I believe the difference is quite big. Well.. if you play on medium sized maps it may be true... but huge maps are a lot bigger, and I believe Civ5 maps will be a little bigger than Civ4 ones
I think you are overestimating the difference in size between EU and Civ’s maps. On the standard EU3 map there are 1,700 land and sea provinces (and even more on modded maps). Now it is true that on Rhye’s world map (here I am choosing deliberately a huge map) there are almost five times more tiles (8,432), but most of those are either ocean or junk tiles such as impassable ice and peaks. Now, I haven’t actually counted them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of European provinces in EU’s map actually turns out be greater than the number of usable land tiles that make up Europe on Rhye’s map.
It is true, however, there are many more sea plots in Civ than there are sea provinces in EU. In EU, seas being very large, the attrition that affects naval units is quite high, and for armies loaded on transport this is often higher than land attrition. By contrast, for Civ’s maps, consideration of scale suggest that attrition at sea shouldn’t be significantly higher than land attrition.
Anyway... even if you add attrition and other balance changes.. it would still remain a brainless system where no skill is needed, not fun.
I don’t see why you think that attrition is a “brainless” system. If anything, it forces the player to make interesting choices: do you consolidate your regiments into one stronger army, thus making it more vulnerable to attrition, or do you spread many weaker armies across the land to reduce the attrition damages? Neither SoDs nor the one-unit-per-tile rule allow for that kind of strategic dilemma. Also, attrition could be expanded to further game mechanics for logistic, reinforcements and supply lines, which would make warfare even more interesting.
I think that those who regard EU’s warfare as boring and brainless have been put off by its tedious siege mechanics, which is usually a matter of just parking your army and waiting for the garrison to surrender. Now, this is definitely not something I would want to see in Civ5. But other elements of EU, such as the attrition mechanics, are workable ideas and it would be good if the developers at Firaxis took inspiration from them.
I think you have to consider the scale here... The Civilization series covers 6,000 years of history while Europe Universalis only covers about 300.
EU3, together with the latest expansion pack, covers more than 400 years (from 1399 to 1820), plus there's a standalone game based on the same engine (Europa Universalis: Rome) which covers the ancient era from 280 BC to 27 AD. This is still less that Civ’s time span, but many of EU’s ideas, such as the dynastic model, are applicable to Civ as well.
The main problem is that if Civ had a fine-grained temporal scale which allowed for more sophistication and details, such as changing leaders and generals, then games would have to last many more turns. With an average time scale of one-turn-per-year, we’d have more than 3,000 turns! Now, EU is real-time, not turn-based, so EU’s solution to the problem of the “endless game” is to allow the player to pause/speed up the flow of time. Civ, of course, is not real-time but it could still adopt a sort of similar solution: just let the player skim through (or even skip/auto-play) those turns he doesn’t want/need to micromanage. (A well-implemented advanced start option would help as well).
I like both series but I do prefer Civ for it's open endedness.
In many way, EU is more open-ended that Civ. EU doesn’t even have victory conditions, so that players are entirely free to role-play and pursue their own goals.
