Just one final thought/addendum: If your influence in each era corresponded to a single human lifetime, maybe there's no need for continuity of rulership. You might allow the player to switch at will between civs at the end of each era.
This might help to solve the complaint that civ games tend to be foregone conclusions beyond a certain point, since you could take on the role of the underdog in the next era, and see how that shakes out. It also means you're not neccesarily invested in the success of just one civ, but might be encouraged to consider that civ's impact on the world as a whole.
Example:
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In the first era you'd lead your tribe to settle near the mouth of an estuary next to an offshore island chain, thus prompting their future development of seafaring technologies, vast territorial expansion and long-distance trade routes, something like the polynesians, phoenicians or vikings.
In the second era, you might take on the role of plains-dwelling nomads they've been bartering with (something like the apache, mongols or bedouin,) who've copied their developments in metallurgy and writing. You combine those techs with your expertise in domestication and warfare to forcefully establish a continent-spanning cosmopolitan empire.
In the third era, the nomad empire has collapsed under it's own weight, while greatly facilitating the exchange of technologies (and a plague or two,) triggering a demographic collapse followed by a new renaissance. This time, you take up the reigns of a once-conquered city-state and focus exclusively on tech development, fostering a golden age of the arts and sciences and the ferment of strange political ideas.
Finally, in the fourth era, that city-state has founded a global sphere of cultural, military and economic clout. But you might return to the remnants of the nomad empire as it's constitutional monarch, trying to keep pace with demands for economic modernisation and secular reform while pacifying the conservative elements of the culture on which your power-base depends. Your crowning achievement is the political re-unification of the region under your diplomatic stewardship, laying the groundwork for a strong political position within an emerging, quasi-democratic world government.
Originally Posted by Carry2
Just one final thought/addendum: If your influence in each era corresponded to a single human lifetime, maybe there's no need for continuity of rulership. You might allow the player to switch at will between civs at the end of each era.
Re: Civilisation 5's tech tree vexes me.
I like Your idea of trying to unite your people and having early factions with the same culture as you. I'd like to explore this idea in depth...
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