HorseshoeHermit
20% accurate as usual, Morty
Here are a few of my expectations:
1) Fix the diplomacy system so it makes sense. Civilizations should act from a rational self interest that in some ways can be understood and reasoned with and it should relate to their historical situation in game, not according to "playing to win" the game.
So your proposal is specifically distinct from that of altering the incentives of the game (and the representations) so as to make historical rationality more commonly the 'playing to win' move?
Now I must ask what you mean by historical rationality. You could mean many things, very different. I can imagine three, and the possibility of something I can't imagine:
-The civilization is led along a progression of policy choices as in world history.
(then there are no alternative histories, frankly no choices, and this isn't Civ but instead a historical-themed TBS, there are board games and abandonware for that.)
-The civilization chooses self-interest to become stronger and/or more secure
(but isn't playing to win? This is a contradiction; the A.I. not managing to compute self-interest is a problem of A.Is. are hard to make, not that it is over-obsessed with anything different from that goal.)
-The civilization chooses self-interest to become stronger and/or more secure interpreted through the anthropology of its citizens
(extremely ambitious)
I'd prefer to do you one better and take the last route, except also make the conceit of the game include the anthropological , and now, instead of being about incentivizing those choices or not (and coming back to historical simulation: the movie), we have either/or different choices in which we see players selecting and diverting those very named phenomena toward the strategic end of the game; or we have a game that is upfront about challenging you to enact those very named phenomena via a different battery of options entirely.
So is this "Civ" game that we want, really, one that must have a different economy entire? That food/hammers/gold can only get a kind of game as we see so far?
In some ways this is not a huge redesign. All mechanics after food, hammers, settlements, and working tiles, are implicit anthroponomies modeled in the game. The social policies of Civ: V purport to describe ways of social organization that are comprehensible and feasible to citizens living in particular technological eras - and have meaningful absences of policies that you can define but are not adoptable at all. The tech tree shape lays down the manner in which philosophic thought can proceed from technology to inspiration. The happiness device is a kludge that stipulates a people who are sorely uncomfortable with their own kine multiplying in the land (i.e. is a nonsense to the lens of Reality).
Civ's skeleton is enough to support any design of arbitrarily many "local" properties of cities, measured in numbers or otherwise, and empire metrics atop that. Local property modularity is very powerful; the Community Balance Patch's take on happiness proves the expressive power of that degree of freedom for design (even if I agree no way with their alternative).
I believe, and some research I've done is showing me, that drilling down a little bit to the anthropic level, can generate this satisfying macroscopic dynamic of the systems you refer to... of getting diplomacy incentives organically, of cohering to a persisting civ identity that is "rational and can be understood and reasoned with", without banging it into hardwiring or a 'computerizing' attitude modifiers system. I bet it can make trade ubiquitous too, thanks for pointing me in that direction. I was stuck on a pacing problem for war; maybe peace will provide the answer.