Civilization V was developed for one thing and one thing only to appeal to the widest audience possible
This is true in the same way that it's true of the multi-million selling Civs I through IV (although most of the Civ franchise's sales were, I believe, in the first and fourth incarnations). It's not in itself an argument against anything.
which meant everything from the ground up was made as simple as possible which is why this game is basically insulting players as soon as they start a game.
A claim which relies on a completely unsubstantiated assumption: that wide audiences want simplicity in mechanics. If you look around at most extremely popular games - from the populist Civilization franchise which is not only credited with "popularising" 4x strategy games, but is by now such a popular brand name that it may be the only such game to have been translated to 'dumb' platforms like consoles, through Starcraft II (the best-selling computer game of 2010), one thing you tend to find they have in common is that they are often mechanically more complex than many less popular games in their genres (Civilization was always mechanically more complicated than Master of Orion, for example; whereas most modern RTS games dispense with the complexities of resource management demanded in Starcraft, and either remove or automate resource generation).
Civilization Revolution is a case in point, as another thread indicated that its science vs. gold economy management required more micromanagement and was more complex to manage mechanically than either the classic Civ or Civ V computer approaches: Civ Rev required turn-based decision-making at an individual city level. Classic Civ just required clicking your mouse on a slider whenever your income was running low. Which entails that either, contrary to general feeling here, console games are aimed at a more complex (and, on the assumption that greater complexity in games is somehow correlated with the intelligence of players) generally brighter audience than the traditional Civilization games, or that complex detail is preferred to mechanically simple strategy gaming among average gaming audiences.
Civ IV had more features and micromanagement in it's debut that Civ V has after a year,
Also not an argument against, merely an argument that they're different. Civ V had more macromanagement than Civ IV had in nearly four years and two expansions.
let's not forget that the DLC's and patches after said year should have been in the game already.
That can be said of any patches in any game. As for DLC, I largely agree - sure the basic game had a decent number of civs, and adding new ones as DLC and scenarios is entirely reasonable, but some of the specific ones left out stink of cynicism - Babylon? Spain? Denmark (when Vikings are even in the intro movie)? Okay, Polynesia's a bit more 'out there', Korea's peripheral in Civ games generally etc. so I can understand those being left out of the main release. At least some scenarios ought to have been in the core game, and some of the standard terrestrial maps (fine, make donut maps, "plus" maps and that sort of thing DLC, and perhaps very specific ones like Amazon or Japan, but the general continent-scale maps like Asia should have been in). And this is a game with 20 years' history of naming its 'hero' buildings Wonders - and yet three of the standard list of ancient Wonders of the World weren't in the core game and had to be added as DLC.
Too bad Sid Meier won't come take over development as this game is boring.
I presume you realise that Sid Meier had nothing at all to do with the development of either Civilization III or Civilization IV, and relatively little with Civilization II? He designed a game called Civilization, which in his conception was actually rather simple, perhaps with as few features as Civ V or fewer, certainly fewer wonders, no national wonders, fewer units, fewer building types, fewer resource types, fewer civilizations, no civilization-specific traits whatsoever, and in which only three terrain improvements - mines, roads and farms - existed. All of the subsequent versions of the game banking on his name have departed substantially from that model, and have had little or nothing to do with Meier.
Sid Meier is also the guy who's on record as describing Civilization Revolution - again seen around here as the 'dumb' kids' version of the game - as the version of Civilization he always wanted to make.
As for the supposedly AI smarter? Yeah... you're denounced after a couple turns because the AI thinks you are trying to win the same way as it. Declares War then after 10 turns give's up all it's cities, resources, and gold.
I think the AI is universally regarded as bad - not sure anyone's claimed it's smarter than Civ IV, so not sure why it's "supposedly" smarter.
As for peace declarations, the AI is definitely inclined to make stupid deals, but in my experience it generally offers peace at intelligent moments - to lift a siege on its cities, or if the reason it declared war was to capture one of your cities and its attack failed, for example. In that regard at least it's superior to my experience of previous Civ games' approaches to war-related diplomacy.
Diplomatic Victory = bribing the most CS, which serve no purpose in strategy just resources which increase happiness.
Firstly, maritime, cultural and militaristic states give you bonuses other than resources, which gives incentives to ally with them (well, except militaristic ones, which give a crappy bonus) other than victory, and reasons to befriend (when you won't get the resource bonus but will get the other).
Secondly it's not possible to decouple happiness management from strategy, and deciding which resource you need (and hence which city state), whether to select one you already have in order to trade for a 'better' resource, when you need to invest money in securing a city-state resource to boost happiness vs. making happiness buildings, trading existing resources or settling sites with additional resources, are all very obviously strategic decisions.
Thirdly, diplomatic victory is hampered by bad AI - the AI doesn't contest control of city-states if you bribe them enough, and it doesn't do anything about the ones it can't control because you have them too tightly in your grasp. If the AI were better, city-states that pose a diplomatic threat and can't be secured diplomatically would routinely be destroyed by rivals aiming to prevent a diplomatic victory - I understand this quite commonly happens in multiplayer. Play for diplo victory when there aren't enough surviving city states to dictate the outcome, or if you're playing in 'disable city-states' mode, and you're forced to use other means of diplomacy (ignoring the obvious point that bribery is a form of diplomacy). So in principle the condition is preferable to the classical Civ system, it just needs improvement to the AI to work well in real games.
Add to the fact the UN wonder actually affected gameplay.
In Civ IV. Not in Civ II or Civ III. In Civ I it had an effect that was unrelated to diplomatic victory.
Happiness and resources, are equally dumb as the previous game it affected both happiness and trade. V actually reversed this great core gameplay feature and then put it on pills as if scared it might confuse even the most noob of civ players.
This sentence lacks clarity - what affected both happiness and trade? Or do you mean happiness/luxury production was linked to commerce rather than trade?
Lack of leaders to pick meaning no traits
In Civ IV only a minority of civilizations had multiple leader options, and fewer still before the expansions, and, frankly, they were only there to make up the numbers because the game needed one of every two-trait combination and the designers ran out of ideas for different empires to add that would fit the 'missing' combinations.
which means no further random play it's basically now aggressive or just pacifist which means the AI just builds one city.
From testimony on this forum, this is probably not the case. We don't know specifically what the leader traits are or how they influence diplomacy as a result of the opaque diplomacy system, but there are lots of reports of, for instance, the Inca or Greeks being especially aggressive, Gandhi making use of nuclear weapons (quite possibly as an in-joke among the developers) etc. Different AI civs in Civ V do appear to play differently from one another, although admittedly it's not clear from my own experience of the game that they necessarily play in ways that make good use of their civilization trait (I don't know that the Germans are particularly prone to attacking barbarians, for example, and I haven't seen much sign that the Babylonians advance technologically more quickly than other AI Civs).
The Policy trees are actually interesting but with the lack of civics makes it predictable and just no fun.
There are many more policies available than you can select in any game. Granted they could be better-balanced to make certain picks less 'must-have' at point X in the game, but then so could the civics in Civ IV (what was the downside for taking slavery at the first opportunity, again?).
The meaning of this rant = Civilization V was step backwards and I found myself playing and enjoying Civilization.... IV tonight.
I'll still happily enjoy both, and indeed will return to my latest Civ V game tonight. However, whether or not it is a 'step backwards', your own analysis of Civ V (such as the insistence on the lack of strategic choices offered by city-states) is superficial - even if it does indeed lack depth (and from a strategic perspective, all Civ games do), you aren't going to show that by displaying a very limited knowledge of what depth the game does have.
