At least some Civ inherent abilities should be able to be carried forwards as traditions

[autumn forum]

As title.

It feels pretty bad to plan your city around Khmer keeping yields building on rivers only to lose it next age. It should become a Tradition on Age Transition IMHO.

It wouldn't necessarily be ideal for Carthage or balanced for Assyria but for Aksum, Egypt, Han, Mississipian and Khmer I think it'd be nice.

Possibly some Exploration civs too.

[dull estuary]

I made a similar post recently, +1. Unique traditions should be in average stronger, and they and other age persistent systems should contain most of the gameplay decision incentivizing mechanics of their civs so you don't lose those incentives and desync your empire from the decisions that motivated it's choices. Khmer being by far the most obvious problem case of this

[idle gate]

I think the development of this 3 tier evolution is backwards. The civilization evolves into a new civilization and the ruler is the short modifier. I.e. Egypt has their pharaoh but over into another time like exploration Egypt evolves into CivB and has a new ruler with new perks. So basically the culture remains intact but the rulers change. Egypt into Hawaii and then into Mexico. Each era has a leader but they change. Maybe keeping aspects of previous civs.

[rugged yew]

The leader is purely a human embodiment of a "common thread" between your civs and it's not really intended to be look at with much scrutiny.

The civs are the main course in teams of mechanical and historical depth.

Having a civ roster for each age triples the amount of depth they can go into for each civ.

See China, Han/Ming/Qing as opposed to just China. With or without Confucius as the leader. I'd much rather this than "generic China" with changing leaders. That just feels like a crusader kings ripoff

[slate shuttle]

As I see it, traditions are exactly what you are refering to: Civ inherent traits/abilities that are being kept into the following ages. They do, of course, have to be balanced with regards to future ages as well.
The abilities are civ inherent traits that are not being kept. The fact they can't be kept into the following ages allows for more possibilities since they don't have to be balanced with regards to them

[unique hull]

Yea, I think the system as-is works pretty well. Most Civs have traditions that give a similar mechanic or incentive as their UA. For example, Bulgaria’s food-from-pillage tradition, or Majapahit’s culture-on-specialists-outside-of-capital.

Khmer’s just a standout because their mechanic heavily incentives river settlement, but no tradition interacts with that. IMHO, I would just change Pithi Chrat to something like +1 food and happiness on buildings constructed on rivers.

[green valley]

The Khmer traditions in general are really weak. Combat strength of floodplains is too niche. +1 Gold on specialists is very weak. Reduced maintenance on specialists is weak. Even if you had 40 specialists by the end of exploration, this gets you an extra 40 gold and saves you 10 food and 10 happiness. Compare this to the Mississippi tradition of gold adjacency for resources, the Greek discount for befriending IPs, Han’s bonus influence traditions, etc. I find that in Khmer games, their traditions get outcompeted by every other social policy.

Turning the maintained yields on rivers into a tradition would be busted strong because of increased warehouse yields in later eras. I would be in favor of a tradition that reduces building maintenance for buildings on rivers. Actually, Khmer is labeled as a scientific civ but they have literally no bonuses to science. They should have a tradition that gives +1 science for buildings on rivers, excluding bridges.

[dull estuary]

There are ways to balance that effect in later ages, by giving it a kiss/curse effect or by making the tradition be "keeps 50% of base yield tile" and the civ's baseline effects gives the other 50% or something. Imo, balancing the changes is step 2, step 1 is getting changes to have the proper design goals. And I strongly advocate that those design goals should make it so the mechanics that dictate decisions, such as in your city layout and positioning, need to carry over into the next age at least partially so they maintain those incentives. Khmer's incentives are to build on top of rivers and make use of warehouse effects off of them, from nat wonders, regular wonders, etc. I think it needs to carry over that, not just get a different effect for building on rivers.

[slate shuttle]

Yeah, changing traditions may be a good option here and there