My personal guess is that eras and civ-evolutions will be part of the next, great 4x game, but not in the form we've seen them so far.
By eras, I mean game rules that evolve over time. I think this will be key to keeping the late turns from bogging down into long, tedious click-fests of increasingly meaningless decisions. But the transition from one era to the next will need to arise organically from in game events, be subject to player agency, and feel seamless, not disjointed.
By civ-evolution, I mean the potential to change traits over time, including potentially civ and city names, but only under the full control of the player. I don't believe having the ability to start as the Hittites and evolve into Byzantium would be a problem, I think it would be a fun feature. But being forced to drop your starting civ and not being able to start as Ancient America is a problem. Such a big problem, frankly, that I'm still shocked Firaxis leadership didn't identify it as a possible show-stopper.
Also, Genghis Khan will be in the base version of the next, great 4x game. Some unforced errors are easy to avoid.
Want to expand on this, because you hit many of the elements of the game I've been contemplating recently.
First, the trend towards some kind of Era or Age differentiation in 4X games. It seems to be solidly entrenched now, since not only Civ but Humankind, Ara and Millenia have fully embraced it. I completely agree that it is a handy mechanic to manage transitions in the historical record that the games want to (sort of) model.
On the other hand, all Eras/Ages are both artificial in that none of them applied to the whole world at the same time, and as modeled in too many games, utterly Euro-centric and non-applicable to most of the world, and so become artificial game mechanics rammed down the throat of the poor Aksumite, Mayan or Chola player.
- And, doubling down on the worst parts of any Era system, forcing your Civ through a bunch of changes up to and including complete dissolution when there is no in-game reason for it or no way to avoid it, no matter how brilliant your play has been up to that point.
Put simply, the Era system, at least as modeled so far and especially in Civ VII, is a strait-jacket forced upon the player that mandates the flow of the game regardless of anything the player does. Whether they articulate it or not, that is probably the thing that rankles most players more than anything else in the game.
Civ VII's specific, overwhelming problem is not Ages or Civ switching or even the complete Sheep Leap (or Flock Up) that is the Modern Age set of Techs and Units. It is the lack of gamer choice in almost every part of the game.
You cannot choose to play any non-Antiquity Civ in Antiquity - or any other Out Of Age Civ outside their specific Age.
You cannot choose a starting biome for your Civ-Leader combination, only the basic map type. If I want to play on an Arboreal Forest (Taiga) or Temperate or Tropical Rough starting position, I cannot: I take what the game assigns to my Leader-Civ combination (and, by the way, in most cases that seems to be Tundra regardless of the combination: as in Civs 5 and 6, I find myself restarting 90% of my games trying to get a non-Arctic start for my distinctly non-Arctic Civ)
If your game goes distinctly pear-shaped for your Civ - as in, finding a complete lack of viable trade routes for your Aksumite boats - there is no changing any of your characteristics to match the in-game situation, until the artificial Age Change - and then your choice is an almost-entirely new Civ with, too frequently, only a passing relationship to your previous Civ.
And the worst part of all this is that, without meaningful choices in too many parts of the game, you wind up playing almost the same way every time. Your little 'victory paths' in each Age are set by the game design, your Civ is set in all its aspects from the start of each Age, you have almost no way to adapt to your terrain and neighbor situation in the game, and so very quickly all the play becomes Rote. Having learned the best way to amass Artifacts or Relics or Codexes or Treasure Resources, you do it that way every time until you start making up 'Victory' conditions for yourself: "Can I do it without doing X, or doing it with one eye closed?".
Whether in Civ VII or some other game, we need meaningful choices in the game, and in Civ VII's case, that means more choices on on who and what we are playing from the start of game, and choices about how our Civ will adapt to changes in the game - and whether those changes and situations force/allow us to warp our Civ into another version of itself or into something largely New - not completely new, because Culture is extremely durable and changes constantly - Arabic Syria under the Umayads or Abbasids might have seemed largely Brand New, but the Mesopotamian background was still there, and the influences from both west (Byzantium) and east (India, Central Asia, Persia) were 'warping' the Arabic states even as they basked in their conquests.
Put that into the game, and give the gamer a real chance to Write Their Own Narrative, and One More Turn becomes a real aspiration instead of just a forlorn hope.
