Wide penalties needs to be less punishing, happiness wise atleast.

[Logoncal]

I have a feeling that the game is very chaotic with the world being completely aflame, because everyone just razes all cities but the capital because they simply can't handle happiness. And also, Wide play in Civ V is much less encouraging than in IV.

A suggestion because otherwise it feels like the world will be very barren.

Even on Immortal, where the AI is mega buffed and has a crap ton of happiness buffs, they still raze every city. lol

 

[PiR]

Yeah that's what I felt too when I played V95: a lot of razing. But I actually enjoyed it. It provided me with opportunities to grab their land through culture. Moreover, the game started lagging at Renaissance era with my old computer, so each city/unit removed from the map was welcome. I felt city states were taking most of the computing between turns, but it may be running other scripts and just displaying "city states playing".

I used to think happiness was the issue to not expanding, but now I believe it's more general to Civ V.
There are ways to get happiness: religion, resources, resources via City States (I found in my last Indian game how powerful it can be to be allied with most CS)... but then there are other things like science, cost & prerequisites of national wonders, etc. to dissuade you from expanding.
I'm wondering if the best way to expand is not to just become allied with all CS...

I would love to see this mod able to allow European powers everyone to colonize much much more (even though the game would lag more) but I don't have any simple solution to that, the base game is there.