Reflecting on my own psychology of intense player focused crises: I tried some severe dramatic ages in VI where half of your empire would split off and join a golden age AI to loyalty in ~5 turns. Even though I wanted the pain, it felt pretty demoralizing since victory was so closely tied to having cities and it felt like I lost everything I invested there (the ai was also stronger militarily). It was a fun and memorable game but I get why vanilla didn’t do that. In my current game it Stellaris, I just lost half my empire to AI claims and getting hit directly by the first crisis. However since I could move most of my pops to my surviving empire (and put them on new high-pop planets) I am feeling the narrative arc of the loss and a pivot, without fully derailing my game.
All this to say, I think VII’s strong reward for legacy paths will help make it less crushing to lose cities in crises so long as it doesn’t wipe out one’s progress on these paths. Overbuilding will also help me be less attached to the work I had done in my lost cities.
Now let’s just hope the game files have separate player and AI crisis settings…