Seems like this patch will bring some useful improvements, and more than initially anticipated, even if it's not quite everything many players hoped for.
For me and from an outside perspective (not played VII yet for a few reasons), two aspects around ages and civ switching could be improved with potentially proportionate effort:
1. Give more options how to achieve each legacy path. I was initially quite surprised that there is one - and only one - way to progress along each legacy path. And I'm not surprised that this makes games feel samey quickly and burns players out. Sure, there is still choice on which paths you prioritise etc. but it's quite jarring and unnecessary. Since there are so many of them, it's not a straightforward solution, but one elegant approach could be, in so far as it's possible, to complement earlier age legacy paths rather than replacing them. For instance, you can meet the exploration age culture path be either collecting and displaying relics or building wonders. And modern could be wonders, relics or artifacts. You can still place emphasis by setting higher thresholds for "older" path elements, but it would give so much more flexibility in how to play the game. I appreciate it's more difficult for the other paths, where you cannot really just add the previous ages. But the idea of more flexibility remains and would seem to help replayability a lot.
2. More fluidity in age transitions. I'm personally fine with the concept of age transitions and civ switching. I played Humankind and really liked it in many respects. While Civ switching wasn't my favourite, I didn't mind it too much. But even with all the build-up of the age transition, so much happening from one turn to the next seemed quite jarring. Maybe one solution would be to have "change cards" similar to the crisis cards, which you need to slot as the crisis develops and which introduce those changes gradually. Like, one could be around all armies retreating to the home land; another about losing your civ unique power; another about losing the ability to build unique units/ buildings, and so on. That way, your current civ gradually disintegrates but you have some choice over what goes first.
Yes, that would probably be quite complex to program for the AI. And No, it wouldn't necessarily make a classic mode harder to implement. All those lost uniques could instead be framed as a dark age, as we had in VI, and you could then emerge as an advanced version of that civ, maybe with an upgraded version of the unique ability or whatever else a classic mode would entail, if it ever happens. Just that the above idea shouldn't interfere with it too much.
), calculating the geography comes in at a very early stage. That is to say, if you need to shape that geography, you're changing the map generation at a very fundamental level. Everything is layered on top of that (and there are multiple passes / layers assigned).
