The idea Mike and Bluevoss has suggested is certainly very interesting, and it is actually something we tried when we were creating Bronze. One problem we ran into was that making the campaign "metagame" more complex drastically reduced the "fun factor" of playing the maps. Since the map starting positions became more random, there was very little balance. As a result, many maps were extremely easy or simply impossible. Winning a campaign came down to exploiting the easy maps.
Having said that, I think that making more randomized campaign maps or giving other civs an ability to attack can still be done. It will just take a lot more work in terms of making sure the balance doesn't get thrown off too much. It will definitely be something we'd like to try in a future version of the game.
It's interesting that Mike thought about transferring silver between games. We tried that at the beginning, but...players started exploiting this by purposefully building up silver when they knew they would win. As a result, we had to cut that.
Re: The Campaign - replayablity
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