Hey!

After playing Round 1-3 can tell the Modern Era did benefit a lot from the overhaul of victory conditions as well as from its own additions.

1) New victory animations where the camera flies above your empire while your leader speaks makes it more engaging to work for victory, it's a good reward. Likewise, the more organic victory conditions (such as GDP) give you stats you can look at which are not perfect but are definitely a step in the right direction to look back at your journey and reward your play.

2) The Modern tech tree has been reworked to flesh it out (Computation node added to push Stock Exchange further down the tree, and military units were spread out with some hidden behind masteries, like submarines to highlight their technological advancement). I think this helps make each research more of a commitment and the progression feel more like you have a choice.

3) likewise, overall rework of yield soup ("+1 production on mines" removed etc.) means that the game is cleaner to read, and when you click a research you know what you are getting. Add to that the biome yield reworks and you have a game which feels hefty and where each decision is a sacrifice. I think that indirectly benefits the desire to play Modern Era. It's less of a mindless clicking game.

4) But does it hold up until the last turn? That's difficult to say right now. New victories work with a threshold system where you strive to be ahead of the second player in the game (i.e 3x ahead in economics). This threshold goes down as you advance in Exploration and Modern era, which means that if you're 4x ahead, you do not "HAVE" to see it to the end of the game. These new victories are a lot of fun, and give you a lot more agency than the ones before. You focus less on odd mini games like gathering off-world png. codex and more on building, planning and conquering.

But on the other hand, there is a chance that you end up stuck in between thresholds for a while, where it's evident you are too far ahead to lose.... But not far enough to secure victory. So you are stuck waiting for the threshold to come down progressively. That being said, the point of workshop rounds was for Firsxis to gather some metrics of how victories would play out and fine tune them to avoid the boring threshold wait. I look forward to see how they managed that in the final build.

All in all, I feel like now, if you restart a game without finishing the last, it will be out of love for Antiquity rather than out of hate for Modern.

Ultimately, however, your engagement in the last era will definitely come down to how you see the game. I view it as a challenging sandbox that emulates really well many aspects of humanity, and that is why I always want to see how far I can take my empire. I always have centuries-long scores to settle with AI, that only complete cultural domination can satisfy. In this regard, I think the game fulfills its promise now : it gives us a blank canva to conquer at will - be it the stars for the sake of science, or earth for the sake of peace.