Ok, thanks Charon. I guess I can look forward to the inevitable expansion then. If there are only eight to choose from, I hope the developers will at least take extra care to make them all very distinctive.

I really don't want to be responsible for creating game content though.  ToA should be considered the definitive version of GCII now, so should have been a starting point for GCIII.  I'd like to see 12 races at a minimum.

Don't forget that most likely there will be people who put their civs on the steam workshop. And then a few weeks/months later you should start seeing "civ packs" that ad maybe dozens or more at once. Few years down the line i imagine there will be packs of fully custom civs with their own portraits and flavor chat options etc.

so that way you can have more civs without doing the work.