No Mutants Allowed

These are the first cities on earth, first kingdoms, first empires, first conquests, first armies. One would think there'd be a bit of interest to play it out? :I

Such a game would be perfect as, for example, a Mount & Blade mod. Alas, I'm not a modder I checked lists today, and majority of mods are medieval europe or "better female bodies"

Are we talking about copper age or bronze age setting?

There's only a vague difference between the two, I'd need to know what you read into copper vs bronze age setting - BUT, I'm not sure what exact setting I'd prefer. Emotionally, I'd prefer "pre-deluge", since we'd deal with the "top 5" first and ancient-most cities, where the "god-kings" dwelled

Practically, it would have to be "post-deluge", since this would give us a much greater number of cities, capitals, villages, vassals, and so on, to play around with. The "deluge" is typically seen as occuring 2 900 BC

A setting during stone age to bronze age transition would be neat, maybe during indo european expansion (kurgan).
Always like to see how my bronze claded soldier fare againts stone age barbarian in civ 5.

Earliest Sumer borders on stone age, but yeah, something like that.
There's a big difference between pre and post deluge, since pre would concern the very earliest "legendary" cities, as early as 5000 BC, weaponry and technology would be significantly limited compared to 2 900 BC

The next few centuries, Sumer expands and interacts a lot more with the surrounding world, as a "metropolitan" empire. In my vision - sotospeak - I want to limit the scope to within Mesopotamia - to the rivalry of the initial Sumerian city states and their respective god-king roles.

If the game was hugely ambitious, it could - like Europa Universalis - include AI-driven growing empires all over the surrounding world, to interact with late game. Paradox games will allow countries to change identity as the game progresses, so a "nation" could be labelled as some "corded ware culture" or some shit - then "give independence" to a bunch of early kingdoms later on

hmmm....
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1238022363/neolithic-first-city-states-a-deep-historical-stra
No Iron age though, the end game will be about surviving the bronze age collapse

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=854046403 Just announced

ooo that actually looks very cool! Both of them, in each their way

The second one is more expansive, post-iron age stage is definitely possibility

Yeah, it does look good. It looks like they're truly going to try to go for subtlety and realism too, otherwise they'd probably just barf out another "medieval mega-war!"-thing. Not that I'm opposed to epic scale medieval warfare, but there's like a thousand games with that allready