I have been testing out some changes in my Civ 6 mod, with some pretty notable success. My primary goal is to make the game more challenging in a way that is fun, and that largely speaking means addressing all the spots where the AI is hopeless and the player just rolls over them. This generally breaks down into three categories. The first two I have pretty much fixed, but the third is a tricky beast.
The first category is some stuff being terrible. Endgame buildings are garbage, and clearly were not lined up to see if their cost is appropriate for their effect. A Water Mill, an early building, provides about 2.5 stuff per turn. It costs 80 production. Late in the game you get access to the Food Market, which also provides 2.5 stuff per turn. So you might imagine it would also cost 80. Or maybe more, if you don't mind it being weak... say 100 production to build. It costs 465. At that rate, it will pay itself off in something like 186 turns. For a building that should only be around for 50 turns, that is ... an embarrassment. So my first task was to make sure that all the buildings and wonders are good. Not good all the time, for any situation, but you should look at everything and think "Well, when I unlock that thing, I am sure going to build it somewhere!"
My version of the Food Market gives 14.5 stuff instead of 2.5. I still don't bother building them everywhere, but when a city really does need food, the Food Market delivers.
The second category of things is war. The AI is much weaker than a human player at war, and the primary offender here is healing. Humans keep their units alive, carefully heal them up, and level them up until they are beasts that the AI can't handle. One thing you want to constantly do is earn a level but then save it because when you cash it in you get a 50% heal. The AI doesn't do this, and it just levels right away. This tactic is devastating because it lets you run units into danger or under fire and get them out alive. I altered the healing on level to be 10% instead, so it still does something, but you can't just use a stored level to get out of jail free. I also reduced healing in general from 15/10/5 to 7/5/3. Lastly I decided to double the amount of experience required to level up, because getting to high levels was too quick. So how did it work out when I made these changes?
The game is so damn hard now! Even on Immortal it is a serious problem to win, and I would hesitate to try these changes on Deity at all. I still obviously try to heal my units, but being out of commission for 10 turns instead of 5 is awful. I had multiple occasions where my whole army was hurt and I had to flee enemy units and let them pillage and bash on cities so I could heal up. That difference in turns is far larger than you might think, and requires a drastically larger army to make a comparable push. That larger army spread out experience more, which leads to more losses, which loses you more experience. That combination of levelling less, having lower stats, healing slower, and no emergency button ratchets up the challenge, but in a way that I really like. Instead of the game being insane at the start with the AI having all the stuff, and a cakewalk at the end because you have an army of invincible high level units, you actually have to fight it out all the way through.
It feels weird to be advocating for extra challenge, but the trick is that that I want the challenge to be of a certain type, and apparently that is worth an almost unlimited number of hours. There is something really fun about cashing in all those good early game decisions for a huge burst of power late game, but the degree to which this happened with combat choices was simply too high.
The third category is policies, in that the AI chooses them randomly and most of them are absolutely worthless at any given time. It isn't just taking policies that aren't ideal - literally half of the AI's choices have no game effect, and that is a problem. Fixing it will require a serious rewrite of policies to trim the trash and take highly situational policies and broaden their effectiveness.
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