The thread asks you to change one thing, so I think we should imagine what single change would positively impact the game to the greatest extent.
There is no thing as important as changing 1UPT to something better. I have no idea what, but there has to be something better than either that or the misery of infinite doomstacks. It damages the entire game.
The gains we get from 1upt
- More engaging than brainless and heart less doomstacks
The price we pay for it
- Very long turn loading time for many of us (Humankind's almost instant turn loading was positively insane to my brain).
- As that system in civ context is a perfect nightmare for AI programming, we can't get decent AI with it without soul crushing turn times and great dev investments, so we will never get decent AI.
- Therefore AI terribly sucks at war, which makes warfare deeply unsatisfying.
- It comes with a metric ton of frustrating, tedious micro management which cannot be avoided. Don't even let me begin on the horror of having to invade country full of mountains, rivers, hills and jungles, with a traffic jam moving 1 tile per turn. I know it should be hard, but it should still be fun.
- It also removes need to seriously care about military defense, removing layer of a game.
- That negatively impacts the entire diplomacy system, because diplomacy is half empty without effective threat for human survival. If the main reason to avoid AI wars is not concern but just avoiding annoyance then the entire diplomacy falls flat.
- That negatively impacts economic balance, because you don't have to balance military and civilian spending, invest into militsry infrastructure etc.
- Why build navy if AI doesn't contest water?
- It makes many civ unique stuff go to waste because why bother about military superpowers if you can easily steamroll AIs with no bonuses anyway? A "variety of options to steamroll" is far less satisfying than "thank God Almighty for Cossacks, they saved Ukraine from Romanian invasion".
- How to world war if AI can barely comprehend the existence of airforce and navy? Nuclear weapons are just another way to kick crippled, sobbing AI lying on the ground so who cares anyway.
- It generally biases the entire game towards gamey meta - level favorisation of war as the most optima way to do any thing, because you can circumvent a ton of games systems by cheesing killing disproptional number of AI units with minimum force.
1Upt hurts the entire game. Just invent whatever better please.
Victoria3 has yet to be released but it had guts to do something revolutionary and abstract all warfare from point clicking individual units to abstracted frontlines which you manipulate and provide armies, supplies, generals etc. Stated goals include removing tedious micro, issues with AI and an abilit for the player to ignore diplomacy and economy (main focused of the game) in favor of cheesing AI with improbably underdog armies. Whether it work or not is yet to be seen, but I am fascinated by this revolutionary idea (for paradox games). Perhaps civ needs its own revolutionary paradigms shift once again, better than stacks and better than 1upt.