I agree with
@Bibor and
@megabearsfan, I have even discussed the very same things you both mentioned in the past. Civ 5 and 6 do feel static, boring and too formulaic for me, and have played everything Firaxes made from Civ 3 onwards.
As for mid to late game goes, Cooperative victory conditions, regional events that demand cooperation such as regional benefits for climate change impacting less said region, or having increased population increase based on how countries deal with immigration. Like for instance, having migration waves and events activating after wars or catastrophic events, or negative effects to high score civs due to the impoverishment of smaller weaker neighbors. Trade deals as well could provide benefits, or even funding revolutions in other civs countries triggering a a friendlier leader of sorts. Or maybe a dynamic global resource economy, one that is based on what the map offers.
I think they should scrap the cards policy system and recreate something like between civ 4-5 policies which affects other civs, and to have negative/positive effects with a conditional clause. An example will be some civic that values immigration, which increases pop whenever countries goes to war, but that also increases unhappiness. Something like domestic/foreign policies will do that are affected by both local and foreign events.
I do also expect a less deterministic approach to leader traits, as being soft pushed to play in a particular manner takes away from choosing a civilization, rather a path to victory with a historical name.
While I do not like the district system I cannot find a better solution to it, hence I would recommend a rescaling of the values the game has, since districts take forever to build and their return values are too weak. It also suffers from being to static and boring, maybe have blank districts on which one could combine buildings in designing our own, to better tailor our victory conditions, or to get specific GP or buffs, like having economic buildings along with museums could boost tourism, or scientific and military buildings could boost military tech. Or to have theaters next to workshops to greatly improve happiness.
Civ 4 and 5 combined had the best approach to GP which imo on 6 it sucks and its plain math. To have GP being achieved by happiness levels and to have the type of GP determined by the citizen manager from 4, which was my fav. I think civ 5 and 6 lost the charm of managing citizens and became redundant compared to what it was.
I also think the adjacency thing should be between buildings within a district, not from external feats, since its silly to have a campus in the corner of a city separated by jungles and farmlands.
Building back roads makes a lot of sense, and having back workers instead of builders makes the game more interacting as well.
As for diplomacy and trade, I might think the game might benefit by taking the opposite approach of having trade available as tech allows by default, and having the trade dialogue as means of controlling what gets into your civ from your neighbors. I am thinking of avoiding capital outflows and embargos to deter enemy civ. That way we would avoid the chore of having the disgusting page with all resources and be trading fur for the same 5gpt the whole game.
What do you think?