Humankind introduced the idea of changing cultures over time. While I don't think the radical shifts (Khmer turns into Dutch turns into Brazilians turns into Soviet) makes sense in civ, I like the idea that you can pick your affinity for each era and tweak the way your civilizations evolves between different playthroughs of the same civ. Can something similar be incorporated in Civ (i.e. picking different branches within a "culture set", for instance English, Celts, Scots, Americans, Canadians form one group? That's just a loose thought.)?
I think developing new abilities in an RPG-style "talent tree" could be interesting, but I don't like the idea of changing cultures in the Civ model (even though I actually really like it in HK, arbitrary though it is). There are just too many civs whose only logical progressions are completely dissonant and were the result of conquest. E.g., do Native Americans become the United States or Aztecs become Mexico? Ew. Does Sumer become Babylon become Arabs become Iraq? Again, ew. Few civs have the kind of millennia-spanning development options open to, say, Persia and China (and even then, Persia was dominated by Turks for most of the Middle Ages, and China has its own conquest dynasties like the Jin, Yuan, and Qing). Civ's everlasting civilizations may be one kind of fiction--but that's because real civilizations don't last 6,000 years--but it's a more palatable fiction than assuming your alternate history
must follow real history, e.g., Mesoamerica inevitably being conquered by Spain and Mesopotamia inevitably being conquered by Arabia (and on which note I hate the hints of this already in Civ6 such as modern Aztec civilians having Spanish names or modern Sumerian civilians having Arab names).
tl;dr: Yes to RPG-style talent trees, no to progressing cultures in Civ.
District sprawling based on map features made cities look incoherent. Follow Humankind path of making (urban) district need to spread from city center.
This is one option. The other is to make the devs' intention that districts are smaller urban centers more visually obvious (and for heaven's sake make them look civ-appropriate: no more Greek amphitheaters in my Cree city, please!).
More ways to claim territories than just by founding cities
Yes!
More uses for culture. Civ6 tried with a culture tree similar to the tech tree, and I'm not sure that was the best solution. Whether one keeps it or not, the fact that you need to boost your culture to spread your civilization seems good and worth exploring.
Again, yes. This goes back to the thing I harp on: Civ6's systems do not meaningfully interact with each other; Civ7 needs to address that shortcoming.
Is the wonder race system ready to be put to rest? I'm not sure myself. I have long thought about how it would be if wonders were something you "bought" instead of raced for, and Humankind did basically that, and I'm not sure it makes the game more fun.
I'll be honest: as frustrating as it can be sometimes, I like Civ's wonder race better than HK's wonder purchasing.
Policy cards and governments: I really didn't like this system at all. It feels very board-gamey in the bad way (artificial), it's tedious, it can be abused, and it's poorly balanced on top
I love the policy cards, but I think the system needs an overhaul to be more interesting and varied and to make different governments feel more meaningfully different. (I will say the NFP patch that revised governments did a good job of making different governments more appealing in different situations; I've found myself picking different governments since that patch than my usual Classical Republic > Merchant Republic > Democracy. But Civ7 needs to do
way more in terms of government diversity.)
Please let us decide where roads go. Having roads tied so intimately to traders you could not choose path for is really annoying.
I have mixed feelings on this. I appreciate not having to micromanage roads, which was often tedious in Civ5, and I even more appreciate that Civ6 makes international roads a thing. However, the automatic pathing system can make stupid choices.
The modular approach may have been worth trying but was mostly a failure. I'm not saying there *can't* be elements of the game that can be toggled on/off, but in terms of core game features, in order to be a success, the need to be fully fleshed out and integrated in the game which seem incompatible with the modular approach.
100% this. The more modular the game, the less integrated the features. That's a serious problem.