Not sure if this was fixed in the recent update, but because civs that have not spawned yet are counted as dead, they are used for civil wars. This includes the player, but if the player spawns before their date they can't control any units, nor does a spawn trigger ever fire unless all of their cities and/or all of the units they gain control of are killed. The result is the player is perpetually stuck looking at the waiting screen long past their start date.

I remember 'fixing' it by copying the loop that adds civs to the list of those usable for civil wars, having the first only add dead city states, then have the second loop fire only if the list is empty after the first loop and add major civs. That way dead city-states were used first, and the chance of the player getting stuck was at least decreased :P.

Thanks dude! Will try and fix this in the future. Sorry for the super late reply! Amazing work fixing it

Was kind of a jank fix tbh. Later on turned out to be impractical because city-state AI always seems to raze the cities they are given, so entire empires just disappeared by mid-game. I think an alternative fix might be to AND on to the if-statement on line 62 that determines what civs are added to the civil war list, as the current logic seems to still include the player as a candidate if Not entirely sure what that means.

Okay yep I am experiencing exactly this issue constantly- only civs with relatively early start dates are playable.

Please fix this I have started five games so far and only was able to play two and I'm kinda tired of Egypt and Babylon I've had my fill of both in vanilla Civ5

Also btw the AI gets dramatic ages weirdly often and it causes their technological progress to totally stagnate bc they promptly fall into dark ages. Sometimes the AI will go broke which causes them to stop getting techs that could unlock gold earning buildings which keeps them stuck

The dark age system just makes it so civs that get ahead get SLAPPED down and never get back up again. Just straight up an execution they lose entire cities its actually sad to watch in spectator mode. Its like if the bronze age collapse happened on repeat and only as an f you in particular to whatever civilization pushed the boundaries at any time.

If the real world worked like this england would have researched industrialization, realized they had just finished a heroic age a few turns ago so now theyre in rock bottom prestige, realized india already built taj mahal and theres no making it again, and then went "welp, guess the sun sets now" and completely imploded in the 1820s.