>My wishlist for a proper civ successor is a game that takes you from a single village to a globe-spanning superpower, not on a single map with a single handful of opponents, but starting as a village with village-sized opponents which you will conquer or co-opt, expanding the scope of the game, the map and creating new opponents matched to your progress as you progress through the eras.
In principle this could be achieved through the agar.io approach. Spawn the map with 100s of small fish. Small fish either swallow or get swallowed, and increasingly over time, you get fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger fish.
I think the problem is that the playerbase seems to want both "fair rules", where every ai you meet is playing the same game as you, and an experience of exponential growth.
I think these two demands are fundamentally impossible to do well at the same time. Too small differences early on snowball into too large differences too quickly. You either have to limit the growth hard, or you need to play against a "gm" that fudges everything behind the scenes to provide you an engaging experience throughout the game.
My wishlist for a proper civ successor is a game that takes you from a single village to a globe-spanning superpower, not on a single map with a single handful of opponents, but starting as a village with village-sized opponents which you will conquer or co-opt, expanding the scope of the game, the map and creating new opponents matched to your progress as you progress through the eras.