Nice to finally meet someone else who is critical of the climate stuff of GS. And honestly, I don't think it's just a design failure, but also a feature of the global warming itself - how are you supposed to make a major mechanic out of the process which historically only started being relevant at the very end of 20th century? I mean, seriously. The game lasts from 4000 BC to 2050 AD. Of this, IRL global warming is a significant phenomenon on civilization level maybe since 1990s. It's basically the feature only significant in the very last era of the game, if made realistically. I honestly think climate change in civ6 is more about message and virtue signalling that anything profoundly impacting the gameplay. I'd go even further, I consider all environmental effects of GS insignificant. They are basically a shadow of usual feature of other such games, random events. Few random events per game is not something profoundly impacting the gameplay, it's more of a flavour thing (God these games need random events and such dynamic processes so desperately). And again, it's reflected by the reality itself - tell me, how many cases do you know of volcanoes ending civilizations, besides one moderately sized city of Pompeii and Minoans? I won't even comment on the presence of blizzards and tornadoes on the scale of centuries and continents, cause that's just stupid. Global - sized imperial - scaled game shouldn't follow such micro events, but here we are.
Climate has been very influential in the world history, but in much more subtle way: dynamic changes of regional patterns of climate in the background. You know: small ice ages, climate optimums, centuries lasting droughts, desertification. Such things were very interesting and influential. They had their impact on the collapse of Maya, rise and fall of Andean civilisations, North American natives, history of Sahara, fall of Rome, Migrations of Peoples, early modern European economy etc. Now if something like that has been happening and you were forced to adapt to that, that would be very interesting. You don't get perfect, predictable, fertile area forever - in one age yields may drop for you, slightly, but enough to cause a deficit and crisis. This way global warming could be an influential mechanic in the information era. Of course that would be too deep for this game so it could never be in.
Don't get me wrong, it is nice for the game to have an occasional volcano and moderately important global warming. But those are small micro features, third tier of importance for the global strategy.
Gunna sound weird. But I used to play starcraft 2 arcade games religiously. The SC2 Arcade was essentially a place where people could make and publish games using Blizzards map creator (which had assets from Warcraft 3 and SC2 and all of the stuff in sc2 that didn't make it in the published game. Blizzard gave us EVERYTHING to do with as we pleased). And there was this one game called Eras Zombie Invasion.
It's basically like CIV 6 zombie mode ---> but an RTS. The players played as one of several European countries and had to work together to eliminate the zombie bases that otherwise kept spawning stronger and stronger zombies. You started off in a sort of classical era and advanced into modernity just like civ. There were all sorts of mechanics present in this 2012ish-onwards little arcade game: random events (economic boons, economic depressions, outbreaks, boss events, you name it, it had it), technological progression that felt seriously impactful, country unique active abilities with tremendous cooldowns that had unique benefits AND DOWNSIDES that you had to coordinate with others for proper timing to use, warring with belligerent allied states (if someone trolled or whatever), etc.
ALL OF THIS WAS IN A SMALL ARCADE GAME. Blizzard just threw its map creator and practically ALL of its assets at the fanbase, and they were able, years before civ 6 NFP came out, to create one of the most complete and exciting RTS-style grand strategy games I had ever played. And one of the biggest reasons why the game had SO MUCH REPLAYABILITY was RANDOM EVENTS.
Now I get that some people hate RNG. Sometimes it can feel like the most unfair crap in the world. But when something is so monotonous and predictable, that is truly the WORST thing you could imagine for replayability of a game. There needs to be impactful random events that make sense. This little starcraft 2 arcade game that Blizzard had nothing to do with kept thousands of people coming back again and again to play it, and the games usually lasted anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 or so hours. Sometimes you get instawiped and sometimes you get intense, back and forth battling with reclamation of lost lands and whatnot. Civ needs this so bad, if nothing else, it needs this as an option.
It's too freaking predictable. It's too monotonous. Everyone I know, including myself, loves the first 100 turns of this game. After that, what a snoozefest. And sometimes the first 100 turns are frustrating as hell, and sometimes I feel like a God. But that's ok. Because it's relatable to life: there are so many things out of our control. We can influence it and get better, but we can never be omniscient like we can in civ6. There needs to be RNG. There has to be RNG. And it needs to be seriously impactful. Why not introduce random economic depressions and boons? Why not introduce plague outbreaks that can spread or be contained that nuke population centers? Introduce things to mitigate these effects sure, but they have to be there or the game just gets boring. Why do countries only have passive benefits/downsides? Why not give countries active abilities unique to them with long cooldowns or costs or whatever that reward timing, preparation, etc.
These are FUN aspects of micromanagement. And on that note, I can't forget that in the aforementioned little starcraft 2 arcade game, it had all the mechanics of base starcraft 2: I can set production queues so I don't have to micromanage EVERY little decision, I can give commands to multiple units at once (of course civ with 1UPT and turn-based nature you can't do that, but there's probably a middle ground firaxis or a modder with dll can reach to make unit management less tedious), I have clear and easy to see hotkeys that allow me to control multiple buildings or units at once (why can't civ add something like group hotkeys for cities? I can have as a huge Rome cities dedicated mostly to military production, settler production, etc., though production queues would also fix this crappy micromanagement system), etc.
It's sad to see what civ6 could be and what it isn't. It's double sad to see games much older than it and with much less resources put into development outmatch it in MULTIPLE ways.