>I've played every Civilization since the first one, I believe. I think 4 was my favorite, especially since it had the best music.
>Lately I've been wavering from the series though. My biggest complaint is that every game is so long and requires so much micromanagement in the mid-late game.
You may be interested to know that the lead designer of Civilization 4, Soren Johnson, is directly attacking that problem in his most recent game. The TLDR is you have a fixed number of actions you can do each turn which you choose to spend to move a unit, rather than each unit having one action every turn no matter what. So turn times do not increase exponentially like in Civ games.
"Perhaps the most interesting resource in the pool, and the one which makes Old World stand out most from the 4X genre as a whole, is Orders. In most expand ‘em ups, you move each unit once each turn, and that’s that. In Old World, you have a pool of orders (replenished at a variable rate each turn depending on parameters such as your ruler’s legitimacy, the technologies in play, and dozens more), which you can split at will between your units. You might choose to blurt all your orders to a single scout, moving them three or four moves across the landscape until they hit their fatigue limit, or you might focus your whole order pool on a few military units fighting war, or you might go hard on workers building improvements. It’s a novel way of breaking a tradition, and offers flexibility while keeping turn times relatively snappy."
The game is playable now in Early Access, if anyone is interested.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/04/14/preview-shape-na...