But once the going gets rough, the tough... are nowhere to be found? Once the AIs main fighting force gets depleted, they get steamrolled. Firaxis failed to teach the AI that the best offense is a good defense. The AI doesnt seem to understand the concept of a reserve force.
Personally I think part of this problem is the new smaller army sizes because of the 1UPT. Units take a lot longer to build cause you are expect to keep them alive. But it's really easy to focus attacks on taking the AI units down while suffering minimal damage yourself.
When the forces are wiped out because it takes so much longer to build units then the AI can not replace it's forces fast enough to put up any sort of fight. This combined with the fact that units move twice as fast as they did in previous Civs and you got a recipe for disaster.
Basically once you crush a persons front line unless they have some more troops in reserve you will be able to easily sweep through their lands and take everything. Against a player they can probably do a little better job of managing their troops but the problem still remains. They mess up and their pretty much out of the game since cities do a poor job of defending themselves and garrisons don't help much.
In Civ4, the Revolutions mod (by Jdog5000, and company) penalized unhappy empires by causing civil wars, amongst other things.
I really wish they had done something like that for global unhappiness. I thought Rev mod was one of the best mods out there and really did a good job of balancing things so it was hard to have a large empire. Not to mention it was fun all the new Civs joining mid game because of civil wars.
Ive played games where I almost entirely ignored them, and others where I focused my empire on obtaining them. I wonder if the gold cost over the entire game is enough to make the investment (in turns and gold) worthwhile.
I never really considered ignore them. I always want their bonuses though not sure like you said if the gold trade off is worth it. Mostly I get them though because I like large cities so I have a lot of culture to expand my borders.
I do however notice the same thing that happened with civics. I tend to pick the same ones over and over because for the most part they are the best to suit my play style. If I change tactics though I might go for different policies just like in the old games where might pick a different civic. But part of the reason for the change was to make it not so linear. Not sure it does that too well.
What bothers me is that the terrain and units can easily become indistinguishable. Unless you have 20/20 vision, and a eidetic memory, youre going to need to glance two or three times to figure out what unit that is. It doesnt matter that the unit is now rendered in 5000 polygons with state-of-the-art trifactoring, I want to see the unit. Instead of fixing the artwork - Firaxis opted to add a strategic view, which does technically fix the problem. I now understand why 2kGreg said he has played entire games in the strategic view - because the normal view just doesnt cut it. Strike for Firaxis.
Even if playing in strategic view didn't help improve my performance and reduce crashes I'd still play in it because of what you mentioned. Civ5 is not the only 4x game recently release that also has a "Simplistic icon style view". And personally I'm fine with that.
I've never been a big fan of this whole push to make 4x games in 3D. The problem is these are turn based strategy games on large maps with a lot of stuff going on. It's actually a lot easier for people to recognize icons then it is to recognize a bunch of 3d objects which can be seen at different angles, distances, locations, and etc.
It's like the old "Where is Waldo" books which had a ton of similarly dressed people scattered around the picture and it was hard to spot the real on. Well all the fancy 3D graphics and such are ending up doing the same thing to this game. Sure it's cool to see them in 3d for about a couple mins then you wanna get down to action.
I've gotten so use to strategic view now that when I first load it up and it's in "normal" view I can barely make heads or tails of it. because there is so much clutter on the screen. Which I like how in one of the dev videos they guy talked about getting a save from a friend and you can't tell anything at a glance so you go to "strategic" view and use all it's filtering options to get a better feel of what's going on. That right there should of told us something.
The unobtrusive UI, +1 for Firaxis.
I can understand giving it a pass but I don't really agree. At first glance it does seem rather nice. But the more I play the more I find information lacking, like you mention regarding maintenance.
Also I find some of the layout choices to be rather bulky and a complete waste of space. Choosing what you city focuses on took up a tiny square in Civ4 about 1.5 the size of an icon. The new one takes up a huge section in the right side eating up close to maybe 1/12 the total screen.
The specialist in Civ4 also were limited by what buildings you had (unless you got a curtain civic) so that's not new even though I heard one dev in an interview claim it was. But now they have each building have it's own row with 1-2 spots to put a Specialist. When you have a lot of specialist buildings this can end up taking up 1/3 of the screen and you still have to scroll up and down to see them all. While before it was confined to a nice panel that took up maybe 1/9 the screen if even that in Civ4.
The building select takes up a HUGE amount of space at the lower left to show what is currently being built. While the build menu is smashed between it and the production display at the top. Far fewer items can be displayed because of this then in the previous Civ4 build menu layout. I find myself scrolling a lot more then I did back in Civ4 to try and find things late game. In fact I suspect this is the reason they forced the build order for each line of buildings like Monument goes to Temple and so on. To keep things off the build list so it remains easy to navigate.
All that was just from the city management screen. I can point out a ton in other areas as well but I think you get the point. I love the idea of making the interface sleeker and more stream lined. I just think they did a terrible job of it in many areas.