Nationalism does practically nothing, despite destroying empires in real life. But my ideas of an answer to this would require another long post and a Civ 7. And the Civ system doesn't really allow for another nation to rise up in your lands, because most of the time you'll have 10 civs, and there isn't as many civs to fit in to a huge empire like that. The Ottomans had to deal with the Balkans, a (not literally, I respect their cultures. I mean the disparity) mess of languages and religions. The Balkans had to deal with the Balkans, even. There's 9 cultures at least in the Balkans (excluding Bulgaria and Romania and Hungary). Strangely, Hungary ingame has Belgrade (is it the Ottomans? might be the Ottomans) as a city, and Zagreb (this one isn't as far fetched as they were both under the same king).
hint for the ideas: Definitely more often than not in the last 1,200 years, there's been more than one Germany. Or Russia. Or Mongolia. Or Spain. most countries, really. Most weren't unified.
There is one fundamental design problem with adding proper secessionist movements, rebellions, revolutions, emergent states, new players etc in civ series, and I always remind it:
The reliance on leaders for each major civilization - now even worse, because full 3d animations. Obviously, new civs randomly emerging during game can't get 3d leader characters.
The potential solutions are:
- Disable "real diplomacy" with them forever, essentially limiting them to barbarian or city-state existence. Sort of what loyalty system does. Honestly I think that's a horrible solution. We'd all like real civil wars, revolutions, secessionist movements and new, suddenly emergent empires - REAL rebels, not crippled, pseudo-civ minor players.
- Banish the historical leader system or "one civ from ancient to future". That's never going to happen. That's the appeal of Civ series, even more now when its rivals Humankind and Old World will each have its own signature take (changing avatar of changing culture in HK and ancient dynasty in OW).
- Limit rebellions to "once we rebel we go to civilization of our preferred ethnicity/culture/religion/ideology" and "once dead culture's cities may rebel and reestablish it. It'd be already something nice (and no, loyalty system is not nearly enough), but it still doesn't allow us to see real Civil War, Revolution or Rebellion.
At this point I'd give up, but Humankind proposed brilliant solution to this problem (here used not for rebellions for all civs)
Let's introduce full - fledged rebellions to the game, which can form full - fledged civilizations. Usually they just wanna join "canonical" civilizations (we Indian rebelling cities wanna rebel and join India once again). Sometimes, however, they wanna go independent. And then, for leaders...
...let's procedurally generate 3d leaders for such civs from a bunch of basic, generic assets. With some respect to their "native culture".
Of course they wouldn't be voiced, but goddamnit, I can accept this minor exception for sake of finally this game having this basic historical feature, priceless for the difficulty level and general dynamism.
Years ago I remember reading an interview - with Meier himself maybe - stating that they had implemented dark ages in an earlier version of Civ, and the removed them when play testers ended up just restarting when it happened.
So I think that's lead their design policy for a while, that players want continual forward progress/momentum, not set backs.
However I'd agree that it's the sort of thing that should be able to satisfy everyone if implemented with proper difficulty levelling and game options set up.
Difficulty levelling in civ series is ridiculous for a long time. 8 difficulty levels of which first three are basically garbage nobody plays and which could be as well rolled into one "beginner semi-tutorial family-friendly casual-friendly reddit-friendly" setting. Prince and King which are almost identical and could be as well rolled into "normal" setting, no buffs for player or AI. And then last free difficulty levels, with gigantic jump between each one, up to Deity which ranges from borderline impossible in civ4 to "entirely doable, just goddamn infuriating". Let's just turn them into "very hard but still fair" hybrid of Emperor and Immortal and "we wanna please masochists, but this time do it in more interesting way" Deity.
Then, on top of that, slap some XCOM-style (or Paradox-style) Ironman optional setting "autosave each turn, no coming back" and some other optional hilarity such as, IDK, hardcore mode which makes mere survival until late game an achievement in itself. Because for example this mode is entirely unchained in random game - ruining events, or makes political system hilariously unstable and empires rise and fall as rapidly as IRL, or because your interface is crippled in some fun "realistic" way (for example you can't choose specific techs to reserach, just nudge your science in a general direction you wanna follow; or for example the further cities are, the more autonomous they are, and this only gets better with eras).
You end up with much better difficulty system, fitting modern era. Modern era IRL, not in civ series.
This series needs a revolution in many, many outdated, stale and stagnant aspects. Comparing jump between civ2 and civ3, or civ3 and civ4, or civ4 and civ5, most recent "jump" was not quite as remarkable. Civ6 has inherited a lot of civ5 mediocre solutions and "traditional" features. Its most revolutionary changes were unstacked cities, which didn't however revolutionize the fundamental "linear accumulation of yields, same across all ages" economy; second tech tree which is, well, second tech tree; and by GS climate and disasters (very cool mechanic but hardly fundamental).
The biggest problem is combat and AI. I am absolutely convinced there is no damn way to teach AI on the current technological level how to handle 1UPT in the way it works in civ. It is just a combat system perfectly nightmarish to program AI for. You need a ton of effort, time and resources to make it go from "catatonic" to "mentally challenged", before you hit the glass ceiling of "we don't wanna make every AI turn last 30 minutes". I'd be fully ready to abandon 1UPT entirely, if its cost is an inability for AI to endanger humans with warfare from early till late game, consistently, without a need of
years of patching.
I hated stacks as well they way they worked in old civs and old 4X games in general, so I'd be for every creative solution making combat less unbearable for AI. And army management and logistics less tedious for the human player ("it's time to click 100 times per turn to move 50 units across the sea"). Limited stacks up to 4 or 8 units for example, performing automated battles, where the strategy lies in the composition and quality of troops and where to engage the enemy, and army movement tedium is reduced 4-8 times.
