The "Civ 5 is only comparable with Civ IV vanilla" argument is getting tiresome. I'll say this one last time. It's not only valid to compare Civ V with Civ IV BTS 3.19, it's actually the fair thing to do (unless you're just talking about the common vanilla bugs, wich isn't the point). Firaxis didn't just magically forget 5 years of improvements to Civ IV. They purposely ditched a lot of them for who knows what reason, and it was a mistake.
You and other posters are apparently getting tired of that argument. You seem very strong in the opinion that Civ4 + expansions + patches should be comparable to civ5. That's fair enough. However you make the choice (as well as pretty much every person complaining about the game) to call all the features that are absent in civ5 *removed*. Technically, none of these things were ever removed, unless you were aware of some parts of the development that everyone else isn't. They're all things that were never *added* to civ5, for whatever design decisions those may be.
People forget that this is a new game. It was built from scratch. Yes it would have been nice if it had everything that civ4 and its expansions had, but consider whether that is realistic with Firaxis having already been under pressure to rush this game to release. Would you have preferred an even more feature-rich game that was even less playable due to game-breaking bugs and AI deficiencies?
I'm not trying to defend civ5 all that much really, but my point is that not everything in civ4 necessarily had to be a part of the civ franchise forever. And disappointing as it may sound, the planned approach this time round might be one that has even more emphasis on "content added after release". It can't be denied that civ4 had a lot of things added to it in its expansions; things that affected the game deeply. It's entirely possible the same will happen with civ5.
People get so riled up and offended to the core at the thought of something of their beloved game not appearing in another game.
I think most people are disappointed with how civ5 presents as a stand-alone game, with bugs and the rather graphics-demanding laggy gameplay, questionable AI and poor balance, and mistakenly attribute a lot of their disappointments to what civ4 had that civ5 doesn't. In design civ5 can work without things like health, vassal states, religions, corporations etc. The problem with civ5 is that with what features it
does have the game doesn't work very well overall.
TL;DR:
It's not because of what it
doesn't have, but how it uses what it
does have that Civ5 is a disappointment to most. Complaints about differences from previous games were
inevitable regardless of what direction civ5 took, and are for the most part red herrings - missing the real problem.
