I like the premise of ages as mini-games which means ideally each age has it's own explore, expand etc. phase. I feel like the systems they have now are the bare bones of a full, but unique age-specific 4X experience, and I think the base game should improve the victory conditions a bit before the final patch.
Here are two examples, modern economic victory and exploration cultural (religious) victory, that show how existing systems can be implemented with more texture.
For the economic victory, I wish my factories were doing a little bit more. For instance, instead of a factory resource buffing the town which contains the factory, I want to assign that buff to other settlements. This is because the track is called "railroad tycoon". So if I have chocolate improving happiness (already in the game), I want to "send" that happiness on frickin' trains to other towns. Then, the trains like merchants can be attacked. And for goodness' sake merchants should take the train and you should be allowed to trade factory produced goods with other players. I get the feeling this was the original intent and seeing how godawful the railroad textures are at simply lining up, they thought the train was too much to add. Well, they can abstract this without an animated train. Either way, I want my tycoonery to be doing something.
For religion, it's way too spammy as is. The idea should not be that there are religious wars, since religion only happens in the one age. It's should be explore/expand/exploit, so you basically have one chance to spread religion and only under overwhelming circumstances or special leader abilities can you actually fight out back and forth religious wars. The idea should be that evagelizing a religion is only part I of the religious gameplay. Part 2 ought to include a reliquary and diplomacy phase. You ought to be able to trade relics. You ought to be able to slot relics into army commanders (when fighting units of another faith there's a bonus, penalty for same faith, modified by religious belief, leaders or policies). You ought to be able to slot relics into economic buildings (or culture) for bonus yields from pilgrims (more world believers in that religion, more pilgrims, bigger yields). This system would lead to massive strategizing over what faith to support, which you can't oppose, maybe adopting tolerance to benefit from other faith pilgrims. It should also affect diplomacy. There should hands down be a religion that anyone who's a majority that religion must join a war of someone who has a certain wonder built, like you know, a crusade. By creating a second exploit phase with the same foundational religious system and using the same concept of relics, this civ 7 religious system would be much better. Imagine even a liberalization civic that lets you escape certain religious effects in the crisis phase.
Those are my two major examples of taking civ 7's existing systems, without majorly modifying them, and creating much more engaging and diverse age related gameplay.
Other thoughts I've had that are less clear:
I don't like the World bank. It's just a countdown timer with gold cost. It should be more interesting then that. For instance, what if you had to deposit massive reserves that economic crippled you in the late game, but slowly began indebting other players where you could call in their debt to force them to go to peace or war? It's consistent with World War politics and as like a Bretton Woods/IMF milestone from modern to post-modern.
I hate the culture victory of the final age. Proof of how dumb it is comes from the AI spamming the map with dozens of explorers and it seems like no AI ever gets all the artifacts. Instead, the culture victory should be a modern age equivalent of exploring. So half of what your explore is the anthrosphere rather than the ecosphere. You have to get travel permission for a scholar to visit foreign universities. Maybe study for a time, maybe bribe the government, maybe follow around miners. It should get into the geography of cities, and be a mini puzzle game that's more of an educated dice roll that becomes a progress bar toward getting a relic. Then, when you go to dig up the relic, your site can be attacked. You can pay a host for protection, or you can hire local mercenaries which pop up as barbarians. You would hope the host takes too long in responding before you can dig up the artifact, would be fun.
Anitiquity codices should be tradeable. Secondly, in addition to earning them through wonder construction, you should be able to sacrifice culture yields or a civic pick up or something to get them. This would introduce an interesting meta of never upgrading civics and spamming to an early culture legacy.
For economy and treasure fleets, there should be a fur trapper/silk road merchant equivalent that takes longer and is more perilous (requires lots of influence and friendly independent powers and maybe a big military presence). Also, they should modify the distant lands concept to include same continent lands of a certain distance. It's just that, if a place is minimum X deep ocean tiles away it's automatically distant lands even if total distance is X+2, but a land that's significantly far on the same mega continent is also a distant land. I do like the fact that continents have massive unsettled land even into the early modern age. That's good.
Here are two examples, modern economic victory and exploration cultural (religious) victory, that show how existing systems can be implemented with more texture.
For the economic victory, I wish my factories were doing a little bit more. For instance, instead of a factory resource buffing the town which contains the factory, I want to assign that buff to other settlements. This is because the track is called "railroad tycoon". So if I have chocolate improving happiness (already in the game), I want to "send" that happiness on frickin' trains to other towns. Then, the trains like merchants can be attacked. And for goodness' sake merchants should take the train and you should be allowed to trade factory produced goods with other players. I get the feeling this was the original intent and seeing how godawful the railroad textures are at simply lining up, they thought the train was too much to add. Well, they can abstract this without an animated train. Either way, I want my tycoonery to be doing something.
For religion, it's way too spammy as is. The idea should not be that there are religious wars, since religion only happens in the one age. It's should be explore/expand/exploit, so you basically have one chance to spread religion and only under overwhelming circumstances or special leader abilities can you actually fight out back and forth religious wars. The idea should be that evagelizing a religion is only part I of the religious gameplay. Part 2 ought to include a reliquary and diplomacy phase. You ought to be able to trade relics. You ought to be able to slot relics into army commanders (when fighting units of another faith there's a bonus, penalty for same faith, modified by religious belief, leaders or policies). You ought to be able to slot relics into economic buildings (or culture) for bonus yields from pilgrims (more world believers in that religion, more pilgrims, bigger yields). This system would lead to massive strategizing over what faith to support, which you can't oppose, maybe adopting tolerance to benefit from other faith pilgrims. It should also affect diplomacy. There should hands down be a religion that anyone who's a majority that religion must join a war of someone who has a certain wonder built, like you know, a crusade. By creating a second exploit phase with the same foundational religious system and using the same concept of relics, this civ 7 religious system would be much better. Imagine even a liberalization civic that lets you escape certain religious effects in the crisis phase.
Those are my two major examples of taking civ 7's existing systems, without majorly modifying them, and creating much more engaging and diverse age related gameplay.
Other thoughts I've had that are less clear:
I don't like the World bank. It's just a countdown timer with gold cost. It should be more interesting then that. For instance, what if you had to deposit massive reserves that economic crippled you in the late game, but slowly began indebting other players where you could call in their debt to force them to go to peace or war? It's consistent with World War politics and as like a Bretton Woods/IMF milestone from modern to post-modern.
I hate the culture victory of the final age. Proof of how dumb it is comes from the AI spamming the map with dozens of explorers and it seems like no AI ever gets all the artifacts. Instead, the culture victory should be a modern age equivalent of exploring. So half of what your explore is the anthrosphere rather than the ecosphere. You have to get travel permission for a scholar to visit foreign universities. Maybe study for a time, maybe bribe the government, maybe follow around miners. It should get into the geography of cities, and be a mini puzzle game that's more of an educated dice roll that becomes a progress bar toward getting a relic. Then, when you go to dig up the relic, your site can be attacked. You can pay a host for protection, or you can hire local mercenaries which pop up as barbarians. You would hope the host takes too long in responding before you can dig up the artifact, would be fun.
Anitiquity codices should be tradeable. Secondly, in addition to earning them through wonder construction, you should be able to sacrifice culture yields or a civic pick up or something to get them. This would introduce an interesting meta of never upgrading civics and spamming to an early culture legacy.
For economy and treasure fleets, there should be a fur trapper/silk road merchant equivalent that takes longer and is more perilous (requires lots of influence and friendly independent powers and maybe a big military presence). Also, they should modify the distant lands concept to include same continent lands of a certain distance. It's just that, if a place is minimum X deep ocean tiles away it's automatically distant lands even if total distance is X+2, but a land that's significantly far on the same mega continent is also a distant land. I do like the fact that continents have massive unsettled land even into the early modern age. That's good.
