Q: "Who else agrees that Civ 5 has been dumb down?"
A: Less than one in three voters. (
Numbers don't lie, don't you know!)
To answer a few specific points:
No culture, research and commerce sliders.
Requires more planning - more complex than "I'll keep the science slider as high as I can afford."
No civics. Now civics is merely a ladder of perks that you upgrade. Has absolutely no flexibility.
Rather than 20 civics (of which half were hardly ever used) we have 60 social policies to choose from. Leads to more interesting decisions.
Weren't in vanilla civ4. (Although not a replacement, we now have puppet cities.)
Had too strong an effect on diplomacy. Will probably return in an expansion (hopefully in the form of
Holy City States).
No hamlets that can upgrade, instead we get this absurd "trading post".
Perhaps a fair point, although with science and gold now independent (i.e. no commerce slider), a town producing 5 gold would probably be overpowered.
In civ4, health and happiness were too similar and to an extent health was redundant.
Boring - rarely used (IMO).
Culture, commerce and productions are now separate entities.
More complex.
Not in vanilla civ4. Often turned off. Partially replaced by city-state quests.
Leaders have no personality traits. Only one leader per nation.
Each civ has a unique trait, which is far more interesting than generic traits like financial, organised, etc. Leaders now also have 'flavors'. Regarding one leader per civ, I would argue that with fully animated leaders it is much harder to add another leader to a civ than it was previously. I would rather they spend the effort producing new civs than new leaders for existing ones.
How is that relevant to being dummed down? Will probably be added later anyway.
No wonder animations. No end-game cinematics.
Not relevant to being dummed down.
I think it is also worth mentioning that combat is now much more tactical than "who can build the biggest stack" and city-states add a new layer to the game.
I would recommend giving
this post a read.