If somebody have doubts I am not saying the way Humankind do the culture change is ideal neither that CIV need it. What I want to point is how many people (I see this a lot on Reddit and Steam) do not have a problem with the change of cultures, what they have an "immersion breaking" problem is that we can change to any historicaly unrelated culture. And like I said on the context of the game Gauls>Franks do not make more sense than Persians>Aztecs because both need some people come and take over your nation in a world without their real historical distribution.
So the part that bother most people is not the game abstraction of some invasion of people than take over your empire, what bother them is WHO is taking over.
Represent the real factors of cultural change is very difficult for a game, on CIV most people dont have problem with turns being almost a century long on some eras, found religions without the real context from where they rise, or change to a goverment type that make no sense neither for the leader and being a prosperous world power.
Now for some context which one of these are worse example of history:
1- Modern UK is the outcome of the influence of peoples like Brittons, Romans, Gaels, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans.
2- Euro Americans are being living on North America since 6000 years ago and they developed civilization by themselves.
Of course real UK would not have Assyrians or Ming on their history but neither Indians started next to Mapuche and Kongo like CIV could do.
A game could be developed that allowed only 'historical' progressions of cultures.
It would require that the geographical relationships between Civs were essentially the same in every game, and result in players having a pretty good idea what was going to happen to them, and only a limited ability to modify it.
Result:
It would be unplayable. No real reason to replay the game after you've struggled through a single rendition, and a frustration factor off the charts.
So, both Civ and
Humankind get it right from a game-play perspective: freewheeling interactions between cultures/civs that in real life never heard of each other, ability (in Humankind) to convert to cultures/factions that IRL were so different culturally an ethnically that 'conversion' would have required Genocide. All that gets papered over to provide an intriguing, playable game.
The question is, how can we break Civ out of its Straitjacket of One Civ, One Game which is all you can play now, without getting a
Humankind-like One Game = Random Acts of Cultural Conversion that breaks immersion for anyone whose historical or cultural knowledge extends past Disney movies?
To do that within the restrictions of graphic/game resources (no selling Cray supercomputers just to play a game with infinite Leader/Civ graphics and maps) I think we have to admit a few things from the start:
1. The animated Leader graphics and expensive voice acting are Here To Stay, at least for now, so multiple Leaders per Civ simply cannot be done across the board in any game playable on the 'average' computer and by any company that plans to release the game for less than several hundred dollars a pop.
2. No Civ/Faction will be historically handicapped to the extent real groups were - it simply makes them unplayable. No one is going to play Aztecs that automatically lose 75% of more of their population whenever they meet someone from another continent. No one will play any central-south African or Native American Civ if they are doomed to never have access to Horses in every game. Some 'quirks' are acceptable: game losing attributes are not.
3. Complete violent change of Civ attributes by some kind of Foreign Conquest, although frequent in history, will need some considerable modification to be included in any way in a game. Losing everything, even if in fact your Culture and Population remain largely intact and you can 'bounce back' in the future, is still Losing, and very few gamers buy a game and play it to Lose. We save that for Real Life.
4. "Victory" will have to be defined in order to include many changes, some involuntarily (see above) in basic political entity and culture. That will probably have to include multiple ways to win, because even
Humankind, that originally advertised a single Victory Condition - Fame, in fact was released with several: Science, Pollution (a "negative victory condition", in itself an intriguing concept) and Conquest as well as simply achieving more Fame.
