I agree with some of this, disagree with some.
The AI definitely needs a lot of combat work.
It shouldn't be that hard to have it evaluate local unit strength, and adopt defensive posture when its outgunned.
Or to have it look at enemy ranged bombardment, and figure out what local unit strength will be during the next turn after the other players get to fire on it.
Or to have it not pick on a city state unless it has the troops to actually take the city.
Or to have it retreat heavily damaged units to heal them.
There are many ways to make unhappiness more serious (gold income penalty anyone?) without needing to add a complex system like immigration.
Its ridiculous and insulting to say things like "no one on the design team thought of this". More likely, they brainstormed and thought of all kinds of suggestions, and then focused on a simple, implementable core to put into the game.
Agree that Wonder balance is poor. Some are great, some weak.
On the suggestions:
No max XP for killing barbarians, instead XP should decrease from kills logarithmically.
Confusingly non-transparent to most users. How many users do you think understand logarithms?
Increase Barbarian spawn rate for normal game, and raging barbarians
Doing this too much risks overwhelming the AI. Many Civ4 mods did this, and the AI suffered. More barbs normally favors the player, particularly when the player is better at combat.
Only way to do this is if you give the AI a bigger boost vs barbs at higher difficulty.
Require Pact of Cooperation for Research Agreements, Open Borders, Defensive Pacts
If you have a pact of Cooperation, you can not declare war.
f you cancel a pact of Cooperation, it takes a 5 turns (normal speed) cool down time before you can declare war.
Pact of Secrecy Disallows trading with the victim player. If trade occurs, pact of Secrecy is broken (with diplomatic repercussions to the offending player)
Seems fine.
Better breakdown of unit maintenance costs in the Economic Advisor panel (unit by unit costs)
THis isn't the issue. Unit by unit costs are all the same (worker is the same as knight same as Modern armor), its the total number of units that matters.
The issue is that the per-unit cost increases over time in an unclear manner, and only every second unit counts, and in the late game maintenance gets insanely high.
Allow City States to hold onto captured cities (instead of auto-razing them)
Risks exploits with getting City States to make huge empires with gifted units, and the player can easily stay allied with them.
Increase Influence from Gifting Units (ATM, I can gift a unit costing 500 hurry gold, and get a measly 4 influence... WTF?)
Sure, but the main benefit from giftnig units is in them getting the unit to defend themself, and letting you fight proxy wars.
AI seems to be terrible at defensive wars
If The AI loses more units in the first 5 turns of a war, move to defensive positions
The AI needs to learn the concept of reserve forces. It seems to put every unit at the front, which leaves none for defending if things go sour
AI needs to learn how to position and properly defend artillery.
Agreed, but even more than this is needed. It also needs to learn how to stop throwing meatgrinder into a deathtrap with no hope of overwhelming. It needs to be much more careful about sending units into zones where they can be bombarded.
Yes, give the AI line of sight cheat if you need to.
City States fall behind in techs late game - perhaps research pacts or techs could be granted to them for extra influence?
Sure, though they do ok.
AI seems too...artificial. Often, 4 or 5 of them will contact you in a turn for exactly the same thing. Some random numbers seem to be needed to curb requests at least for humans
Fine, but minor issue.
City Build Queue Hover for Units should display the additional unit maintenance you have to pay after youve trained the unit, just like it already displays the additional gold maintenance.
Fine, but the problem is that this varies by game turn, not by unit. So it might say 8 gold when you start building it, but be 9 gold by the time it finishes building.
The Game Should Not allow moving to the next turn until all cities have fired on enemy units. (More than once, Ive been distracted and forgot, until right after I ended my turn and noticed.)
Eh. No biggie..
Trebuchets should not require iron
Cannons should require Iron
Gameplay > realism. Its good to have some strategic tradeoff between units. Iron is a classical/medieval resource, longswordsman vs trebuchet should be an interesting tradeoff.
The main problem with strategic resources is that they're too widely available.
Given how high maintenance costs are, you can never have that big an army, and so strategic resource limits are almost never binding, so this is a boring mechanic.
I'd reduce each resource down to 2, instead of 2/4/6. And make horses less common.
Make the Russian ability useful, and make it actually worth trading for resources, and settling near resources useful, and a second resource copy worth having.
So we get real strategic tradeoffs between elite/normal units.
The AI likes building Harbors too much, even when their city is hooked up to their capital. (25% naval production is useless compared to the 3 maintenance it costs for the building)Harbors should give 50% Naval production - its worthless ATM. Maintenance is too high.
Haven't noticed this.
If A unit movement path is blocked unexpectedly, Id prefer the unit to stop and ask for new orders than to try and find a path around it, especially since that path is usually stupid
Sure.
Auto-Exploring units should not be allowed to enter neutral city state territory. I have to manually explore now, out of fear of angering city states.
Yes please.
Clicking on a unit should show its current path
AI Should not be embarking units when ranged or naval enemies are nearby
Agreed.
But I think these don't get at a lot of the core problems; like favoring empire size, and expansion through conquest.
I would give puppet states say a flat -25% gold, hammer, and science penalty [And make them stop building useless buildings.] Its too easy to power your culture/gold economy on puppets, there need to be more incentives to annex. And reduce courthouse cost (hammer cost and maintenance cost).
I would reduce the amount of food needed for population sizes above ~14. Its too hard to get a big city, so you're much better off with lots of moderate size cities.
I would increase tech costs slightly by increasing the marginal increment at each stage.
I dislike how fast research is compared to unit/building build times.
I would make capturing a city more serious; add an extra temporary unhappiness hit when you capture a city, even making it a puppet.