One of the biggest problems I have with Civ games (played thousands of hrs cumulatively.. also MOO2 has the same problem) is the late-game tedium of managing non-top-4 cities. The ones where you will never produce a wonder there, and your choices there make almost no difference since any result it can give you will be too little too late. This is especially a problem when conquering, since the population and infrastructure get wrecked, putting an already measly city a further 20 turns behind to regrow and rebuild before beginning to do anything interesting.
What if cities could be grouped into regions, provinces, etc, where their production and territory are grouped? Let's say you get a tier 2 govt like Monarchy, or some civic like Beuracracy, and now you can group up to 3 cities into a region with a shared max population, happiness, and production. It would be a huge leap forward for empire building the way Nationalism is for domination.
Then you get to Nationalism or something and you create provinces with higher max populations and more cities, and all unclaimed land in between them gets claimed.
Then at any point, you have no more than 8 cities/territories/regions to micromanage, and never consider a city as junk. Of course there would be more complications from this, but I think it could make the game a lot more enjoyable in the mid-late game, and make people actually want to progress rather than heed the call of Baba Yeti and restart for that fresh, fun, ancient era game...
What if cities could be grouped into regions, provinces, etc, where their production and territory are grouped? Let's say you get a tier 2 govt like Monarchy, or some civic like Beuracracy, and now you can group up to 3 cities into a region with a shared max population, happiness, and production. It would be a huge leap forward for empire building the way Nationalism is for domination.
Then you get to Nationalism or something and you create provinces with higher max populations and more cities, and all unclaimed land in between them gets claimed.
Then at any point, you have no more than 8 cities/territories/regions to micromanage, and never consider a city as junk. Of course there would be more complications from this, but I think it could make the game a lot more enjoyable in the mid-late game, and make people actually want to progress rather than heed the call of Baba Yeti and restart for that fresh, fun, ancient era game...