For me it's a FOMO sense of "ok fine I guess I got all I'm gonna get this era" after it's been chirping at me to advance for ages while I farmed 10 extra stars. Followed by "shit do I still need to finish any EQs?"

Doesn't really fit the tone imo. "Keep access to the previous era's EQ" is a simple enough gameplay improvement, but I also wonder if the end of an era should be portrayed more melancholy? There's no official lore reason for the culture shifts, so something like "we hit our zenith and stalled out, so the Immortal Leader let a reformist faction reimagine our way of life" could work. Fits the final few turns of an era where you're doing the last bit of housekeeping before inevitably moving on. Then the new era starts and the tone becomes excited for the future.

I feel great like Tay-Tay. ^^

SpikedWallMan wrote:

I feel the same way as you.  It's a weird and sometimes frustrating tradeoff because Fame collection from Era Stars and era progression feel like they're diametrically opposed.  So there is less incentive to progress Fame-wise, but it puts you at risk of being attacked by another civ using stronger units from the next era.  Also, since only one player can choose a particular culture, there is also the risk of someone grabbing the better cultures before you do.  But if you're already lagging in Fame then era progression is not a good idea either because you'll miss out on additional Fame from Era Stars.  So in that sense it's easy for civs to snowball Fame.  Also, the idea that you can complete a Victory Condition but still hypothetically lose in Fame is a little weird.

One potential solution would be to require more Era Stars before progression, but that would defeat the purpose of the culture specializations since the number of Era Stars are capped per-era.  Maybe a better solution would be to increase the number of stars required for era progression AND ALSO increase the number of Era Stars for your culture specialty while at the same time reducing the number of stars for the other categories?  (So as a rough example, increase the number of Era Stars for progression from 7 to 14, and then give the science-based Babylonians a total of 15 possible Science Era Stars with 1 bonus star available in the 6 other star categories...or something to that effect...)

I know, right? >.<