games

Also Hexagons but otherwise yeah. I love how your borders grow and grow and grow and grow and you can take over other cities that way

Civ 6 has better combat as you said, it also has better city management, tile management and city-building with districts that can really customize cities and areas based on their geography. It also has the best mod support and UI by far at this point. I also prefer the city state system, religions, and having a civic tree alongside the science tree.

It's really cool in the expansions how you can build canals, dams, tunnels, etc. If you use modded map packs you can get large maps with rivers that are 1-tile wide and navigable by ships, which is a lot of fun when combined with the above features. Trade routes get multipliers if they go through canals in your territory, and all these districts give adjacency to industrial and commercial zones. There's also alternate playstyles where you go more into preservation, tourism, culture, appeal and faith with the nature preserves and holy sites and unimproved forests. You also get diplomatic benefits for not polluting, it can slow down or prevent global warming and you can get a "good ending" for the world where it doesn't turn into a radiated deathworld (A peaceful cultural, diplomatic or religious victory in a world without crazy disasters and war) - though to do this with the base AI is difficult because they are programmed to bee-line for industry and science so I use a mod that changes AI behavior based on their civ.

Civ 6 is also too easy, the AI isn't good enough at late game aggression and district management. So ironically, the things that are better about Civ 6 for a human are things that AI have a hard time with. So you have to mod in Deity ++ and some other mods if you really want a challenge.

I also would like a marxist or historian to go in and make a mod to correct some of the Liberal ideology underpinning certain mechanics and civics/governments. It would also have to add revolutions, slavery, genocide, etc. if you are going to include fascism. It makes no sense to make a sanitized PG version of history as a game (wonder what my units are doing while "pillaging" to get full health and 180 gold) and then also include Fascism as a government choice, but it's just +X to combat strength and +Y% to unit production benefits and no drawbacks. At least Paradox games have penalties and show the gruesome outcome of these policies (mass murder, genocide, forced migration, slavery, etc). You either gotta go full historical reality or full G rating Disney mode, otherwise you implicitly are whitewashing fascism and capitalism. I hate that they always call capitalism "democracy" in these games! It's a Bourgeois dictatorship, the Communist government is more democratic! However, in reality your government is autocracy with you as god-king and is the whole game long since there's no mechanic that interrupts your complete control and micro-management of your empire.

Like does this make any goddamn sense? Capitalism is a dead-end civic with no relation to anything else. The 3 governments after that are Communism, Fascism and "Democracy". So this "Democracy" thing isn't capitalism, fascism or communism?

In reality there's no such government as a "democracy" in such plain terms. Liberal bourgeois dictatorships allow a veneer of democracy during boon times and go into fascist defense mode during crisis times, it's the two postures of the same government. So really there's 2 late-game government types (Prole Dictatorship & Bourgeois Dictatorship) each with their own war posture and peace posture. Capitalism is not a separate optional thing, it's the economic system that creates these two government types because it creates these two opposing classes. You should discover Capitalism, undergo rapid changes in your empire, start to lose control if you cling to feudal systems. Then once you are sufficiently developed and hit a cyclical crisis, you make a decision one way or the other to adopt a revolution or crush it and become one of the two governments. Then your war weariness and threat levels determine your posture (how much war policy cards you have, etc). If you crush the revolution you will have certain benefits and certain downsides, but if you have to go into war mode it should be clear your society becomes fascist and imperialist and you have penalties from that like population loss, diplomatic penalties, etc.