Snowballing effects in this game are utterly wild.

The idea of having a few decisive battles and population support for war is sound, but:

1. battle favors winner overwhelmingly, since losers die and winners get to heal in a very short time, even in occupied territory. Heal could be much slower or disabled in occupied territory, or random rebels when stability is below a certain level. The militia as a whole is not good enough and should have been replaced by normal troops (with e.g. zero industry for next 5 turns). Also walls would be better with offensive capability, like ballista or hot oils .

2. war support is okay for some empires like Achaemenid, but lack serious bonus for defender when you consider city-states or homogenous kingdoms like early Roman republic who are willing to fight for much longer. As an aggressor, I could declare war on a weaker state, beat their army or capture city to force a surrender, then repeat a few turns later again and again by triggering grievances (mostly by asking alliance).

3. the terms of surrender should be scaled to loser's situation, not winners'. How can a tiny city state in ancient era possibly pay 20k gold to an empire of 15 cities? I guess it got losers into serious debt that they have no hope of getting out.

also, because of the snowballing effects, the game favors most aggressive approach and the balances are completely off, regardless of cultural affinity. In fact some affinities such expansionist' aren't even useful, because it's much cheaper to conquer AI's cities than to earn influence for a new outpost, or to build war support than resorting to diplomacy and world congress (the embassy brings nothing but negative effects). In my most recent games my biggest worry was not having AI or independent people near me for expanding!

The healing mechanism basically fixed the entire logistics problem player would face in other strategy games, and allow experienced troops to stay alive and keep gaining more experiences and conquering.

it could be:

- after combat, only 50% of loss is healable.

- but without healing in occupied land, the victor has to ransack occupied districts to heal that 50%.

- paying to resupply lost soldiers (NOT heal) in friendly territory reduces experiences, depend on loss of manpower.

- 50% of loss of the loser in friendly territory are distributed back to the city or outpost as population. But if a unit already has loss of manpower before last combat, the portion of previous loss would simply vanish.

But is this moddable? Can we add scripts? I can't do modding yet until my windows PC is back.

Also war support could be made to favor small and primitive nations. The richer and more developed a nation becomes, the less likely its population would be willing to endure a war without serious benefits or any defeat at all.