IMPROVE IMMERSION OF CULTURE SHIFTING WITH EVENTS THAT EXPLAIN HOW THE SHIFT HAPPENED

The culture shifting mechanic is one of the most interesting features of Humankind but its reception is rather mixed. The problem that many people have with it is that it's most extreme cases (i.e. Spanish becoming Zulus) breaks their immersion, and the constant shifting results in people not being able to connect with or care about their empires. I think a way to solve this problem would be to add events that pop up when we decide to change cultures that explains how it happened; how your old culture fell and your new one rose to power. If people had some kind of rationale to latch onto for why the changes happened they might be more tolerant of them, even the more outlandish ones. For those of us who aren't bothered by the culture shifting, these events would simply provide a cool new feature that could help players create their own stories. 

These "collapse events" don't have to be as simple as a random event that pops up that explains what happened and has no tangible gameplay effects, though that would suffice. How this could be implemented is if after changing your culture and advancing into the next era an event would pop up which would essentially say "We collapsed, what happened to us?" and present 3 options like "We were conquered.",  "We grew corrupt and decadent." or "We were overthrown by a rebellion". Each of  these options  could also have their own maluses and drawbacks as well such as losing population and production, losing influence, or losing stability on cities. There can also be more than three options to choose from meaning that different options can appear or they can even be made era specific. The options would represent how civilizations collapsed in the real world and range from your empire being conquered by roving hordes of barbarians who then become the new rulers of the empire, to your culture mixing with that of foreign conquerors thus creating a new culture, to epidemics and plagues causing the collapse and utter destruction of your old culture with the new culture being new people who came and settled in the ruins of the old civilization afterwards. Of course these events would not occur if you chose to transcend instead of change cultures, and transcending could also come with an added bonus, as it would represent your old culture entering a new Golden Age or showing its strength by outlasting its contemporaries.