While playing the new Beta 1Z last night, I took some notes about strange or counterintuitive UI decisions that I think should be considered:

• The faction customize screen gives you a list of different bonuses you can assign, with each entry having a check-box on the left and cost on the right. For some reason, this screen confused me when I first saw it, and I had to look at it several times to figure out which check-box belonged with which option. I would suggest abandoning these sorts of interfaces and instead using a "store" sort of interface, with no checkboxes, but rather a pane of options on the left, each with a cost, and an empty pane on the right, where "purchased" bonuses or penalties will go if the user selects them.
• The mouseover cards/tooltips in the game are very nice, but if you click on the thing you're mousing over, they disappear. While the same data then shows up in the bottom interface, it still throws me off that I now have to look somewhere else to consume the same information (and frankly, I don't really see a good reason for the specific map feature to even be selectable, when you can just get the info in a nicer form from the card anyway).
• It seems that you can't scroll the map on a diagonal by putting the mouse in a corner. Being able to drag the map with the left mouse button is better anyway, but sometimes you want to be able to scroll with just the edges.
• Iconography for buildings and such is really nice and clear, from what I've seen, particularly since it's consistent from both the build screen and from what you see on the cloth map itself.
• You can't easily see how long a building has left to build without selecting a city AND clicking a button or tab, likewise, no way to select a new thing to build or train without selecting a city AND clicking a button. Civ IV really does this well, by having a thin strip of UI under the city name that shows how long the city has to grow, how long it will take to build whatever it's working on, and letting you select new things to build as soon as you click on the city. I could see the way Elemental does it get tedious on long games.
• Mousing over one of the buildings built in a city tells you about the city in the card/tooltip, but mousing over the central, biggest square does not. Furthermore, mousing over a building being built tells you how long it will take, but this seems to only be true for the last building queued up, so if I have queued up 4 buildings, only mousing over the 4th one will tell me any info about build time.
• No easy way to see what the "Unlocks: X" messages really mean when choosing a specific technology when you make a discovery. If Farming unlocks Farms, I need to be able to see what a Farm is and does (obviously farms are a simple example). This could work like the Civilopedia (a seperate screen), but I would prefer a nice card when you mouse over the "Unlocks: X" message, since it would be consistent with the current UI and wouldn't require me to go to another screen and then go back.

Overall, the game is pretty fun already, great work.