The various race and leader specific adjustments are all new. 
Oh cool, I didn't know that mechanically different leaders had yet to be added. Still looking forward to the diplomacy overhaul, even if it's driving you crazy and been changed again.
Yeah, the leaders are now WAY more different, which is really cool.
I think I'm going to stop calling the diplomacy stuff "diplomacy." That's not what it really is, anymore. It's really "interactions with other races via methods other than fighting, and interactions with your own populace in other ways than the standard citybuilding mechanics." I don't know what to call that. Certainly diplomacy is kind of contained within there to a certain extent, but there's a whole lot of stuff that is nothing to do with governments, and more about Billy Jim and his crazy antics in the Skylaxian Mall, or whatever.
What I've really been realizing today -- after another frustrating day yesterday -- is that trying to shoehorn in that sort of interesting interactivity into the existing model for things like resources, wonders, market items, etc, was really not going to work well. Those existing systems were simply too complicated to begin with, and not something I found fun. I love the NAMES of the market items, but not much of anything else to do with them. And the fact that they are crazy bonus procgen techs is also cool, I don't mind that at all because it doesn't require me to make any choices, and it's neat to see.
So today I've started writing down all the guts that need to be ripped out, and things that need to be simplified in the systems I mentioned there, so that the path is clear for me to use those all in different ways. I like the resources and wonders and market items as a concept, and their thematic nature is great, too. But I was trying to have those really directly play back into the citybuilding part of the game, and for resources and wonders in particular that was simply Not Fun. At least not for me.
So many parts of this game work so well, but there have been these certain key areas that come up again and again with people both new to the game and very familiar with it. I'm not erasing those areas, but I am going to simplify them and tie them into the new central interaction system. The interaction system plus the citybuilding are kind of the two beating hearts of the game, ideally.
Yesterday I made a lot of progress on the new "diplomacy" stuff, but by the end of the day I realized I had to throw it pretty much all out. I did gain a lot of forward movement in terms of clarity on what things need to be, but it wasn't a case where I could start turning the data definitions into specs that I was happy with yet. Fingers crossed I can finish that up today in terms of the simplest variant of what is several different very broad categories of event.
