Have you ever played the Europa Universalis games? They have an incredibly obnoxious fanbase so I'd avoid the forums except to quickly grab a mod or a patch, but they're pretty interesting and almost more... simmish in nature.
For starters, I'll say that I'm tired of 4x games focusing on military almost entirely in lieu of diplomacy or alternative approaches. This is why I find the EU games interesting, for instance, or the first GalCiv (in comparison to the second, which sort of axed the a lot of the non-militaristic options).
Additionally, city management/building is my least favorite aspect of every single 4x game I've played because it's... a means to get bonuses and produce new units/techs/whatever, but the entire notion of needing to keep your cities happy or provide infrastructure or whatever is such a minor aspect of most games, when in reality, infrastructure and internal politics should be a huge deal.
Imperialism 2 sounds neat. Is it on any direct-to-drive service anywhere? GOG doesn't seem to have it.
Anyway. Comments on your comments.
Quote:a simplification to 2-4 resources
Less of a cliche and more of a gameplay necessity. For every resource you have, you have to balance it somehow to make it useful. HoMM is sort of bad about this. They have TONS of resources but after you've got your town built, gold's the only one that really matters.
And on the flipside, even if you DO get resources well balanced, you run the risk of turning your game into a spreadsheet.
Quote:a tech race
I think tech trees are sort of silly because they lead to this (or worse, lead to a situation where you click through a million turns waiting for something to get researched without actually doing anything. Dull!). I think there are other, better ways to represent technology in games than just "Click a research node, wait till it's done cooking." Then again, the alternatives might require a more simmish approach and a lest... typically strategy approach.
Quote:The concept of non-offensive "minor powers" to fight over as cannon fodder (Imperialism)
GalCiv had these as well, although they weren't strictly non-offensive and some of them could actually be a pretty huge risk. And then you get to the EU games, where you have like, 180ish playable nations, some minor, some less minor, all meaningful in some sense.
So, continuing on.
In epic, broad level strategy games, I don't like tactical combat much. I feel like it's... too much of its own thing, and it's hard to do a really great 4x game and a really great tactical game at the same time because your thoughts and resource are divided, so you end up in a situation like you described with MOO2 where you get little imbalances like the lack of an initiative system.
Also, as the player, I want to be able to focus my attention more on a single mode of gameplay. If I'm building an empire, I don't really want to get dragged into a twenty-minute tactical battle.
I think political, social, and economic policies are a good idea, but I'd like to see them more open-ended -- maybe creating a party with a particular set of goals/philosophies/morals/whatever. I'd also like an internal politics thing in place. GalCiv one, for instance, had the senate, which conveyed various bonus/penalties to your civilization depending on things. EU: Rome also had a senate if you played as a republic, and they literally would block you from doing certain things if it didn't match their beliefs/the will of the people. Pretty neat.
And as I said, less militarism. I think a system where you can never be entirely self-sufficient and need allies to trade with would be really neat. And maybe a system, like in Crusader Kings, where if your empire gets to large you get efficiency penalties and need to start giving it away to vassals (or, in other contexts, local jurisdictions, state governments, semi-autonomous planets, etc).