It was more their lack of individual culture, science, government, and production that made me consider that they weren't really much of a civ. I have researched this, remember? Culture, religion, and science are all key to the structure of building a civilization. The mongols had none of these. I didn't quite mean they didn't contribute anything, I was saying they contributed little in the sense civilization revolves around. An empire can barely survive without culture, and is swiftly destroyed without science. They were very important, true, but to consider them a civilization is a little out of context. after kublai Khan's death the empire kind of split apart among the Mongolian generals and Kublai's sons. I don't think the mongols were really a civ in the sense that the game revolves around. I think they should stay a scenario like in warlords, all due respect to their accomplishments and leaders.
I'm a little late here, and others have summed up a lot of my points, but I haven't seen this mentioned yet. You say here that religion is key to building a civilization, and that Mongols had no religion. Well, Mongolia was the first empire of its size to allow freedom of religion. Rather than being persecuted for their beliefs, people could worship as they chose, whoever they chose. Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, they were all equals within the Mongolian empire. While there's isolated examples of religious freedom in earlier civilizations, it was never done to the scale that the Mongols did. When you look at the USA, the UK, and other major western nations now, Mongolia was very far ahead of the curve in how it handled religion.
You say the Mongols had no culture. They had a very distinct culture. They were a nomadic people, masters of the horse. They could travel farther and faster than any other people. This was the hallmark of their empire. The postal system was mentioned. They set up lit watch towers to warn of bandits and military threats. A rider with important information would gallop from tower to tower, stopping at each one to drop off his weary horse and pick up a new one, to go farther in a day than anyone could dream of. Is that not a cultural achievement? Just because it's not a book, a song, or a work of art doesn't mean it shows a lack of culture. The spreading of trade and their means of communication were examples of Mongol culture shining through. Can you count that as a Wonder in the game? Not really. But that doesn't mean it's not valid, or important.
You say the Mongols had no science. They didn't need much. They had their skills with the horse, of course. But again, they were adaptable. That which they needed, they borrowed from their enemies. Chinese siege engines, Korean boats. Does it make things less valid if they use the inventions of others? Only one person can actually be the inventor of something, after all. Does current Western warfare show a lack of science, because the Chinese invented gunpowder? Of course not. While the Chinese invented it, it took western armies to actually craft it into a semi-efficient weapon, and brilliant military minds like Oda Nobunaga to get the most out of it with shrewd tactics. If having science and inventing things yourself was truly important, than these 'primitive' Mongols should never have conquered anything. But obviously, the Mongol inventions in the military field were enough for them to get rolling, and from there they were open-minded enough to borrow what they needed to thrive.
The weakness of the Mongol civilization was none of the above. It was simply their population. Spread a million Mongolian people out across the vast empire they conquered. How are they going to govern that for an extended period of time? Eventually the intermingling weakened the Mongolian bloodlines and diluted their power over the areas, and they all wound up devolving back into independant states. The empire started by Genghis Khan still lasted far, far longer than that of Alexander, and brought about more meaningful impact to the world at large (sorry, I don't count thirty cities named 'Alexandria' as impact). It sparked the Age of Exploration, and offered very modern, liberal ideas that in many cases didn't resurface for hundreds of years. It's unfortunate that in the writing of this paper you talk about, that you failed to actually delve into what the Mongols did. It's equally unfortunate that your teacher seemed ignorant enough to give you a good mark for such incomplete work. If you got a bad mark for this paper, you wouldn't be bragging about it, would you?