Barbarians shouldn't be so advanced

[Boris Gudenuf]

Civilization, which is a vague and i bet debated term, maybe not, but states, for sure. States assembled and collapsed multiple times in every area of the world because they were hard to maintain. The definition of barbarians tends to become in modern times (now) "people who lived out of a state".

As to be transient and momentary, i wouldn't say that. At the beginning of States, they were symbiotic with it. They were trading far away resources, they were raiding them, they were hired as mercenaries, etc. etc. But some have argued that the "barbarian" way of life was vastly preferable to a sedentary life based on cereal crops, which was painful and slavish. If any, the generalization of the state is the enigma here.

In terms of the game, equating 'Civilization' with 'City Building' is not inaccurate for most of the game's time period. The game currently (IMHO) produces two major problems from that:
1. Many, in fact most, early 'Civilizations' that became very important later, and thus desirable to include in the game, were not City Builders for a great deal of the early game. Some were purely pastoral, others migrated (like, virtually all the major European states, including Greece) to such an extent that they don't start considering themselves as distinct until the migrations were finished, and that wasn't until, in some case, just before the Classical Era started. That means a lot of the early game is completely artificial, and more important from the game-play standpoint, the mobility of the early Civs is completely missing. I'm still hoping that the Maori Mobile Sea Start mechanism can be adapted by Modders or Firaxis to a Land Mobile Start to give us some more playable options.
2. The case can be made that the modern city has outlived its usefulness. This has been debated over the past 40 years (at least!) and is still debatable, but given the increasing pollution problems of all kinds attendant on cramming millions of people into a small space, and the problems of transportation and housing, the case can be made that spreading the population out into smaller 'nodes' would be a Better Thing.
Whether the debaters are right about that I couldn't say (my sister might, she has her PhD in Population Geography and made a very lucrative career out of advising state and local governments on how to deal with 'city' problems) but what an interesting variation on the Civ 'End Game'!
At a certain point in the Atomic or Information Era, the City Center becomes just another District and the effects of Districts can be assigned as 'Bonuses' to whatever other District(s) are connected by Transportation - with some kind of End Game MagLevel/High Speed Rail or Musk's Tunnels as a late game requirement.

Oh, and in Modern Eras, the definition of "Barbarian" includes those that live inside a Civilization but have no idea how it works, or what behavior is required of them to make it work. There's no point in barring the gates: the barbarians are already inside, and in some cases in charge.

 

[Naokaukodem]

I already said it in another topic, but it could be done so that you control citizens instead of cities. You could do cities out of citizens, but you could also collapse more "easily", it is to say not to waste entire games because of it, because it would be the normal course of the game. By controlling citizens, you could even play barbarians...
I already imagined something like : each citizen has before the industrial revolution 3 slots of work. Each non-used slot creates a point of "Coercion". With enough points of "coercion", you can create a state. But if you don't have enough at a point (a little like the era points work now) anymore, you collapse, your citizens fly away your cities and you go back to a sparse tribe or pack of tribes. It's very schematic because it represents only the civil revolution kind of collapse, while there are many more, some still included in the game (conquest, although it should be done - A LOT - more profitable pillaging wars), some totally absent (diseases, starving/weather).