How Would You Solve the Late Game Problem?

[Wingednosering]

It's no secret that the late game in 4X titles tends to be less interesting than the beginning. In Civ, this is especially apparent. I see this as two overlapping problems.

1) Each turn that goes by makes your actions matter less because they have less time to make an impact

2) There's usually a clear runaway (either player or AI) that can't possibly be caught.

FXS solution seems to be to just make the late game more interesting with minigames (like art theming) that unlock later in the game, once exploration has mostly concluded. Artifacts in particular are interesting, because they reintroduce exploration elements after the map has been fully explored.

I'm curious to see what the proposed solutions are. I am a professional game dev, but not a designer, so this is a bit out of my wheelhouse, but I'll propose some options below to get the ball rolling.

For science/culture, I think it's pretty easy to level the playing field. Spies should be better at evening the odds with tech stealing, tech trading should return and trade routes should steal beakers towards techs the other civ has that you don't. Additionally, eurekas (which are a great system) should be able to trigger from both external and internal sources. Why don't I get a eureka towards horseback riding when I see an enemy horseman?

For production, the ideal scenario would be that if you settled a city on turn 250, all the ancient and classical stuff would be built in a flash. Things your people have experience creating already just shouldn't take as long to produce. Possible ways to do that would include:

1) After a building or unit has been built/trained once, lower its production cost.

2) Scale production HARD throughout the game. Possibly closer to an exponential increase throughout ages. This could be a % increase per turn or per era. It could tie into techs or civics or anything else really.

Post your ideas here! I'm interested what other people have thought up.

 

[Ferocitus]

It's no secret that the late game in 4X titles tends to be less interesting than the beginning. In Civ, this is especially apparent. I see this as two overlapping problems.

1) Each turn that goes by makes your actions matter less because they have less time to make an impact

2) There's usually a clear runaway (either player or AI) that can't possibly be caught.

FXS solution seems to be to just make the late game more interesting with minigames (like art theming) that unlock later in the game, once exploration has mostly concluded. Artifacts in particular are interesting, because they reintroduce exploration elements after the map has been fully explored.

I'm curious to see what the proposed solutions are. I am a professional game dev, but not a designer, so this is a bit out of my wheelhouse, but I'll propose some options below to get the ball rolling.

For science/culture, I think it's pretty easy to level the playing field. Spies should be better at evening the odds with tech stealing, tech trading should return and trade routes should steal beakers towards techs the other civ has that you don't. Additionally, eurekas (which are a great system) should be able to trigger from both external and internal sources. Why don't I get a eureka towards horseback riding when I see an enemy horseman?

For production, the ideal scenario would be that if you settled a city on turn 250, all the ancient and classical stuff would be built in a flash. Things your people have experience creating already just shouldn't take as long to produce. Possible ways to do that would include:

1) After a building or unit has been built/trained once, lower its production cost.

2) Scale production HARD throughout the game. Possibly closer to an exponential increase throughout ages. This could be a % increase per turn or per era. It could tie into techs or civics or anything else really.

Post your ideas here! I'm interested what other people have thought up.

The standard game on smallish maps is certainly a dog in many ways.

But I don't have any of those problems at marathon speeds on Gedemon's largest stable Terra maps against 20+ other civs. At high levels (> Emperor) the other civs have time to establish themselves and can be very tough opponents in the late stages, especially when 3 or more decide you are no longer their BFF. Nobody I know (with 2,000-5,000 hours) can win more than 50% of games at Deity level. (Fair scoring essential, of course!)

Good luck, but IMO mods are the way to get the game you really want instead of the flawed slop dished up as standard.

 

[dagriggstar]

I think you need two elements

1) Catch up mechanisms such as trade routes to tech leader giving you science (for example). Catch up also applies to later cities, probably some migration mechanic perhaps.

2) More benefits to teamwork. Especially economical. A trade and economic system that will allow you to cripple runaways by simply not trading with them. For instance if the only source of gold is from trade, everyone embargoes you, you can't get gold to pay your armies, you're kind of screwed....

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Let me repost what I wrote in the other thread:

It has been said many times but I think the #1 reason why players lose interest before the latter eras is because most games are already decided by the mid game. Why keep playing when you know you are going to win? In almost all my games, I know by the renaissance era, sometimes sooner, if I am going to win or not. This is due in large part to civs always growing and never falling. So if I have successfully conquered a few of my neighbors and have carved out a sizeable empire for myself by the end of the classical era, I know I am just going to get even bigger and my opponents will never be a threat to me. Once the initial expansion/conquest phase in the early game is finished, the rest of the game is just building the right stuff in your cities until you eventually win. This phase of the game can feel tedious because there is rarely any challenge. It's just hundreds of turns of selecting the next thing to build. This is why I often don't finish my games. Once I establish a nice empire, I feel like I accomplished the most important thing. My civ is the best and strongest. I don't feel like playing another 200 turns of just selecting the next thing to build to make it official.

Firaxis' solution in Gathering Storm appears to be to push the victories back so that players will be forced to play through to the new future era in order to win and also add new stuff (climate change, power, world congress, rock bands) to give the player interesting stuff to do in the late game. The approach seems to be "yeah, we know the single player game won't really be competitive anymore by the mid game but at least there will still be fun stuff to do". I think this will be fine for players who enjoy the "role-playing" parts of the game. Certainly, a lot of those new features do look interesting and fun. I will probably play a couple times to the future era, to see what the new features are like. For the more competitive players, I am not sure it will work. It does not seem to address the main issue which is that if I already know I am going to win by the renaissance/early industrial era, why would I keep playing just because you gave me more buttons to push? I am concerned that veteran players will still quit mid game because they won't really care about the cool features. For them, once the game is in the bag, they won't care about continuing the game.

For me, the key to making the late game interesting is addressing the fundamental problem above. If you want the player to stay engaged, then the game needs to offer a real challenge where the winner is still up for grabs even late game.

A couple solutions:
1) Add more geopolitical events that could potentially upset the power structure. For example, have real revolutions and rebellions that the player would have to fight or change their government/policy cards to placate. Have civil wars even that the player would have to fight. Have a neighboring civ face a rebellion or civil war that could spill over into your territory. Have a serious barbarian invasion that you would need to find other civs to ally with to help you resist it. etc... If the player were facing rebellions, revolutions, coups, civil wars etc either within or in neighboring civs that would really spice up the game.
2) Change how victories work. Get rid of the individual victories and replace them with one single "score" type victory that only triggers at the very end. Players could still pursue culture, science or domination to win victory points. Also, victory points would ramp up with eras. This would help players catch up since they could earn more points in the late game. By allocating more victory points in the late game eras, it would shift the focus to the late game. Games would be decided in the late game since that is where the most victory points could be earned. This would prevent the game from being won in the middle.
3) This might be radical but maybe when you research nationalism, your civ would fundamentally change. You would lose some outer cities and they would become independent nations, your remaining cities would also change. Your civ name would change. For example, if you are playing as the roman civ, your civ name would change to the Italian civ. And you would get brand new civ abilities and unique units etc... This could help the game feel new and fresh as it would be like starting a new game with a new civ except with the map already settled with nation/civs.

 

[Bechhold]

Simple. Add more micromanagement. More random events, better scenarios that can creep up and require the player to partake in even if they don't get involved as other civs actions result in something major.

 

[679x]

It has been said many times but I think the #1 reason why players lose interest before the latter eras is because most games are already decided by the mid game. Why keep playing when you know you are going to win? In almost all my games, I know by the renaissance era, sometimes sooner, if I am going to win or not. This is due in large part to civs always growing and never falling. So if I have successfully conquered a few of my neighbors and have carved out a sizeable empire for myself by the end of the classical era, I know I am just going to get even bigger and my opponents will never be a threat to me. Once the initial expansion/conquest phase in the early game is finished, the rest of the game is just building the right stuff in your cities until you eventually win. This phase of the game can feel tedious because there is rarely any challenge. It's just hundreds of turns of selecting the next thing to build. This is why I often don't finish my games. Once I establish a nice empire, I feel like I accomplished the most important thing. My civ is the best and strongest. I don't feel like playing another 200 turns of just selecting the next thing to build to make it official.

I think you've hit it spot on. I almost never continue games to the very end. I personally think an AI improvement would be the solution, though... the higher difficulties just give the AI more things to start with, and if/when you catch up, there's not a whole lot more you need to worry about. At that point, I'm just clicking things because there's nothing urgent to do - I've already sealed myself a victory. (Though, I play on King/Emperor, because I think it's kind of dumb to have to deal with AI that has so many more possessions at the start like they do in Deity.)

If the AI could continue to be competitive in the late game even if their empire is not as strong as yours, then I would play for longer.

 

[MonkeyPaw]

I'd treat each era as its own mini-game. Goals change, some rules change, in part determined by the actions of players in the previous era.

Most importantly- work on the last era first, make it fun and interesting, then work backwards. Everyone loves early Civ already, it needs the least attention.

 

[Sostratus]

Apologies for long post. It's par for the course in Ideas & suggestions though. You knew what you were getting into.

Because it can be so easy for the AI to fall behind in every way, my first gameplay change would be aimed at keeping players from diverging in tech so much.
Using the world era system, players researching techs ahead of the current era would incur steeper and escalating penalties than the flat 20% we have now.
Conversely, researching techs behind the world era results in greater and greater bonuses.
The goal to is to keep players from getting too far ahead of the pack while maintaining a broad edge for having science, and having a mechanism to ensure that no one who is otherwise still "in the game" gets so far behind it's just pointless.
So with some balance, most players end up within about a half era from the current world era.
Thought experiment:
Imagine every civ has the same number and size of cities with comparable terrain, and there are two districts: campus and industrial zone. Suppose there's 8 district slots in each civ right now. We can create 3 hypothetical strategies:

Invest in science (8/8 campuses)
Invest in both (4/8 campuses)
Invest in hammers (0/8 campuses)

How much should the trade off between these civs be? Should science be the end all be all? Should there be any advantages to investing in production?
If the difference between the Science and the Production player is an era or so, the science player has a ~10 combat strength advantage in his units. Should the production player be able to produce 50% more units to counter that? (parity) 25%? 0%?

Without radically reworking districts, this is an easy way to normalize science so you can reach out into other yields. It's nice because it remains monotonic: unlike civ5, more science always means faster tech progress. But there would come a point where it may not be worth spending every last dollar supporting scientists. If rubberbanding players towards the world era probably won't be enough. So, we have to go deeper.

Stage 2:
Gold becomes scarce.
Do you remember the days of civ5 when you had to have a decent accounting of each piece of gold you spent? Recklessly putting up buildings could put you into bankruptcy? Well, this was more a BNW phenomenon. But i thought it was clever.
First off, units need to cost more gold. The AI obviously gets an advantage at this, so they aren't as concerned. Science and culture buildings would also become more expensive, so eventually you have to break down and build other stuff.
Production and growth buildings would be relatively cheap to maintain. The goal is to create an entirely different strategic balance between players who focus on gold and those who don't. If you don't, you will run close to break even. If you do, you will have large surpluses that of course you can rush buy with. Right now the difference between focus gold and focus science is trivially small in gameplay effect.

Stage 3:
We grant the AI's districts extra adjacency. Straight up +2/3/4 or whatever. The Ai currently ets a growth bonus and something like an 80% production boost on deity. Yet players still overtake them. Why? Because most of a player's secondary yields (science, culture, faith) come from districts and their placement sucks.
Stage 3.5:
No one wants to do this, but we take the practical approach and we add a number of build orders for the AI in starts, tech order, policy and gov't configurations, etc. Humans are really good at leveraging policies. I imagine if we could see what cards AI run we would have seizures. This is a low effort way to avoid coding smarter AI that can judge better cards (hard.) We just tell them, hey, the best players use this mix when focusing science, so you will too. The ol' other people's brains strategy (OPB.) (easy.)

Stage 4:
Now, the other issue endemic to Civ6 besides science being too good and the Ai falling behind is the lack of choice with domestic investment: you should always build out instead of up. I would love to see a little more strategy here. You have 8 cities. Should you spend the next 20 turns settling 4 more or should you build some infrastructure in existing ones to really make them shine? Okay, obviously this leads to concepts like national wonders (more like civ4 than civ5) and district buildings gaining some +% effects. By tweaking this, and giving more reaosns to invest in yourself, it also chips at the advantages of warfare. Speaking of which:

Micro Combat change:
Siege units are often built by the AI and brought to a siege. Great! except AI cities have been programmed to focus fire siege units, and we know to focus them too. This leads to the wonderful battering ram meta where we ignore siege units. But it also cripples the AI's siege ability. So siege units get a nice +17 range defense (they take half damage.) A catapult is a catapult, whether it looks like an arrow pincushion or not. They are already fragile units - go up and punch them with your melee units.

Stage 5:
Hopefully by now we have the tools to tone down science spam, help out the AI, and nerf warfare a bit vs domestically sourced investment.
But, one last piece. Yep- rising production costs. Since production costs of districts, chops, units, and buildings all happen to sit on a 1-10x scale while production yield does not, I think it would be way easier to make production get more boosts and more frequent ones in the late game. GS is adding electric power, but they are nerfing what IZ buildings do. LOL. remember kids, production costs have never been tuned or rebalanced since vanilla. In vanilla we could stack factory auras. Maybe that was OP, but the solution has really gutted things. So here's what we can do:
Factories have a local and regional effect that are now separate.
Everyone can get a factory aura by being in range, but actually having a factory would give you more production in some way. Maybe it's the district adjacency in hammers, +production per pop, or a %boost. IDK.
Second, we leverage those wonderful new railroads and we integrate some production boosts there too. Civ5 had a 25% boost if the city was connected to the capital via railroad. We can work something similar in. Start driving that steel, boys!
Another neat idea is to extend the trade route efficiency bonus for sea routes from just applying to gold to also affecting food and production on internal routes (ignores +yield cards and such. No +8/8 Arsenal of Democracy for you.)
Throw quarries production boosts whenever mines get one. Add another late game production point to mines and quarries. For goodness sake, allow oil wells and platforms to provide adjacency to IZs. Last resort, give the IZ more adjacency opportunities generally. (Dams for hydro power, harbors/canals for shipping, maybe renewable energy improvements? You get the idea.)

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Using the world era system, players researching techs ahead of the current era would incur steeper and escalating penalties than the flat 20% we have now.
Conversely, researching techs behind the world era results in greater and greater bonuses.

Thank you for your long post.

I like this idea a lot. The trick of course would be in the balance. You don't want to nerf science too much where it becomes pointless. I think a good rule of thumb should be that no civ should be more than 1 era ahead and no civ should be more than 1 era behind. Basically a majority of civs should be in the same era with 1-2 civs 1 era behind and 1-2 civs 1 era ahead.

I do think it would be good to make sure that individual techs within the same era give you cool stuff. That way, the science civ that gets to new techs first, will still enjoy some big advantages even if they are still in the same era as everyone else. And making eras longer so that civs can use units longer before they become obsolete will also benefit science civs as they will get to use new units first. For example, even if all civs are in the same era, if I get to gunpowder units first, it should give me a nice military advantage. I do think that tech trading should remain banned as it would totally negate any need to invest in science. Trading eurekas would be fine as that is just trading a boost to a tech, not the tech itself.

 

[Sostratus]

Trading eurekas would be fine as that is just trading a boost to a tech, not the tech itself.

Part of the issue is that humans are just way better at getting eurekas than 1) was intended 2) the computer can. So we can effectively do more with less science.
What the devs really need is basically game log reportware so they can mine out just how good players are at different difficulties and calibrate AI boosts to that.
I imagine deity players have the optimal eureka path down to a T whereas the prince cohort maybe doesn't as much. Hence, deity AI would get something extra to compensate.

I think a good rule of thumb should be that no civ should be more than 1 era ahead and no civ should be more than 1 era behind. Basically a majority of civs should be in the same era with 1-2 civs 1 era behind and 1-2 civs 1 era ahead.

My thoughts on constraining the spread would hopefully result in this. Importantly, a tech leader could still colonial war a tech lagger. It's just that you wouldn't end up with korea 3 eras ahead of everyone. After all, a one era lead is approximately a 50% military combat advantage. But other pieces of my proposal, like the gold scarcity, where there so that a player who just builds campuses can't afford very many of those pricey units, they have to build CHs and run int'l TRs to support them. A corps unit is equal to a base unit one era later, so that's kind of where my brain was at: a good player who builds some campus but also emphasizes his production and gold could put out enough eg musketmen corps to play close to par with a riflemen military. (This would roughly be a 33% production advantage on the tech lagger in that instance.)

But I'll leave out my combat rebalance ideas from this thread.
Fix late game by making the stakes higher- players need to be able to lose. Doesn't mean they will lose, but the threat of competition does a lot to drive us.

 

[The googles do nothing]

(These ideas would need some fleshing out)

Making the late game more interesting is going to take both gameplay/rules changes and changes to UI/AI. Having some machine learning like Sostratus suggested I think is a good start. It's might be easier to have some system where the community can set up how a civ would behave by era. Specifying build orders, aggressiveness level tech progressions, etc.

Starting the the industrial era, the strongest AI civ should be declared the 'Axis' who's only mission is to defeat the players 'Allies'. I'm not sure how would work but the result should be a world war in the Modern era. It's would be the equivalent of the begging of the game rush but with the later game mechanics.

For gameplay:

Reasons to interact with other civs that are just alternates to internal mechanisms. If each civ could specialize in some way as the game went along and that could not be duplicated or taken from them in a war. Luxuries seem like a obvious choice of a specialization. If I choose to specialize in diamonds i get 6 luxuries and all other civs get 2. A trade route or alliance to my civ gets you diamond luxuries.

Expand the 'reserve' system to luxuries.

Split Science into 2 kinds. Call them 'experience' and 'research'. They apply to the same tech tree, but you need different amounts of each type to achieve the tech. There would be some exchange rate between the two so you would never get 'stuck', but you could be slowed down. experiences would come from things you actively do - build roads, make improvements, reveal the map, and research coming from campus, research agreements, working tiles.

 

[Sostratus]

Having some machine learning like Sostratus suggested I think is a good start. It's might be easier to have some system where the community can set up how a civ would behave by era. Specifying build orders, aggressiveness level tech progressions, etc.

Well, I was thinking less machine learning and just doing a survey of high level civ players and just plugging in some optimal build orders and card layouts
Unlike a multiplayer FPS/RTS, the devs just don't have the data trove to determine this sort of stuff unless they call upon the player base.

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

Making the Loyalty system more challenging would keep a player on their toes. Just this game mechanic alone could make the late game more interesting, less tedious and more realistic.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Making the Loyalty system more challenging would keep a player on their toes. Just this game mechanic alone could make the late game more interesting, less tedious and more realistic.

Right now, loyalty is actually rather passive. It exerts a very predictable pressure on nearby cities. Sure, you can tweak loyalty with some policy cards and governors and golden ages have an effect but for the most part loyalty will have the same overall general effect of homogenizing your territory by flipping cities that are disconnected from your empire, like the city settled alone on a different continent surrounded by another civ.

There are a few things that I can think of to make loyalty a lot more interesting and deep:
1) Changing too many policy cards at once or changing governments should give a negative loyalty modifier to your cities for X turns. This would represent how your people react to your government's policies and add the possibility of internal rebellion which right now is almost completely lacking. It would also tie the loyalty mechanic in with more of the other game's mechanics. Also, it would prevent the player from always picking the best cards or the best government whenever it suits them. Players would have to take into consideration how the change might disrupt their cities. Imagine switching to democracy and having a city far away from your capital flip to an independent city. This could represent that your new found democracy has emboldened unhappy cities to vote for independence.
2) Some policy cards could have an added loyalty effect to better reflect what those cards do to your society. For example, maybe the "nationalism" card could add a positive loyalty to cities that you settled and a negative loyalty modifier to cities in your empire that you did not settle yourself (conquered cities, foreign cities that flipped to you). This would represent how your core cities have a stronger national identity but cities that were not settled by you are developing their own national identity and want to break off. Some civics could also add a loyalty effect. For example, the civic "class struggle" could add a negative loyalty pressure emanating from your industrial zones. This could represent the Marxist movement of workers wanting to revolt. The civic is called class struggle after all. Maybe some techs could also have a positive or negative loyalty effect to represent the effect that technology has had in sometimes disrupting societies. Adding loyalty effects to some techs, civics and policy cards would mare choosing certain cards and researching certain techs or civics more interesting. It would also shake things up. Researching new techs and new civics or picking a card would not be automatic. And it would add a real element of internal politics and empire management. Again, imagine having a city flip after your research "class struggle", representing an internal revolt from well, a class struggle in your society. You might choose to forcefully retake the city with your military. Now, we have an in-game mechanic where a class struggle arose in your society that caused an armed revolt and a military response.
3) Cities far away from your capital should have a small negative loyalty. This would represent cities far from your capital, feeling less connected to your civ. In terms of gampleplay, it would prevent players from going to wide and too expansionist in their games. Spread yourself too wide and maybe some cities very far from your capital do flip and declare independence.
4) Lastly, conquered cities should exert some negative loyalty pressure for X turns. This could represent the cities trying to mount a secret resistance movement and the cities not readily accepting their new overlords right away. In terms of gameplay, it would provide much needed resistance to warmongers, preventing them from just conquering non-stop. Right now, war weariness does not really do that, as it is too easy to add more amenities to keep your civ relatively ok while you just keep conquering.

Overall, adding one or more of these ideas, would definitely make loyalty a more interesting and deep mechanic than it is now.

 

[NukingGandhi]

Having different classes of citizens would be interesting to have some higher earning citizens in cities be happier than the lower earning ones. I understand that this would be harder to program in. Keep in mind that I don't know much about the actual development process.

 

[NukingGandhi]

(These ideas would need some fleshing out)

Making the late game more interesting is going to take both gameplay/rules changes and changes to UI/AI. Having some machine learning like Sostratus suggested I think is a good start. It's might be easier to have some system where the community can set up how a civ would behave by era. Specifying build orders, aggressiveness level tech progressions, etc.

Starting the the industrial era, the strongest AI civ should be declared the 'Axis' who's only mission is to defeat the players 'Allies'. I'm not sure how would work but the result should be a world war in the Modern era. It's would be the equivalent of the begging of the game rush but with the later game mechanics.

For gameplay:

Reasons to interact with other civs that are just alternates to internal mechanisms. If each civ could specialize in some way as the game went along and that could not be duplicated or taken from them in a war. Luxuries seem like a obvious choice of a specialization. If I choose to specialize in diamonds i get 6 luxuries and all other civs get 2. A trade route or alliance to my civ gets you diamond luxuries.

Expand the 'reserve' system to luxuries.

Split Science into 2 kinds. Call them 'experience' and 'research'. They apply to the same tech tree, but you need different amounts of each type to achieve the tech. There would be some exchange rate between the two so you would never get 'stuck', but you could be slowed down. experiences would come from things you actively do - build roads, make improvements, reveal the map, and research coming from campus, research agreements, working tiles.

I like the idea of experience and research, but the one thing that would drive this home would be some more diversification in you cities so that you can't just fill your cities with all the districts. There is actually a couple mods that do this but they are kinda old. They are Redistricting by Ananse the Spider and Specialized Industry by Uncivilizedguy.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I support changes that would make the late game more interesting. However, I would also propose a new victory or a modified existing victory that could end the game sooner when a civ has completely runaway and winning is just inevitable. In those instances, it might be better just to end the game sooner rather than trying to drag it on. I played a game like that last week, where I conquered everyone on my continent and by turn 257. I was a vast and powerful civ, ridiculously more powerful than all of the other civs. To keep playing on for 150+ turns would have been boring. And 257 turns felt very satisfying to me so it's not like I felt like I needed to play more. I successfully conquered 2 civs and built the greatest empire. I would have been very ok with the game declaring me the winner right then and there.Frankly, the way civ6 is now, I feel like the most satisfying type of play is to conquer 2-3 civs, build a great empire and then be declared the winner in 250-300 turns instead of the game that goes on to 400-500 turns and finally ends with a science or culture victory.

So, maybe the game should do that? I think this could be accomplished very easily by modifying the domination victory to be more like it was in civ4 with a land and pop requirement, maybe throw in a science and/or culture requirement as well. Civ4's domination victory did work pretty well at avoiding late game boredom by declaring a winner once a civ had become the indisputable megapower. I would propose a modified domination victory that requires the civ to control at least 66% of the map, have at least 75% of the world population and at least 50% more science or culture output than the next civ. I think that would be a good way of ending the game when one civ has basically already won and before things get boring.

 

[Sostratus]

Having different classes of citizens would be interesting to have some higher earning citizens in cities be happier than the lower earning ones.

In some past games they have drawn distinctions with regards to empire upkeep - happiness/gold etc - between citizens working tiles and specialists.
There's a lot that could be done by having, for example, some approaches that make specialists produce more loyalty, or maybe farmers are happier, or perhaps some pro-environmentalism (thinking of GS) would piss off those miners. You could tinker with how much food/housing/amenities they consume and how much science/culture/loyalty they produce.

If there was a clean and intuitive way to integrate it (ie, not random chance, but something that the player knew would happen) I wouldn't mind having a better rebellion mechanic if your empire becomes too sprawling without the player supplying the necessary infrastructure. (Perhaps amenities for internal and loyalty for external rebellion.)

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

I support changes that would make the late game more interesting. However, I would also propose a new victory or a modified existing victory that could end the game sooner when a civ has completely runaway and winning is just inevitable. In those instances, it might be better just to end the game sooner rather than trying to drag it on. I played a game like that last week, where I conquered everyone on my continent and by turn 257. I was a vast and powerful civ, ridiculously more powerful than all of the other civs. To keep playing on for 150+ turns would have been boring. And 257 turns felt very satisfying to me so it's not like I felt like I needed to play more. I successfully conquered 2 civs and built the greatest empire. I would have been very ok with the game declaring me the winner right then and there.Frankly, the way civ6 is now, I feel like the most satisfying type of play is to conquer 2-3 civs, build a great empire and then be declared the winner in 250-300 turns instead of the game that goes on to 400-500 turns and finally ends with a science or culture victory.

So, maybe the game should do that? I think this could be accomplished very easily by modifying the domination victory to be more like it was in civ4 with a land and pop requirement, maybe throw in a science and/or culture requirement as well. Civ4's domination victory did work pretty well at avoiding late game boredom by declaring a winner once a civ had become the indisputable megapower. I would propose a modified domination victory that requires the civ to control at least 66% of the map, have at least 75% of the world population and at least 50% more science or culture output than the next civ. I think that would be a good way of ending the game when one civ has basically already won and before things get boring.

I find it pretty satisfying to play for score victory without conquering everybody. It forces me to play a well rounded game. It also gives me a reason to build wonders.

 

[NukingGandhi]

I find it pretty satisfying to play for score victory without conquering everybody. It forces me to play a well rounded game. It also gives me a reason to build wonders.

I feel like there should be a quicker way to get a score victory without having to wait till the end-turns.