Firstly apologies for my shabby formatting and grammar, if you can get past that I really appreciate your reading my idea and would love if you could respond with any criticisms you have and changes you'd make to what I've outlined.
My core ideas for this would require a step away from the games current concept of cultural switching and would have little impact on gameplay it is purely an idea for immersion/connection with your nation. This is all cantered around of my major issue with this game and it's overall feel, that I think is so close to brilliance, which is I do not think you keep anywhere near enough of a connection to your previous culture with the single turn jump from one to the next completely ruining the experience in my view.
The core of my idea for these changes is removing the harsh edges that currently exist between age ups and cultures this is a game that should be about the blending/merging of cultural groups not jumping between real world cultural groups at random. The first change I would make to address this would be changing the current faction naming system, maintaining the current avatar names for the faction I would love to see the sort-of reintroduction of the created names for the joining of different cultures as a sub-heading/title for the factions. With these titles merging together before phasing out the previous cultures name once again becoming monoculture before merging again on your next age up. To better explain this in the Ancient era you choose x culture, this is your name, you then reach the classical era choose a new culture and become x-y for a set number of turns dependent on game speed, before becoming solely y until you age up and then you are y-z etc. A system like this would require a lot of thought and care to plan out inventing plausible sensible names for cultural mergers that don't exist in reality but would in my opinion help smooth the transition greatly. Additionally to this the game should allow players to name their own nations if they choose offering the chance to rename with every age up giving them the freedom to invent state names instead of culturally based ones if they wish. This removes the idea from the players head (which I think is one of this games biggest missteps) that we are playing as existing historical cultures because we aren't, we're writing our own history.
Beyond the naming from one culture to another in a single turn jump just doesn't work there's too much whiplash there. In my idea for cultural merging takes place over many turns with districts containing the visuals of both cultures and time periods during in this transitional phase slowly shifting from your last cultures aesthetic to your new one. I would also like to allow the player to continue to build the previous cultures emblematic districts during this transitional time. A change like this would really help show the technological and cultural shifts of your nation occur naturally aiding in the removal of the current disconnect between these to cultures. Currently in my view ageing up feels like a foreign power has invaded your nation and wiped out all elements of their culture apart from their most significant sites (emblematic quarters) instantaneously in my mind It almost reads as a cultural genocide which is not the goal of this game at all.
I would also love to see this merging on units as well blending the visual style of different cultures, slowly phasing out the previous one. Again this is mostly in service of immersion with only the emblematic quarter aspect affecting gameplay but I truly think immersion or a lack there of is hone of the biggest problems facing this game.
If you've read this far thank you very much, I would really appreciate any feedback you have on this. I really love this game and would love to see it regain some of it's initial success and popularity and I think these are some non gameplay related changes that could potentially contribute to that. This is almost entirely a visual Idea attempting to change how ageing up is perceived which is likely not a priority for the devs but I truly believe that little elements of quasi narrative crafting would elevate the experience.
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