I'm really disappointed with the endgame.
You're given pretty much no indication that another civ is working on a win condition project, and when one is completed you just a get a game over screen. The first time it happened to me I thought the game was bugged... I reloaded an old autosave and the second time around I noticed you get a very brief message in the corner of the screen "So-and-so has won the game!". Yeah... how??? Tell me or show me what they did!
You didn't usually get a warning in Civ V either. I actually almost lost when I saw Hutama building the mind flower, so I rushed to get mine built, finished a couple turns after him, managed to grab the victory.
Also, for the transcendance victory, it said that during the period between building the mind flower and winning, the planet would undergo all sorts of upheaval, like quakes, mountains suddenly forming and increased wildlife activity, but there was nothing, and there were TWO mind flowers going.
-snip-
I get the same feeling here, that it's little more than a reskin of Civ V without the religion stuff.
The AI also seems to be the same and they're really bad at placing cities, tending to crowd them as close as possible.
I like the Australian guy myself. The way he constantly rolls his eyes at me.
He's supposed to be polynesian, I think.
As for the whole Great Mistake thing, if you read the 'interviews' on the Civilization main site, there are hints that a nuclear war happened at some point, along with the usual consequences of global warming and sea level rise. There were also various mentions of the 'inflection point' approaching, but while nothing actually explains what it is, it seems to have something to do with scarce resources.
I think they could have done much better on the intro because the preview video with various nationalities and ships launching from many cities was a lot better.
Also, does anybody know for sure if the various factions actually go for different affinities each game? I only played one full game and in the various smaller ones I've played, they seem to generally go in the same direction each time.