Well when it wont be soon. Cause civ V is very very popular right now. Steam online numbers proves it. Talking about me i dont really need new civ 6, im enjoying civ5 very much right now they just could upgrade or patch AI so they could be smarter. Cause deity should be impossible difficulty or atleast near it, now its seems like emperor...
I don't think they waited for Civ IV sales to dry up before releasing Civ V - that's not the way these things work. They capitalise on the existing interest in the games while they're still fresh enough to attract an audience.
3) Finally balance the 'sprawling' and 'compact' playstyles. Sometimes I feel like founding a huge empire with 200 cities, sometimes 5 is enough. Maybe make it so that buildings can be built multiple times, to add onto their bonuses? Anything to make it work. Civ V came close but right now Tall >> Wide in most situations.
They got the balance closer in G&K - BNW was a step too far in the wrong direction, and in part because of the decision to link some of the game's most powerful Wonders to policy trees that already favour going tall (Hanging Gardens can change the course of a game; Pyramids ... can't).
5) Make it so that science !>>> everything else. This may be impossible but they should at least try it... It's a major flaw in every Civ game to date.
This isn't realistically fixable because it's not just a "flaw" in the series, it's at the core of how it was deliberately designed to begin with. On that basis it's questionable whether it can be considered a flaw - it's like arguing Total War's flaw is that fighting > everything else. The board game Sid Meier based Civ had as its goal advancing through the game's tech tree, and the computer iteration was faithful to it to that extent. If it's not a game style you enjoy, probably the Civ series isn't an ideal match.
Features such as Wonders are by their nature fundamentally linked to the tech leader, because only one can be built and the tech leader has the advantage in getting it. Every structure in the game is unlocked by technology: Civ V has made steps towards offering alternative game structures, such as removing government systems and religion from the tech tree and giving them their own mechanics, but ultimately you're not going to get away from the fact that the resources needed to generate policies and religion are themselves produced by buildings and Wonders that you need technology to unlock.
Another move in this direction is the restriction of Wonders to policy trees, so that you can be tech leader but not able to build certain Wonders - as mentioned, this is skewed in practice by the terrible balancing of both the policy trees and the Wonders associated with those trees (only Aesthetics - a strong tree with a somewhat poor Wonder - and Exploration - a weaker tree with a stronger Wonder - break the pattern that already-strong trees have better Wonders than weak trees), but in principle it has promise. It will invariably be a limited approach, however.
#3 The global happiness model from Civ V might have been able to work if they hadn't tied it to Golden Ages and national wonders to build 100% of all cities.
Tying to Golden Ages is fine - it's nice to have a reward for management rather than the traditional Civ happiness system which is nothing but an arbitrary limit which the game forces you to manage to avoid penalties without doing anything to reward good management beyond not having those penalties. Moreover a wide empire will ultimately out-generate a tall one in happiness.
The national wonder system is in need of revision - National College's power level is a problem in any case, but the 'build X of Y' condition - while making them distinctive - hurts wide empires too much while NWs are as powerful as they are. It's fine making them something preferable for tall empires (they only affect the city where they're built, after all), but in that case it's tall empires that need to incur the cost of that benefit, not wide empires. Instead we have a system where NWs are both more awkward to time and build in wide empires, and more expensive in them. Remove the extra production cost of a NW for extra cities at the very least. A trade-off whereby NWs are actually cheaper production-wise the more buildings of a certain type you have might work. You wouldn't need to force players to build X in every city - instead you give them an incentive to build more X if they have more cities, and NW cost scales more appropriately with empire size as a result.
Also, Civ IV's model was very effective at this until BTS introduced Corporations which made even useless cities useful.
Civ IV attempted something slightly different; culture and OCC aside you never played tall in Civ IV, you just expanded more slowly past a certain distance from the capital. ICS was gone, but wide was better than tall. Every civic but Representation and Bureaucracy rewarded more cities over less, as did the religion system with its gold-generating holy buildings, and nothing in the system penalised playing wide. Actively attempting to promote alternative strategies, with supporting policies etc. for each, is a Civ V novelty; no other Civ game tried to encourage playing tall (as in, up to about 4 cities).
And in retrospect, while I long supported Civ V's approach in this regard, it has indirectly validated the older model by demonstrating that playing tall is generally rather boring...
#5 Science is always going to be important; but if Civ VI restrains from making a whole social policy tree devoted to increasing science it would be a huge step in the right direction.
Yes, that would help. Rethinking population = food is another area to look at; Tradition is the strongest early tree because, as the growth/food/happiness tree, it indirectly increases science output more than the other trees. Of course food = science was true in all past Civ games less directly (perhaps especially in Civ IV, where since so many buildings added +% modifiers to particular resources, you needed to have as many people working the land as possible), because more pop = more workers, but at least there commerce production was traded off against production of other resources rather than accumulated for free.
