I find it very interesting that a series that is BEGGING for commercial exploitation, in a market that VERY MUCH skews to an older demographic which likely has more disposable income, isn't being exploited.
The demographics of the Civ player base is an interesting question. This forum skews older than the average video game player, but is that true for the overall Civ market?
Much of the disconnect between my expectations and the game that has been delivered is, potentially, a generational thing. The development team is much younger than me, and what interests them most is clearly not the aspects of Civ that most interest me.
So, are they missing an opportunity by not creating a game that better caters to people like me, or are they doing the right thing and creating a game that appeals to the broader and younger audience of video game players?
All I know for sure is that I, personally, would happily pay 10x what I've paid for Civ 6 for a game that goes back to the original core principals of Civ 1, and updates it to take advantage of modern game design principles and current computing power to deliver a game that is truly intended to mimic the rise of civilization from the dawn of history. And then the lightning bolt wielding Apostles and Warlond Thrones can go off into the next edition of Heroes of Might & Magic or some more appropriate vehicle for those mechanics.
I agree there is a lot which could be tweaked, and a few areas where the game could be expanded, but what parts of the game actually need a complete do-over?
For me, the main issue is a lack of integration. Too many insufficiently connected systems. I trade with other leaders directly on a trade screen and the exchange of these goods happen in cyberspace, but I also have a trade system on the map with caravans going back and forth. A trade system that makes absolutely zero sense in Civ 6, by the way, as it dropped any pretense of accurately representing the benefit of trade between distant peoples. I could list off a whole bunch of stuff like this. Tourism has no impact on your economy, cultural influence has no impact on the relationship between your civilizations, "gold" has nothing to do with your tax policies but is instead something produced separate from the underlying economic production of your population, science is divorced from the amount of interaction you have with other civs, the size of your standing army has no impact on the size or productivity of your labour force, etc etc etc. The disjointed and independent systems used by Civ 6 feel like they've each been created in a vacuum and then cobbled together, rather than being designed to work together.
Honestly, in my not at all humble opinion, Civ6 is probably the "best" Civ iteration in a long, long time, if not the pinnacle of the series. Any real criticism of it is going to be based on person preferences rather than hard gameplay fails (with some obvious exceptions like air power).
Sure, that's absolutely true, personal preferences are what dictates who prefers what. Personally, I preferred it when Civ was a game where you were competing against other civs, rather than a Sim City clone, and where the other leaders were interesting characters with their own personality, as opposed to a disjointed collection of agendas divorced from how those leaders behave in game (would it really be that hard to code the leaders to act consistently with the agendas by which they judge the human player?). For me, Civ 6 is a great big hard gameplay fail on the "game" part of the play.