What are your red lines for what mechanics Civ can or can’t add?

With Civ 7 having apparently been rumored to get an expansion, and with the way that Civ 7 has been received so far, I feel like this is a pertinent topic. Basically, I’ve been thinking about the idea of what different people play civ for and how that manifests in which changes they think are fine or not fine for the series to add. With Civ 7 in particular, many people seem to have been turned off from the franchise due to the mechanical changes whilst others don’t seem to get what all the hate is about.

I’ll take a possible (albeit probably unlikely) change that the civ franchise could make for itself as an example, namely that of a crafting economy system similar to something like Ara: History Untold. To me that would be a fun enough way of spicing up the gameplay compared to previous civ games, even though it’s not necessarily the direction I would go in if I was lead designer on Civ 8. But to someone whose enjoyment of Civ is largely based on seeing flat yields tick up to high numbers, such a change would be catastrophic for their enjoyment.

For me, my reason for choosing Civ over other historical strategy games has always been that it offers a more sandboxy experience where things are represented abstractly and you get to make up stories in your own head rather than them being told through a scripted narrative. The historical timeline was always my least favorite addition made in Civ 6 because it felt like the game forcing its own version of my civilization’s story onto me. Civ 7 having RPG-like narrative events and questlines alongside a very strict three act structure was always going to make it less appealing to me then. But of course, to someone who only cared about the strategic decisions the changes to how you approach the roleplaying aspect of the game was always going to be less important.

Civ of course has a history of people who stay with one entry of the franchise after the follow-up changes something important to them. Civ 4 players often talk about how they don’t like Civ 5 moving from a more strategic to a more tactical direction in terms of war. Civ 5 players often talk about how the Civ 5 meta of playing tall was very important to them. I do think Civ 7 is on a new level where some of the historical comparisons don’t really hold — Civ 6 did not have an update one year in backtracking on districts. But nevertheless, we can see a clear trend in the franchise. And I think that’s fine, cause you should never be forced to play a game that doesn’t offer what you want from it. There are of course also people who would never accept any change or who would eat up anything Firaxis puts out. You might say that they are a bit set in their ways, but when they don’t hamper the progression of the series (by either being too critical or not critical enough) I think they’re fine too. You might simply have nostalgia for a certain style of play, or not have any expectations from Civ besides a fun experience.

What’s interesting is how much the answer to my question probably varies between individuals. Maybe making it real time would turn off 90% of the playerbase, but otherwise I don’t know of any change that would be uniformly hated (or loved for that matter). Civ is a very multifaceted franchise with many different possible reasons for playing it.