Civ 5 and 6 are so different that it is difficult to call them successor games anymore. It's Civ meets Settlers of Catan or something, no longer a true Civ game.
The movement limitations in Civ 5 and 6 don't make sense. The biggest battles in history have been what Civ 5+ players dismiss as "death stacks".
Think of the Battle of Trafalgar, Battle of Stalingrad, Siege of Baghdad (1258), Fall of Tenochtitlan... all concentrations of multiple units on one area.
So I understand why they wanted to make room for actual tactics.
If that comes at the cost of archers being able to shoot a bunch of gatling gunners across the English channel without them having the reach to shoot back, then so be it.
No need to add the board game style limitations.
I remember eagerly awaiting Civ V, buying it on release day, and then being shocked by how different it was. At the time I had strong opinions on all the things that it did "wrong", but now I've concluded that Civ is one of those games where the first one you play will just always be special. Objectively, lots of people love Civ V and I'm happy for that.
But even though I stopped playing Civ V I kept following along in the civfanatics forums to see what kinds of awesome mods would develop around it.
We never saw the same kind of total conversion mods that were possible in Civ IV, I think because of modding limitations. But I either missed or disregarded Vox Populi and now I'm excited to read into its history!
FWIW, I started with Civ II (still have the thick manual), but prefer V ;)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=20591...
Recently they started doing community councils, introducing a process for proposals and getting them voted on.
Personally, as I don’t care that much about balance, I also play with the 3rd and 4th unique component [1] mod, which is mostly a one-man project and not as balanced, but makes civs even more distinct.
Oh, and of course, VP is open source [2].
edit: In case someone decides to play with it, the current version 4.x has had some extensive clean up and might have some new bugs. Also, many addon mods have not been updated for it, so you might want to use 3.x for now.
[0]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...
[1]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/more-unique-compone...
[2]: https://github.com/LoneGazebo/Community-Patch-DLL