I'll have to disagree with you. While there is a nice amount of pretty historical things, like the ones you mentioned, the big picture of history is completely missing. Empires are stabile, countries exist from the start, warfare is always like it was in 20th century (unit per hex -> large fronts, completely different way to wage war compared to anything before 15-19th centuries), real "revolutions" or inpendencies don't happen. Actually CiV would be extremely historical, if we could just play with enormous map and hundreds of civilizations.
But yeah, the AI is the worst. Otherwise, CiV has done a pretty good job in keeping the game as historical and as "simple" as possible. If I want an fresh exploration experience or something, I play CiV. If I want something historical, I'll Play games of Paradox Interactive.
But then it'd probably be a pretty terrible game, lol. I mean even the fact that the Great Leader of the nation survives for 4000 years is a bit on the wonky side.
One thing I miss is the long articles discussing every single element of the game. I used to sit down and just read about everything and knew the entire Civlopedia. These days all of the DLC and expansion nations get small little paragraphs giving a brief summary of what they did.... which undermines exactly how important these people are to history.
One of the other major things that is overwhelmingly un-historical about the games is how and why civilizations become world powers.
History and technology are very inter-woven in a deeper way than your tank/artillery example. Greece and Persia rose as ancient powers merely because they were the only ones building armies. Before Greece and Persia you saw very small forces of men, under 1,000 and they were often told of as epics because their invading force after crossing the Mediterranian would be in the lower 100s. When Greece and Persia arrived on the scene they had armies of tens and hundreds of thousands (and a million for Persia).
What would leave these empires in ruin was inadequate political structures for a dominating world power. You would not see an empire like Persia, Greece, or Mongolia actually able to survive until the Portuguese, Spanish, British and French who institute the company system in which a group of self-interested individuals run the country as a colony.
This system worked because revolution was really ineffective in a world in which armies were very complicated (3 people per cannon, 3 per mortar, 300 per ship, horse+person per cavalry). All major powers had training systems in place in which a person would start off as young as 12 and by the time they are 21 they have a decade of experience.
You can't just pull up 300 random guys and run a ship.... hence it was very easy to maintain stability.
The advent of the bazooka and the assault rifle made it very easy to start a revolution because all of these weapons were so simple you could print directions on the side of the weapon This could also be the reason why the game basically ends once you get a bazooka.
One feature I liked from.... maybe Civ 2... was that if unhappiness becomes so great the city would just become a brand new nation with a brand new leader. That was cooler and far more realistic to me.
