With what you said and what you quoted, I think the issue moreso late game being boring, if you haven't gone total war it's likely you're going for another type of victory and managing your cities becomes secondary to your objective despite still being the only gameplay. You're not settling new cities, you're just micromanaging buildings.
We'll see. I'm actually interested in how they'd explain this game lore-wise, since the original EL setting is implied to be one and done and Auriga is confirmed dead in ES2. (And indirectly, in Dungeon of the Endless too).
Why? I really like WW1 as the ending to a Victorian Era or even potentially a longer colonialism game, but it was just the first act of more stuff popping off. I feel like the Cold War/Information Age/Pax Americana is the natural stopping point since you have a story of the world building up to catastrophic ideological conflict and one side of it (historically, choices being liberal democracy and two varieties of socialism in fascism and communism) coming out on top as lone superpower. One side clearly wins. Of course we’re not at the End of History IRL, but since we don’t know what happens next, it makes sense for a game to be built around that kind of narrative.
Really depends on which way you look at it. WW2 wasn't an inevitability and if WW1 can be dismissed as just a prequel to WW2 then WW2 could inversely be dismissed as just a sequel to WW1. It wouldn't preclude having a story of an escalating ideological conflict either; the Paris Commune was half a century prior to the Petrograd Soviet, the French Revolutionary Wars were obviously ideological and even before that you had the English Civil War - you'd just have to be a bit more creative in structuring it than the basic liberalism/fascism/communism. Maybe have it be something more broad like revolution/reaction and you can tailor it across a few centuries (perhaps have a third reform branch that both sides can dip into to moderate).
See, I agree with all that, but I see that as playing out through the whole World Wars and Cold War era. If your game up and stops at WW1 tech and aesthetics, you've just started in the crisis. Britain and France, for example, are only in the beginning of the end of their colonial empires. The polarity aspect is something I think comes about because of game balancing is an inherent problem in any strategy game with a long runtime; you can see the same in a Paradox game or a Total War game where it's just plain hard to balance something around realistic outcomes, and I think a huge aspect of that that goes overlooked is that only a human player has the singleminded focus to run a state as though it is a game. States compete, but you don't have the same kind of sustained and coherent effort from generation to generation. They're not relentless in the same way.
Sure, but I guess it just comes down to expectations - people associate those gameplay concepts with that era just because Civ's the only one that's really done it and they only do it in those timeframes. If you don't have those you would have to put in the effort on the prior eras and really sell WW1 and its peace proceedings equivalents as the game's conclusion, but I think that would still be a draw in of itself.
True, but only from the advantage of retrospective; the signatories of Versailles and the architects of the League of Nations thought otherwise. Similarly, Civ 1 launched the year the Soviet Union collapsed and the End of History zeitgeist came into full swing; the idea that fundamentalist Islam would resurge as a major historical force a decade later and that liberalism would start choking the life out of the promise of hovercars on our moon colonies was probably unthinkable to Sid when he was making the stuff for the Space Age. Ultimately I think it's easier and more impactful to simulate what the player understands is a momentary triumph as a conclusion to a game like this then meaningfully simulate the constant booms and busts of the last century when it should be the final lap for people to finish their victory conditions.
I fully expect a dumpster fire on launch and an unfixable mess mechanically due to retarded decisions with the fundamental design.
They haven't learned the lesson from Humankind. People either want a sandbox with civs or want actual custom nations. At least you don't have to switch civs between eras, but it's still annoying if you'd rather start as specific civ and can only unlock it later on. It removes player choice.
It evens out since the game is also being made by people that aren't interested in history.
They've been doing that since the first Civ game. They picked evil bastards like Stalin, Mao, and Gandhi because they're who what most non-history buffs know. The Zulu were chosen as the token black civilization because of a movie.
No, no, they're interested in history alright. Their version of history instead of the real thing.
Its actually baffling to see the choices nu-Firaxis made regarding the leaders in the game. If they really (and I mean really desperate) want a Pinoy leader, why Rizal? Guy only managed to make the Spanish seethe when his novels exposed the phoney Church but was not leader material. They could have chosen either Emilio Aguinaldo or Andres Bonifacio (or pick both and have a what-if scenario where Emilio's mom didn't convince him to kill his co-partner for the KKK leadership) given their importance to the nation's rebellion against the Spaniards.
