It's hard to quantify what doesn't click in this game, but I just don't enjoy it like I have past games in the series. Might be a little long:
- Turns take longer. Not necessarily sit and wait turns like late-game Civ 5, but each individual turn throughout the entire game has you managing things, so Civ 6 lacks the fast buildup phase that the other games had. That's due in large part to the next issue, which is...
- Miltary conquest is happening, whether you want it to or not, regardless of difficulty. I enjoyed the civ building aspect of the series in the past, often ignoring military expansion in favor of just building my own civ. Can't really do that here, you will absolutely need to focus on defense, and often military units and actually using them just to get reasonable tech advancement.
- Advancement doesn't have the same rewarding feel to it, either. The culture system and tech tree only have a few spots that feel like milestones, and the rest just quickly become ignored. It all seems built with a very specific goal in mind from the start, so you focus on getting certain cards and a government to support them, with no organic feel to the buildup. It makes it a bit tedious to play for hours, because there's little adaptation from an initial strategy you're somewhat bottlenecked into from the moment you pick your civ's leader.
- The new spy system is atrocious. Build a spy, then you're forced to choose not just what city to defend or go against but also individual districts. For a larger city in late game, this turns into a maddening display of micromanagement that you're forced to repeat after a fairly short number of turns for each spy.
- I'm also not a fan of the new builders. They're expendable units with a number of charges, rather than being persistent. You can't automate anymore. Some things they can repair on pillage, others have to be fixed through that city's production screen.
- Barbarians are annoying. They ramp up in tech, your units don't wake on seeing an enemy in Civ 6, they're smarter about pillaging, and the map is worse about letting you know where to combat them. They aren't hard to deal with, they're just a constant aggravation that stops being fun fairly quickly combined with all of the other management you're doing.
- Enemy civs are aggressive, and they stockpile units like crazy. Even at farily early turns it seems like you're being swarmed, and with so many of the civs being military-centric they don't hesitate to declare war on you. This is probably fine if you enjoy Civ as a wargame, but that's never been what I liked about it and I still don't find the combat any more compelling in this version than it was in 5.
- Wonders don't feel that wonderful anymore. They take up precious expansion hexes, they take forever to build, and often it's a tossup if it's even worth it. You're not going to mass produce them like past games, it's not even possible. The screens when you do complete one are neat, but you're rarely going to see any of them.
- At 1440p the UI is ungodly small. Little tiny X's to close windows, and a number of other issues make it a bit frustrating to get the information you need when you need it.
It's not that Civ 6 is a bad game, it's just only going to be a good one for a particular mindset of player. This is a less casual, far less relaxing game than the others in the series that focuses far too much on armies and not enough on the things that always made Civ stand out to me from other strategy games. It also seems like games actually take longer to complete in Civ 6 than they did even in 5, but at least the save feature is a little better.
It'll be better after an expansion or two to streamline things, but right now I don't recommend it unless you're the warmongering type or only ever played the previous entries in the series on the highest difficulties.
