Honestly at this point their communication with fans/customers is so ugly for recent times that I don't think even sudden reveal "Play we are working on third xpac after all" will make me satisfied. Distaste will remain.
I have simply engaged with too many gaming companies who have contact with their fanbase - weekly, monthly, random, whatever - and keep it informed what's happening - to tolerate 4,5,6 months of silence before dropping next patch or DLC and running back to high silence. This is not the way to earn customer respect in 2020, at least regarding as massive and sophisticated games as 4X, and one begins to doubt there some really important innovations are going to happen with Civ if they have communications and development schedule as if it was year 2005.
(to be honest I am not sure if it isn't actually worse than civ5 era - that'd mean regress, not stagnation
)
Civ is strangely conservative series recently. Everybody else stopped doing a ancient two - xpac - model - few - patches - nothing else method (I actually prefer many relatively optional DLCs over this), communication is beaten horse, AI is more or less terrible for a decade - "okay" but
never acknowledging the issue for a decade is not okay. Down to mechanics - some very stale fundamental mechanics that changed little for a long time. God damn how long is this game having traditonal 8 difficulty levels? Despite this measure utterly not working for the last decade - first three diff levels are ridiculous and nobody plays them, "normal" is super easy and "ultimate challenge" deflated horribly between civ4 and civ6.
The same strange paradigm "cities need hills to have any decent production" - no connection to history in any way (half of worlds great metropolies of history wouldn't work according to this idea) and eternal pain regarding city placement and development.
The same extreme snowball problem in the early game and very linear growth afterwards.
No taxes or any actual interesting economic system (God forbid resembling history), just yellow round from the ground forever, thank God at least trade system exists, it was actually amazing innovation in BNW. Btw maybe thats why I am do disappointed, BNW was that one incredibly innovative iteration.
Eternal problem of people demanding some sort of civil warz revolution, rebellion, secession system - impossible to realize forever and forever because of one problem "who would be leader screen for split civs", forever a major block to make this game more dynamic because of that stupid technicality and avoiding the subject.
The same blue currency pay for a static tree way to tech progress (except now needs purple currency too), no innovation here despite countless ideas to make progress more interesting. Look at Stellaris semi-random card-based specialist-appointing different-yield-for-different-tech-category system to see much much could be really innovated here over 25 years. All Eurekas did was adding a ton of tedious simple micro movements on top of a mechanic stale over entire series.
Map covered with mindless Barbarians akin to orcs or insect hivemind for 25 years instead of turning them into something requiring strategy and God forbid resembling history (I am honestly surprised modern cultural changes didn't make the very idea of "chaotic evil savages can't negotiate must exterminate" humans controversial
)
The same old story with community loving every bit of immersion and yet steady decline in "feel the living world" aspects (statistics, demographics, victory cinematics, god forbid Random Events because they reduce steady dopamine flow and may make you feel bad etc)
Steady regress in other areas such as modding
Brave New World was an incredible breath of fresh air and shown how much can you change and make game deeper, more dynamic and engaging even with a single expansion. Then comes civ6 which is civ5 2.0 but with half of once amazing civ 5 BNW features actually worse (garbage world congress, no more ideology cold war, somewhat inferior feeling religion) and major innovations being really based around crazy micromanagment hidden under the idea of innovation (a ton of tedious braindead moves needed to tech fast, need to babysit ever city over every tile placement, millions of religious unit spam apparently counting as enhanced religion, even more painful army movement through rough terrain, need to constsntly spam new builders instead of steady work of workers, TWO tech currencies and tech trees, more painful wonder placement, governors micromanagement, every damn city State and great person nie having separate bonus etc)
Oh and feature bloat - that's also civ6 idea of innovation. Culture victory has seemingly a ton of more options now, and yet its lategame is less exciting than in civ5. World congress seems to have much more options than civ5 WC but its an utter abomination when compared with its precedessor - you know, maybe turning every mechanic into arcade slot machine instead of keeping feet on the historical ground wasn't that good idea. Religion has a ton of mechanics devoted to that stupid idea of physical religious combat, and religious victory is by far the most tedious and boring of all.
The best thing is - all this feature bloat and more micromanagment only widen the abyss between human and terrible AI who cannot use them, so they actually may make the game more boring instead of less boring, as it is becoming easier - you get more and more perfectionist means to ruin mentally challenged AI
I love this series (as a wise man once said: the opposite of love is not hate but indifference
) and I really hope Humankind actually turns out better in most areas, succeeds and forces Civ devs to innovate in making the game deeper, not wider and not with just more currencies and bonuses drowning your attention spam and AI's incompetencs. Oh and more immersive and making you feel like you shape history, not generate multicolor points in a board game.
Throw out half of mechanics and two thirds of bonuses, make rest of mechanics converge into some deep strategy and procedurally generated story, make them just suitable for AI enough to sometimes make you fear it, make the game truly moddable and maybe next iteration will avoid the embarassment of barely outdoing ten year old civ5 in current player user counts on Steam.
I mean, there have to be reasons why civ5 was still having more players than civ6 for YEARS after 2016 and having less only relatively recently. Still, 40% of daily players of those two belong to 6 years older civ5 today. This is also counteargument regarding our complaints being seemingly only of a small group of lunatic elite.
). 
