You know, if I were put in charge of Civ 7 development, I would not know where to begin. It seems an almost impossible task. Where do you take the game so that the result is genuinely Civ 7 and not Civ 6.5? All the things people have aired on this forum have mostly been fixes to Civ 6, not a road map to Civ 7. What will it look like? Will it be bright like Civ 6 or more subdued like Civ 5? What will the leaders look like? More animations or static art? These issues may not affect gameplay but they are vastly important to how the game is received. What you do NOT want is a game such that reviewers say, "This is just Civ 6 with a haircut."
Find Ryika and put them on the design team. (Actually, Ryika, get a business loan and have a go, I believe in you.)
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I keep feeling like a board game of Civ is right on the tip of my tongue. And yes, I do know about the Civ6 board game, and TTA. Some kind of action economy, where you might have more actions in a phase than other players, but you take them in turns, and then the phase ends; and you are translating resources into other accounts over and over, maybe some dice rolls and paying to bias random chance. Anyway.
What any board game lacks of course is the map. The computer game needs to use that resource. And several constraints get introduced right away. If you have turns you must have tiles. While you could have a tileless globe representation, and this would finally (and easily) be spherical, you cannot make that tilelessness do any work as tilelessness except in real-time. And now that you have tiles you must assign discrete properties to tiles. Control of tiles gives the value you turn into productivity; war over the tiles / militarization of the tiles is fought in, principally, a location-denying or -fortifying manner.
I would actually like it if Firaxis put their hands in the air, took a safe bet on making all the economic systems mere tweaks, but reconfigured the military part to respect how one-for-one recreation of different "weapons technology" in Human history doesn't really suit the military demands that a people living on a tiled map, as I have described, would experience. This part of things will be gamey, always gamey, unless you really *really* turn it to a strategic layer thing where armies just fight armies. By which I mean, I could see Civ go either way. But in both cases, we're no longer "making an archer" and then later "making a cannon". The unit type, the 'smallest implement of military power', the thing you place on the tiles for tile control, should have qualities that fundamentally are structured to relate to tile properties, and the dynamics by which that control will be carried out. Bombardment, fortification, push-and-pull gambits, skirmish, attrition, mobility; all of these are familiar, but I also want to see terrain-type exploitation, like using hilliness, water, plains or grass. Again, in a word, the arms that are used are "designed" (by the simulated people) to suit the terrain attributes of concern to them, and bring about the war dynamics that their grand strategy holds for their (terrain-exploiting) plan for flourishing and thriving / empire.
Tripling the basic terrain types at minimum, also. Savannah, Dunes, Rocky, Taiga, all that good stuff from the CIV mods.