On the higher levels, the game is just unplayable for several reasons:
Ancient combat is now useless, the combination of nerfing horsemen
AND increased city defenses and attacks,
AND increased city HP regeneration just makes early wars unprofitable. May as well sit at home and build.
This combined with the even more ******ed happy caps has just made conquest of the world impossible. The huge happy penalty for capturing a city, either puppet or raze, which destroys your happiness the next turn, and then weakens your military by 50%
Also, the patch has brought even more misery, in that the handicap AIs can still out tech you, thanks to minimal scientist slots, always has more gold, and can thus always easily beat you to a diplomatic victory and regularly steals your allies throughout the game - meaning city states are now another redundant concept in the game (at least this boosts Mongolia's power of getting rid of the things - oh no, wait you can't, as the unhappiness from even puppeting would ruin you.
So not only has happiness been destroyed already for the reasons mentioned above, now that liberty tree has been nerfed to the point of being useless, and FP nerfed too, big empires are now impossible (unless your an AI where you get +60 happiness on turn 1 for no reason) - there is no way a human can compete.
The diplomacy system puts the last few nails in the coffin. As the AI DOWs and denounces for no good reason, and when one AI denounces you they all do. The explanations only 'explain'
what for AI has done, but not
why.
In conclusion, I am glad to see the end of horse rushing and ICS, but not to the point where a human can't even compete on Emperor/above.
The game has became a complete joke - its time to boot up Civ IV.