1) Someone has mentioned the Rhye's and Fall Mod which adressess many of your ideas (Stability and Collapse, Different Starting times for different civilizations). But it higlights very well another thing your doing: Your shifting the game more towards a simulation.
I love the Rhy's and Fall Mod - so much so that whenever I play Civ4 these days I either play this mod, or Fall From Heaven, or RoM-AND. After playing these mods, the unmodded Civ4:BTS seems comparatively superficial and unengaging. I believe that these mods very much enhanced the original game and as such I would like to see some of their ideas (along with other ideas like those I mentioned) brought forward and developed in the next version of Civ.
That said, I do admit that Rhys and Fall was too historically deterministic. Imo this emphasis on historical determinism coupled with inherent limitations of Civ4 itself resulted in later patches of the mod being unnecessarily harsh and arbitrary in some respects.
I do indeed want to shift the game more towards simulation because I think that would be fun and strategically enriching. However I do not want historical determinism/simulation to quite the same degree as the Rhys and Fall mod.
RFC is a set scenario on a set world map with different victory conditions for each civ. A Game can theoretically end before you get to play as the Americans.
I have no desire to have a version of Civ where every game has to be played on an Earth map. As I mentioned in my opening set of posts, the Civ game I have in mind will not have
victory conditions as such. It will be a sandbox style game, and the lack of defined victory conditions means there is no need for a clearly defined end date to a game. As such, there would not be any chance of a game ending before you get the chance to play as a certain civ.
So, the more systems you add, the more detailled the game becomes. But our knowledge of the past, of societies and their functioning, of environmental impacts and cycles do have lots of gaps. We don't know everything. So we need to simplify, for the game should be a game, and not a simulation. That's why Mercantilism closed the borders in Civ4, it made sense in the gameplay.
I would rather have a Civ game which attempted to reflect our best understanding of the history of civilization rather than one which simply ran away from the challenge and contained ludicrous features such as nuclear war causing global warming, interstellar spaceships in the early 21st century, or mercantilism shutting down all foreign trade. After all, it is a game about
civilization and the challenges and opportunities that civilizations face: by definition, the game *must* be based on historical reality as best understood (and let's face it, that's pretty much the only kind of historical reality that can exist at any given time). If it is made into a game with about leading a nation from strength to strength for several millenia until one nation achieves something totally fantastical like conquering the entire world or reaching the stars in the face of non-sensical game features, then in my view it should not be called
Civilization at all. Such a game should instead be called something like
Fantasy Civilization.
This is of course a question of a scale between gameplay and simulation. I agree that Civ5 oversimplified too much, but it needs to a certain extent.
So let Civ5 be oversimplified. I am not at all convinced that the changes I propose can be properly implemented in Civ5, even by the best modders and programmers. That is why I am proposing that these changes be implemented in Civ6.
2) The other set of problem somehow figures into that: If it's a game and not a simulation, you need to be able to play it. The game needs to be fun. If it's only interesting and you learn a valuable life lesson from it, you only gonna play it once. ....so it needs to be fun besides interesting. Fun means a) anticipating needs to be doable for the average human and b) rewards are better than punishments. The systems need to be simple that players don't get frustrated by thier actions. See, if in one of your graphs, investing in thing A should give a positive feedback on B, then that is good. But if it also gives a negative feedback on C, that one a positive on D and again on E, which in the end lowers B again, it can get frustrating. It's a game, not the real world, if I wanna be confused I try to understand the financial crisis... To the second point, why are there only Golden Ages and no Dark Ages? Because it's not fun to see your empire crumble. The "grey" systems like maintenance in civ4 or stability in RFC are different as they are anti-snowballing measures and thus have a different goal....
Of course I want the game to be playable. I also want it to be more challenging, more realistic, and I want the fundamental objective and philosophy of the game to change from "victory" to standing the test of time. My proposed changes in the system dynamics of a game are designed to achieve these goals: they are not intended to be explicitly presented to players. Yes many of them are anti-snowballing measures, but that is the point of them: if the game is more challenging then it is also more rewarding (and educationally enriching) when you do get it right. If it has more complex and realistic systems, then imo a Civ game is also going to be more fun and have a greater diversity of possible outcomes. Mods like Rhys and Fall and RoM-AND are evidence of this. The idea of re-incarnating as a leader of a new civ when your old civ is destroyed means that you can continue to actively participate in an ongoing and unfolding story in each game, rather than just seeing each game as a superficial means to gratify your ego by getting a high score. The unfun-ness of things like Dark Ages, as I said, depends largely on context. If you have a victory- and score-oriented game in which every civilization participates in a continuous march of progress, then such a feature might be a nuisance. But in sandbox style game which is more like participating in an immersive and unpredictable story of human history unfolding, then "unfun" elements like Dark Ages (if properly implemented) become interesting features within the rich tapestry of the whole game experience.
In conclusion, I like your idea, but I fear you try to make the God Game which is all-encompassing. The World Formula doesn't exist. And secondly, you go way too far in the direction of a simulation. (A start in 20'000 BC? Why? A separate game may be, but not as part of a civilization game).
The 20,000BC start is optional. Perhaps it would be better to make this a scenario in which the world starts in an ice-age. The idea of it is that a civilisation - however 'primitive' - might have emerged in the ice-age if local conditions were right. The suggestion of a 20,000BC start option also comes from the notion that human history is more of a cyclical process rather than a continuous linear progression.
I always thought of Civ games as God-Games. You get a god's-eye view of the world over several millenia, and the highest difficulty level has usually been Deity! It doesn't matter if the "World Formula" (whatever that is) doesn't exists: all I'm proposing is that the next version of Civ continue the admirable trajectory of Civ's 1-4 towards greater complexity, immersion,
and realism.