I just had an idea this morning, in order to simplify the game and truely focus on magic, I was thinking of having a game with a very simple empire management, like vinci does it, where all the special abilities and effect would be given by spells and maybe 1 racial ability.
The civ system would be something like you have 3 kind of actions and you can do X action where X is the number of cities. Probably you gain 1 gold per city and use gold coins to keep track of actions spending. Actions would be something like Growth (Civilization), Attack(Military), and another one (Empire). Then you will be able to use spells to alter the outcome of all those actions.
There will be more depth than vinci to allow more spell variety. Most progress will be done by unlocking stuff. For example, resources on the field could unlock access to various buildings where some will build up the military level, which will make more powerful units appear in battle. In that case, it creates a chain reaction that does not require additional actions. I only need my 3 basic actions
For example: If I add a new city on the board that gives me access to a iron resources which unlock the access to a forge building. That could raise the military level, so that in battle I compare the unit card, let say a knight, I fliped with my current military level, if it match, the knight enters battle, else its only a simple spearment.
So in that case, I don't need an action to add units to my army, or to place a building on the board. I only need those 3 basic actions and it has a chain reaction of effects on everything else. So less management to do which should simplifies civ management in general.
After giving it some thoughts, I have realised that Pocket Civ also use a similar management system that could be named as "Population management". I don't remember exactly how pocket civ works, but I know the main difference with vinci/smallworld is that population grow.
So I was thinking using a similar system to vinci where you pool population everyturn to do actions like colonising, building cities, attacking ennemy territory, Building an army, etc. Most of those action will have a cost in population but you recover them at the end of the turn. Some action like build city and build army with make you lose permanently a population cube in the process. And you will gain 1 population cube to your pool for each city you have on the board each turn.
This is interesting because you cannot grow exponentially too fast, because you'll have no population left to do actions, so you must grow slowly and surely. As for the Civ/military levels of your empire, I was thinking of havings 2 tracks to record those level, wheer you must spend X population to increase a level. Maybe half the pop is lost in the process. You can get rebate to the cost if you have certain resources. The advantage of a system like this is to make sure smaller empire are not hopeless. Because even with less territory, it could be more developped and have a higher level civ.
One thing I am looking for is to have a civ flavoured game, and not a war game. War game is basically Spawn units, send them to war, repeat. Here with population management, you do spawn units and send them to war, but you can also do other things with your population.
By using a very thin civ management system, I want the magic system to be important to win the game. Not that you cannot survive without magic, but you'll never progress as fast as teh otehr players if you don't use it. So this way the focus of the game should shif from maciv to magic while still having a feeling you are managing a civ game. Because you do get that feeling in pocket civ/vinci/smallworld.