Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
Kinda like "Seeing Like a State" sim (but with less grim/more pro-state viewpoint). A god-game/Civ combo that operates on worldwide scale, but you don't get to order people around, like move meeples from farmers to scientists, or maybe even have legible pops (any more than states at a given historical stage did). Starting at the earliest stage where you are a budding city-state but not in the middle of an empty chunk of map - as with real life, most of the environments worth exploiting would already be populated, and you have to conquer/absorb/convert/assimilate/... all those peoples.