I agree with you in so far as the tool tips and civilopedia descriptions not being clear on how traders work.
The moment you send a trader to another city from your city the benefit is immediately established. The city the trader is created in gains the benefit of the trade right away. The trade expires after a certain amount of turns (it's based on how far the city is you're trading with) and needs to be reestablished once it does. After you trade for a city for the first time 'trade posts' are established automatically which gives a gold bonus to your city the next time you trade with the same city. The road is permanent unless pillaged. If it's pillaged the trader will establish the road again.
At the moment its like on av - 40-55 turns to get space port, then 50 turns for each science victory condition (so like 5 items to build at space ports) - which seems ridiculous to me. So as these numbers are freaking ridiculous I then ASSUMED there had to be some strategy to boost production much further in cities. (past 100 production when most of my cities were like at 25-50 production). So I boosted my 'great engineer' points with policies and special projects - but lost my engineer one-time ' forever ' bonuses after some random auto spawning barbarian decided to keep pillaging my key structures. (like - why can't they pillage fields - why must they always pillage my key structures - that feels like devs-oriented 'bullshit balancing' to me)
And finally the notifications.
You don't get notifications if say enemy troops enter your territory (So to this day I don't freaking understand where they came from - but given that I control most of that continent + am suzerain of all city states - I don't get how enemy troops could have slipped into the heart of my civ. So I'm assuming its another 'game balancing cheat' used by devs.
Which infuriated me because i like things to make sense : this didn't. It just felt like the devs being like "lets add fake difficulty by adding AI cheats".
You don't seem to get notification for anything important at all :
- if a trade route is broken (I think I got one once though but its really not 'obvious' it's something you might easily overlook mixed in with unimportant info you learn to ignore and is gone by next turn)
- before and once you nuke a place they could let you know that the whole place will kill any troop getting anywhere near it for x turns or at least give you that info in the weapon's stats (which they don't).
- war weariness is not at all explained it's just one these things you're supposed to 'hope' doesn't do anything bad to you and make you try to keep wars to a minimum number of turns to get your strategic goal
- etc.
As to barbarians I'm not sure but it seemed to me like more of them appeared in time of war (which is an issue as the wars happened on another continent so I was not at fully capacity on the main continent). Again, I would like this thing explained to me, all they needed was a small ALERT EXPLAINING what's happening and why. like "lower troop presence = more barbarians spawning" or "unrest in time of war heightens the chance of opportunistic barbarians to attack your territories". At this time I'm still not sure if it's coincidence / dev cheats / if there is any logic behind it.
I hate it when things are not explained because CIV is a really LONG game, so you invest tens of hours into something - meaning if you don't know why something is happening or how it works you could have 'wasted' 10-20 hours of your life doing something wrong. I'm fine with developing 'better strategies' but to me that's just bs. So to this day and hour alot of the game BASIC mechanics are completly opaque. And most people commenting on the game online are retards so I'm not necessarily willing to spend 5 hours testing what someone said just because he said it with an air of autority (I'm not talking about you [MENTION=25403]ZNP-TBA[/MENTION] just results of google searches)
And isn't it worrying that you - a man visibly obsessed with knowing the minutia of this game and having researched it extensively - doesn't even know / aren't sure about some of the BASIC game mechanics??
All it would take is a small "?" information arrow next to boxes or a general 'information' button you click on to get details on stuff. I don't know, maybe a switch between the 'nice interface' and a 'full of information' interface. ANYTHING that allows you to pause and think in the game and be like 'okey what is this exactly and what does it mean for how i play the game'
the "2000 years later" surprises that kept stacking up really made me feel 'conned' into 'fake difficulty' (ie: I'm not going to spend 1000 hours playing a game just to learn the 'secrets' the developers didn't bother telling us and I don't want to have to read some fan blogs in 6 months to figure out how the game really works - this stuff doesn't work on me it just makes me want to stop playing)