The RPG aspects add a lot to the gameplay and for me playing the game as a sandbox RPG is a lot more fun than trying to find exploits to beat the AIs on insane mode. In that respect, I think that despite some improvements over other 4x games (outposts, unrest, limited settling areas etc) the game still suffers from city spam & dragged out middle/end game (In fact TBH, I haven’t actually finished a game for this reason). Also there is no progression across the map so that as your parties increase in strength they get to be overpowered with respect to the mobs. These factors make games on the larger maps quickly lose their challenge just at the time when one gets to play with all the advanced abilities in the trait trees.

Some ideas that spring to mind:

- Optional ability to increase unrest in order to inhibit city spam and reduce the negative hit from losing a city (usually taking a single AI city is equivalent to winning the game). IMOP anything over 10 cities or so starts to become a bit of a drag.

- Monster aggression slider making random mobs a more active menace and more likely to attack cities and improvements. Although I suspect that the AI would need to be modified somewhat in order to cope with aggressive mobs inhibiting city building.

- Monsters might get increasingly aggressive and higher level the further away they are from the home cities of the player and the the competing AIs.

- AIs that don’t expand and have other agendas than ruling the map, somewhat like the city states in Civ (or just mobs that work together), perhaps. That would mean that these AIs could be given different levels of power according to where they are on the map. I hear reports that some events create aggressive AIs that make a nuisance of themselves, but haven’t seen that in my games yet.

… great game; step forward for the genre.