My first choice would be a civilization builder, but I can't figure the damned thing out. I could go into a
lot of detail on the history and mechanics involved, but:
-Heroes are your main workhorses, rather than cities. This is because heroes are interesting and flavorful, whereas watching cities throw resources onto the pile tends to get a bit tedious for a forum game.
-Cities/settlements, then, serve largely as your base of operations. They hold buildings, technologies, and other things that allow for crafting/building better stuff.
-Basic turn flow is for your hero(es) to run around gathering up resources and crafting them into things you like, which levels them up and grants special techs; research is therefore a function of what your empire does, not how many libraries you have piling beakers onto which tech node.
-Much of your civilization, like people, owned territory, and structures that aren't crafting stations, is more or less residual from your heroic efforts. Repeatedly mining a resource will tend to build your empire up around it, for instance, which will in turn tend to make it easier to access, defend, place convenient things nearby, and so on.
The problem: Everything. I can't figure out how rolls will work, I don't know exactly how cities/settlements/pops work or what exactly they do that makes them worthwhile. I was leaning towards a King of Tokyo style system, where you throw a fistful of dice and reroll some of them, but I don't think I have enough results to map, I don't think I want that much granularity, and the rerolling thing works better in person. I also don't know how heroes should work; I'd like to avoid straight roll/output bonuses, but I'm not sure what else to do.