I got Pharaoh real cheap and wow.
Okay, so with the entertainment sites and the festival ground they *FORCE* you to build intersections. All the entertainment stuff has to be on a T intersection, and the festival ground needs to be on a 4-way. But the only way to handle intersections is to make every spoke its own totally independent city, because you can't ever depend on something going the way you want enough of the time...
(I think the 'pottery' issue is solved by making more bazaars, which is annoying because people hate living near them.)
Thing that bugs me: In Caesar, I felt like it was a good idea to have high-tax regions that were all posh, and low-tax regions that supplied workers for other parts of the city. This is because there weren't enough workers to supply everything to everyone. And now, early on at least, there's TOO MANY workers, so I can't HAVE my little ghettoes. Why do the most expensive houses support this many more people? I felt like Caesar wasn't this severe of a problem, maybe for other reasons...but there's no reason not to give any block of housing EVERYTHING, unless you just need a tiny handful of workers for your distant mines...
And the aging thing...bleh. Why would they even do that? They could balance the game in other ways that people who play for less than twenty years on one site might actually see!