Here are some thoughts:
1. To make expansion slower (and more realistic)
Make expansion harder. For instance, increase the cost of producing settlers or limiting the number of settlers (maximum one active).
Make improvements more difficult – it could be by making them take longer, by costing money (each improvement would cost X) or reducing the worker movement speed.
Bulding units should have a negative impact on the city population. For early units, the city would reduce one in population each time one unit is produced.
2. Units correction
Guided Missiles have ‘lethal’ abilities. That makes no sense for me. Either from a realistic point of view as from a game point of view.
Change\Reduce the maximum colateral damage made by Catapults\Artilllery\Bombers, etc. I like the idea and I think that having colateral damage is a great way of trying to reduce those SoD’s, but I think that the maximum damage that they can do is exagerated. I also would make those units more vulnerable to being attacked (-50% when defending for instance).
3. Resources
I would limit the use of the resources. With 1 iron you can build infinite number of units. Don’t have a clear idea on how to implement this one, but I do think that it is unrealistic. Maybe it could be done like this: you could build any unit but iron would reduce the’hammer’ cost. For instance, to build one sword (which would cost much more than today), you could get a discount for each iron resource you owned (could be something like 20% for 1; 30% for 2; 35% for 3; 40% for 4 or more).
I lke the Corporation system because it makes the surplus resources available but there should be an early version of Corporations (Guilds for instance), to create ‘greed’ over resources. The control of resources were (and are!) the source of many disputes, so I would like a system where controlling more and more resources would give extra advantages.
4. Others
I also like the hex system more. I would say that it’s not a big issue for me, but I would prefer it
Off course the spying should be changed somehow. The
minimum would be to make the Civic or religion change MUCH more expensive.
I would GREATLY increase the cost of each tech. It seems that the Era's go too fast, there is little time to enjoy the uniqueness of each tech.
Better even - it should be be possible to choose different speeds for different items! This way each player could choose their own. My settings would be:
* Marathon for Techs
* Marathon for Golden Age Duration
D)
* Normal speed for building buildings (and projects, I guess)
* Normal speed for building military units
* Marathon speed for building Settlers and Workers
* Marathon speed for workers building improvements (and why not?)
.