Thanks for the replies. For me this bug is more severe. I opened and then subsequently had to kill the process to exit 50 times in a row. In each instance I was not able to successfully start the application without the bar and broken buttons. I then tried the Alt+Enter and it seemed to work. I have tried it 5 times now and each time it worked so far. I guess now that I am aware of this issue I can work around it but in terms of bugs this is a bad one for new users because you are stuck right after starting, can't progress to access any menus and can't even close the application.

I want to bump this issue.  I'm not sure if it was a deliberate decision or not, but the loss of the Roman fertility fest perk takes away some interesting gameplay strategies.  It makes the Roman more plain.

looks nice! Would be cool if it plays a @#$%-a-doodle-doo sound when the rooster crowing animation is starting

It happens to me every now and then too, and what I always do is press Alt+Enter twice, which disables and enables full screen again, for me that fixes it and is quicker than restarting the whole game.

Of course they are important, when the developers made them so essential to the game.  Let's look at economic technologies. At one point or another, you will want to research all gather speed upgrades, with the exception of lvl2 Stone gathering (if not slinger civ) and Wheelbarrow. Otherwise, your workers are so slow, that people are metagaming 100 pop in 10 minutes games for 11 years now. The original developers knew this trade off was artificial, so they gave you efficient workers from the start of a game. When they introduced technologies, the techs came in pairs, and they were cheap. The point was that the techs were just a path you chose to follow, not something essential to your build. Just played a longvgame with a retro version of 0 A.D. It's so much more focused that it's basically a different game.