe and the flexibility and the level of customization in creating the game experience you want (shaping the galaxy, win conditions, races, etc.)

Reviewers are not hard core 4x GC players.  They have to look through the lens of general accessibility as well as the deeper mechanics over a dozen or two dozen hours if you are really lucky as a developer or have a particularly dedicated review outlet.  They will call this too much management and it will end up a 7/10 or 8/10 if the combat gets better and/or the reviewer persists some games into mid/late game experiences.

As a someone who used to be seriously deep in 4x but then had kids and is more casual about gaming - GC4 is just not as satisfying an experience.  It takes longer to get through the initial careful management and burning lots of quick turns to get to the fun.

And the AI in the early game can be REALLY frustrating.  With a galaxy allegedly setup to provide some spacing to other races, right out of the gate in the period of the first 10 turns, AI took down a scout when I found them for the first time and two turns later took out my colony ship before I had any of the tech - let alone the construction capacity - to get something else in space with guns on it.

And that was with EVERY AI player on easy!

With the buy a governor mechanic, I like the mechanic of stats influence to deepen planet production but might suggest paying for a governor on every single planet you found is overly burdensome.  Why not a governor per sector?  Or star system?  The way it is now, it feels like two colony ships at the start are absolutely useless if I have to burn 600 of my starting 1000 credits just to buy up a couple of people to make the planets marginally useful.

You should NOT be putting a governor on every planet. You should not even put a governor on every GOOD planet. Most planets you should just keep as colonies, and just put a governor on one really exceptional planet that those colonies feed into. Putting a governor on every mediocre/good planet is actually harming your production in all stats (mineral, tech, wealth, food, influence) and effectively seriously reducing the effects of your percentage bonuses. As kind of an example in my current game I have like 10 core worlds and 22 colonies, and I probably should have just left a couple of those core worlds as colonies. Basically find the best (usually most tiles) planet in a cluster, make that one your core world, then all nearby planets just turn into colonies to feed that core world.

I really suck at explaining this stuff. Maybe one of the experienced min/maxxers around here could write up some sort of tutorial about core/colony world management techniques, and get it pinned. I see this coming up as a recurring theme on the boards, so obviously a lot of people are falling into the trap of thinking this is like previous Gal Civs and other 4x games, where you want to make every planet a core planet. I hope the devs end up making a decent in game tutorial to help players at least understand the concept of the core/colony world balancing act that is needed.

Happy Sunday !

It's a bit tricky because early on you kinda want new core worlds, but they become obsolete once you get past your starting sector

I like the district management, but the citizen management seems unnecessary. 

I agree that we need to be able to see the tile under an improvement.

There is a visual queue for district upgrades in the right panel where you upgrade them. They all upgrade together (on that planet), not independantly.

I learned my lesson the first game, scratching my head as to why I was getting poorer yet I had several core worlds. Read some posts, lesson learned, choose core worlds wisely and make sure you give it a lot of colonies.