now to the real topic i want to talk about here. i think i speak for a lot of agers who play on zone when i say i'm skeptical/worried about the home city concept.
I think that the best way to implement it in multiplayer is for each player to choose techs (for the sake of argument, 3 techs) for their home city before the game in addition to a civ. These 3 techs would be hidden from the enemmy player (kinda like hole cards in poker). This could add a lot of strategic depth. you could either accentuate your civ's strengths or get techs that could allow you to play your civ differently than normal to catch your enemy by suprise.
to keep the rpg-type element, they could make it so that above a certain rating, you can have access to 4 techs or even 5 or 6 techs. then once you reach one of these thresholds, there would be whole new strategies than at the lower level (as anyone who played any age game knows, even one additional bonus/unit can completely change strategies). the experts would potentially have a plethora of strategies open to them at the highest level and it could lead to something more interesting than the usual flush battles that aoc experts now engage in.

any thoughts on this would be appreciated and i realize it would be very tough to balance.