I hate the Age transition in Civ 7

I hate the way age transitions happen in this game. Halting your active game, picking a new civ, removing all bonuses, changing the resources on the map, removing all city states, etc. It's such a discontinuity, it makes the game feel like 3 mini games instead. On top of that, the transition feels forced and arbitrary. I'm either bored with an age and ready to move on early, or wishing it would last longer because I'm in the middle of something.

I don't know how different it would be to implement, but I think civ transition should be a choice you can make at a certain point in time. As you grow your civ you get to a point where you've unlocked the ability to change to another civ to get benefits for the next age. You don't have to, you can stay an ancient civ the whole game, but of course benefits wise it makes sense to do it.

This means the ai civs also go through this process, you don't randomly reset everyone to the same tech and culture age. There is benefit to being ahead in tech or culture tree vs another culture that can't transition because they're behind. You return to one extended tech and culture tree that spans all ages and make the game continuous.

What about the crisis system? I would keep something like it, but make it more frequent, not artificially timed, and make surviving different crises give you points to earn towards civ transitions

And speaking of crisises, why are they so pathetically weak? In history, time of crisis caused dramatic changes in population and empires.

The black plague killed 50% of the European population. Smallpox killed something like 90% of the population on the Americas when it was introduced. Diseases should be more virulent and more deadly, causing huge upheaval. Cities should lose large portions of their populations and depending on contact and trade, spread more the more connected a civilization is. And the act of exploration and trading with new civs cause new spread of extant diseases.

Where are famines? Famine is a major historical cause of disruption and unrest. A population suddenly can't feed itself and had to rely on food trade from other countries or trigger mass migration events, or starvation. The current "random spawn" of independent tribes should be triggered by regional famines where they can't compensate for the drop in food. Now you have agency in the impact of the crisis, food reserves and trading for food minimizes the impact, and you have the situation of accepting friendly migrants and fighting hostile migrants.

Earthquakes. Historically some cities were massively destroyed by large earthquakes. Natural disaster shouldn't be a thunderstorm that has you repair a farm for 20 gold.. Destroy large regions of buildings, kill populations, tank production and happiness until you rebuild. Trigger more population migrations you have to deal with.

Consider the collapse of the bronze age in 1200 BC. It's thought it was triggered by some combination of large earthquakes, famine that weakened the population and invasion of hostile migrants displaced by famines elsewhere. Some civilizations survived, some disappeared and were replaced by others.

The crisises should be a major negative force in the game you have to survive against, obviously being more difficult and deadly the harder game setting you use. Your civ shouldn't always only be growing bigger over time, there should be times of unrest that disrupt and change your civilization, allowing you to transition to another civilization.