Cool, I always wondered when they were going to come out with Civ V. I have played all the Civ games. They are fun and I love the whole vertical integration of the game. I do find that it is too hard to keep track of what each city does and keeping some cities just for production and some cities for military. I just ended up letting all the cities do the same thing. The city siege aspect of it was good for certain eras but when you get into the more advanced eras it was kinda not realistic. Also when the military tries to pacifies a city I wonder if they are going to make that more realistic. Like what the US has run into with Baghdad and the like. I never like the way the game sometimes leaps two years for a turn. It is not realistic in that it would take you two or more years to move from one area to another. I am looking forward to this release. I won't buy it until I can get a deal on it because I think it is going to be pricey.
I've also always wanted to see insurgencies and the like.
Another thing that might be interesting is cessation of cities into new Civs (not just defecting to a neighboring Civ) a la US Civil War style. Doubt that is Incorporated though.
Some of the civ games will have guerrilla units pop up around the city after being conquered, though in the case of Civ 4 I think they only showed up when you razed a city.
And in civ 4, cities would go through several turns of unrest before they could actually be used for anything.
Beyond that, I'm not certain how you'd model insurgencies within the typical civ framework.
I agree with you on the civil war business. Historically, large empires often found civil war to be at least as great a threat as external empires. It would be interesting to see that sort of dynamic take place. Especially when you factored in the notion that external empires would quite likely start meddling in such things, and then you could turn around and start taking sides in the civil wars of your neighbors.
I'd also like to see more peacetime conflict options. A lot of times, empires would have all sorts of semi-autonomous proxy nations around their borders, and proxy wars would spark from time to time without leading to an actual full on war between great powers. Of course, sometimes these things
would escalate, but at least there'd be some middle ground between peace and full on war.
The cold war of the 20th century is one obvious model, but the skirmishes between Rome and the Parthians over various client kingdoms also comes to mind.
The civ games tend to play out as though no one existed but the great powers, which loses a lot of interesting subtleties from history.