@Thunderbrd
You gave me an idea.
Say, all normal units get born "Human", as in with "None" culture.
Then, they slowly absorb the culture(s) from the plot they are currently sitting on (could be limited to cities, and could be limited to full-turn-skip).
And when their personal culture % is high enough (say, 51% for zero possible competition flukes), they actually CHANGE to a cultural unit of that culture.
And after that, they can never change to anything else, no matter how much different culture(s) they carry on them as baggage to influence cities and plots.
In other words, you NEVER build unique cultural units altogether - you TRAIN them via cultural influence over time, and it's a ONE-directional switch as well.
How's THAT for an idea, lol?
Now, multi-maps should still be real-time-ish, but my idea was always BEYOND merely several "surface maps" like in ToT.
I'm hoping for something more like Spore, where you have "planet map" alongside "space map", or even more specifically - separate "star system map" and "interstellar map".
And then a bunch of "planet maps" as well, though the latter would be an issue very directly tied to memory limitations, obviously.
But there's one thing that actually makes this rather easier:
1. The maps would be used only one at a time anyways, since it's turn-based. This drastically reduces the memory issue, compared to real time moving maps, like those of Spore.
2. Basically, you should really go for "load all, use at need", kinda exactly like with viewports right now. Heck, that's most probably HOW you gonna do it to begin with, I guess.
This said, and memory limits aside, what exactly is the current problem with implementing the concept itself?
Like, if you use it on a Duel map, then memory is quite not an issue yet, so what IS?