I'm gonna be honest that I haven't read through the 65 pages of complaints, so probably these are repeats but here goes:
In general, it feels like this game wasn't play tested. Or, rather, we are play testing it. How is it fun to play a game with stupid little buggy and tedious features?
For example:
Units moving to a location don't stop and ask for directions when they encounter an enemy.
You can't see what the enemy's movements are unless they happen to be on screen.
This latter is the pretty much universal 'fog of war' mechanic - in what way is it a bug? Why should you be able to see the enemy's movements?
Units idiotically stop their movement when someone gets onto their destination very far away.
Yes, this is very annoying. Particularly if building a road and the worker keeps giving you 'route to cancelled' notifications. Also not a fan of the way workers will automatically stop making an improvement and refuse to restart if there's an enemy visible on the screen, even if it's not close enough to be a threat.
EDIT: Incidentally, is there any good reason why non-combat units can't stack with one another? Stacking was removed to streamline the combat system, but workers, Great People etc. don't do anything in combat (except Great Generals), and allowing them to stack would facilitate moving them around.
Trades can't be set up for more than 30 turns
.
A constant of Civ games, and intended to make diplomacy dynamic rather than setting deals and then forgetting them for the rest of eternity. Also it means you can regain resources in order to trade them with someone else. Being able to set the number of turns a trade lasts from a dropdown would be good, though.
You can't get global information about various things such as who wants resources,
Do you mean within your empire? You can find out which resources everyone else has from the Diplomacy screen.
the amount of happiness that will be
actually generated by a specific building (because of the population cap on happiness),
how trading a resource will affect your happiness
It will give you +4. The buildings will give the specified amount, minus any population growth in the interim - I don't think the computer needs to be able to show these.
, the combat bonus/ penalties of a unit (the only way this is displayed is if you actually are on the verge of attacking, which requires you to be at war),
Yes, there are a lot of 'missing' stats in Civ V. The one I'd like back is the culture meter that tells you how close one Civ or another is to dominating a tile when you mouse over it.
EDIT: Actually, if you mean what I think you do, this is displayed, just in an unhelpful way. If you hover over a unit, friend or foe, you'll see it's health, attack, defence, promotions and up/down arrows for bonuses/penalties, all in the blue unit window. What you won't see are terrain modifiers, attack-as-modified-by-damage-taken etc.
The strategic resources system is silly. Why would I want to gain a resource from another civ, only to then be forced to keep trading that resource with them due to the extreme penalty that will result from loss of that resource. A better system would be to have a stock pile of resources (similar to gold).
That's how resources used to work. The unit cap I like as an improvement to the strategic resource system, and it also means you don't randomly run out of iron at a critical moment because the random events generator determines that you've exhausted your supply. It does complicate strategic resource *trading* however, and this may need to be looked at. I've never lost a resource when using it all to support units/factories/whatever - what is the extreme penalty?
The stupid opening movie.
Love the movie, dislike the lag in loading time that forces me to sit through the first few minutes of the voiceover every time I start the game.
Steam. This blatant marketing and forced social networking is disgusting, and worse, causes problems when I can't get online.
The inability to play offline (or at least load the game offline - I can play fine if the computer disconnects when I'm in game) is inexcusable for a mostly single-player game and needs to be fixed; other systems like Blizzard's have a 'Play Offline' option.
EDIT: Actually had internet trouble today, and if you load up the game it does indeed give you a small and well-hidden Play Offline option. I'm not sure how Steam 'forces' social networking - I have hardly anyone linked on there.
The completely incomprehensibility, irrationality, and poor strategy of the computer opponents. I am completely baffled by the diplomacy system in this game.
The most bizarre thing about this is that the game includes all sorts of new mechanics, such as declarations of friendship and denunciations, whose only purpose is to alter influence with other civs - and yet there's no way of tracking what these actually do in the game itself. Also the age-old "friendly Civs will attack you at random just because you're on a hard difficulty level" (which has happened in every version of Civ, including AI-improved Civ IV) needs to be fixed. 'Hard' should equate with 'difficult to win by whatever means', not 'liable to be overrun by an early sneak attack' - it's as though the AI were playing Starcraft but only knew how to cheese.
The game is too processor heavy due to more effort to make the graphics fancy than to work out a good strategy game.
I don't even know if that's the reason - the graphics aren't exceptional, even given the scale of the game. Somewhere there's a fundamental programming bug that needs to be fixed ASAP.
The less than helpful civilopedia.
I don't find it unhelpful, but its poor visual design and terse descriptions remove all of the character the Civilopedia used to have - and to add insult to injury they've even renamed it the Help menu in the main interface.
In short, the game is very tedious, and frustratingly hard because of the inability to understand basic mechanics and get basic information about the game.
I always do something that everyone else who plays computer games seems to have forgotten how to do: read the manual. Civ V actually has a fairly decent one by modern standards, although sadly the days of novel-sized manuals with a wealth of background detail that we saw in Civ 2 are long past.
Phil