As I said, I'm advocating the KISS principle, and civilization up to ~civ 5 has always followed it:
I generally disagree with your characterization of Civ6 as a massive departure from elegant game systems. In part because I think you're not giving Civ6 enough credit but also because I think you're whitewashing some of the more inelegant mechanisms in Civ games past. Remember happiness in Civ2 and Civ3? That was hardly a more elegant system than the happiness in 4-6. Pollution, corruption, hard caps on city growth that required certain buildings to overcome. These all fell by the wayside.
Does Civ6 have more game mechanisms than other civ games? Obviously, but that has happened gradually as the games have both added new game mechanisms while streamlining others. The increase in mechanisms has actually been pretty gradual and is probably more a reflection of increased computing power than a radical philosophical shift between Civ5 and Civ6.
I think you've touched on the exact problem, civ used to introduce players slowly to new mechanics, having technology be your way to progress and you would manage your empire in between tech turns. You could easily set goals like "I want to get to the tech that unlocks Darwin's Voyage" (had to look that up since it's been so long). Now it seems there are so many goals to get to, it's easy to get overwhelmed. I enjoy the game still, it just lost some of the charm that comes with simplicity I think.
But how exactly has Civ6 dramatically increased the complexity at the start of the game vs. previous Civ games? One of the things increased game mechanisms do potentially is to break choices into smaller pieces.
You have to choose a Civic and a Tech now. But consider that in Civ4, you had to choose a tech from 6 possible choices (sort of.... each civ had starting techs that would cause that number to fluctuate a bit). In Civ6, you're choosing between 5. In terms of Civics, you have no choice at all. You have to choose Code of Laws before you can branch out. Civ4 has simpler mechanisms but more options to choose from. People are always clamoring for more options, but the psychological research is pretty clear that more options causes choice paralysis and leads to lower satisfaction than fewer choices.
To go back to the chess analogy mentioned by Arent11, chess has six types of pieces with six different rules. We could reduce that to one type of piece with one rule but allow each player to move every piece they control once during their turn. That would certainly add a lot of complexity and cut down significantly on the rules. But making a lot of decisions per turn with one movement rule probably won't be as enjoyable as making one decision with six movement rules.
So yes, you can definitely decide to go for Darwin's Voyage, but you have to do that
instead of doing something else. And the fewer game mechanisms you have (while keeping the same amount of content), the more your possible options balloon. Things like Eurekas, Faith, and a Civics Tree offer more goal tracks, but they also constrain possible goal options. Having single pool of gold is simpler than a pool of gold and a pool of faith, but it also means you have to pick what to purchase from a much larger list.
This is one of the reasons I tend not to like mods. They often have a "kitchen sink" mentality where they toss in as many new buildings, wonders, and units as possible. But this explosion of choices for what a city should produce doesn't really lead to a more enjoyable experience.
I'm not saying that Civ6 perfectly nailed this by the way. I actually think Civ6 could afford to trim down its choices in certain places, but it's not the new mechanisms that create that glut.
I've always heard how great Paradox games are, but Crusader Kings 2 stayed in my backlog for a couple of years before I decided to try it, since it seemed like you'd have to spend a week or two just studying the game before you understood what you were doing. When I tried it, things weren't so bad, but sadly the sheer number of things to tweak kind of turned me off. I'll definitely give it another go at some point, but this discussion has made me think, what do new players think of civ now? Are they starting to feel overwhelmed?
I definitely don't like all of the tweaking in games like Crusader Kings and EU. Not only is it just overload, but it feels like the interface was designed to try to put even accountants to sleep. I don't think Civ has even begun to approach that level of fiddliness.
Yes exactly, making the district placement process simpler would I think make things far more enjoyable. I remember one game where I built a campus or holy site in the mountains far away from my city center, and barbs would frequently pillage it. It got very frustrating since it would take my units a few turns to get there to protect it. It's a risk I had to take, but it kind of felt like I was being forced to play a certain way and make those decisions. With districts not being movable, it seems like you always have to go for the maximum adjacency bonus, it feels like there's no way to get around it.
I do think they went overboard with the adjacency bonuses. I think allowing more than one citizen to work a tile was a great addition, and I would use that rather than adjacency bonuses. So, for example, I would rather Libraries give +1 Science per Specialist working the Campus district rather than a flat research boost. City specialization would depend less on where it's placed on the map and more on how much the player decides to invest their population in that specialty.
