Civilisations Collapse far too frequently and easily

I'm having far too many games where nearly the entire world around me collapses into Independents, often these civilisations aren't even at war or under much barbarian pressure, they just explode to a series of checks the AI is incapable of understanding.

What's especially frustrating in combination with this is the extreme regularity that Civilisations respawn, which constantly ruins games. For example, I just tried playing Carthage again, conquered Italy, only to have the Romans respawn, DOWing me a large army barely a dozen turns after they Collapsed.

But in general, the ease Civilisations collapse isn't fun, it's arbitrary and stupidly ruins gameplay and long-term planning. You can have a crucial resource-agreement, war-ally, or destination for a great merchant and suddenly POOF, it's gone (often to have a hostile respawn a short while later).

This isn't just the Classical Era, every single game I've ever played in this recent build has the Vikings collapse before 1200, seemingly for no reason whatsoever, for them particularly they seem to collapse and respawn 3-5 times before 1700, it's ridiculous. This often happens to Russia as well.

Basically, Collapse triggers need to be more stringent, as well as Respawn Conditions. Both happen so often in sequence they don't have any meaning, and only irritate the player.

 

Both collapses and respawns could benefit from happening more gradually at a slower pace.

I can't think of many multiple era spanning civs which haven't collapsed at least once IRL, though. The optimal balance for realism would be to allow most AI civs to collapse at least once. For especially long-lasting civs like China and India, it's fair and realistic to expect them to collapse and respawn several times.

 

In the case of hostorical Carthage, if Hannibal had conquered Rome when he crossed Alps, instead to stay and do nothing near Cannae for years, Rome shouldn't respawn and defeated him forevere.

So when your target AI collapses because of your invasion, you must finish your work and put your rule on indipendent cities, otherwise they can reorganize, resurrect, and counter attack.

This happened in history, this happens in the game. It's an option your enemies have, you know they can collapse.

IMHO frequent collapses of Vikings and Russian well represent their history of union and division of their territories under one rule.

 

I personally really like the ways civilizations are always ‘rising and falling’ (see what I did there). It really does mirror really history, and is an added challenge for the human player to make sure they don’t collapse themselves. One of the things that makes RFC and DoC some of the best civ mods in my opinion.

 

In my Egypt game, I noticed Sweden/Vikings would periodically capture a bunch of cities in NW Russia in addition to all of the Scandinavian land, then they would collapse to independents. Then, they would respawn and recapture all of the cities just to eventually collapse again. This cycle seems a little foolish, but I think it is also quite natural and in the spirit of the mod. As a human player, I often make the same mistake as the AI, but I just reload the game and no one ever knows about it

 

I find that if Vikings/Sweden don't collapse (usually for me in the 1500s/1600s after the Reformation) they become a tech giant on par with England.