I sort of feel that civ kind of slipped into a rut where micromanagement was more important than macromanagement, where to win at Immortal it was all about managing your hammers so that you only had 6 hammers (epic speed) so that you could whip 2 pop instead of 1 at a time to rush that axeman and have maximum spillover production for the next one etc; and that it was all about sweating the small details at the expense of the big picture of running a whole empire - like you were playing the role of ten mayors taped together instead of an emperor. And sweating the details like that really makes it much clearer that you're playing the game's idiosyncratic mechanics rather than actually managing an empire. It was more about knowing the rules than anything else.
While I disagree with you on what Civ V offers on the whole (especially the combat element), I agree that the micromanagement/play-to-the-rules-rather-than-the-concept approach to the Civ series is and always has been a turn-off for me. It is, as you point out later, what drew me to EU3. EU3 has micromanagement, but it's....I dunno...I think of it as "conceptual" micromanagement, rather than "mathematical" micromanagement. It's less about manipulating equations to spit out the "optimal" result, and more about understanding the concepts that the mechanic is trying to approximate. Some stuff is still "mathematical," and folks who dig that kind of thing will likely still do quite well, but there's less worry about maximizing hammers, beakers, coins, etc.
I can see where, to a degree, Civ V sort of moved away from that, but I just don't think that the execution lived up to whatever the design goal was -- to the extent there was a coherent goal, that is. I find that, for example, buildings don't give much bang for your buck, so you end up not needing to min/max, but more because you're not really...doing anything that would require it.
I wish that Civ V was as you described it, but to me, it's as if they stripped out the micromanagement elements more by accident (by making more stuff less useful to build, so you always have plenty of resources to spend), and not filling that gap with much else. It's a lot of (in my experience) clicking "next turn" and just waiting for something to happen. So, for me, they (inadvertently? On purpose?) got rid of much of the micromanagement, but it hasn't been replaced by grand "The empire shall do XYZ. This I decree!" decisions. It's just less stuff to do. Also, while I didn't like the micromanagement element of the earlier Civ games, there were still more consequential decisions to be made. Do I build this, or do I build that? To some extent, the game mechanics that gave rise to micromanagement were an effort to make those choices meaningful. So, sure, you can build [building A], but if oyu do that, you'll probably waste production that could've gone into [building B] instead. But [building A] takes less time to make and grants a lower bonus, while [building B] takes far longer, but has a huge bonus. The micromanagement developed as a way to make those choices LESS impactful and to game the system (which was already gaming you by having a finger on the scale, so to speak). Another reason why I find EU3 more entertaining -- the AI doesn't "cheat."
Civ is not, never has been, nor really ever can be a series fanatically devoted to serving historical realism because the whole of human history is too big to fit realistically into one set of game mechanics; that's where your Europa Universalis-es and Victorias and Hearts of Irons step in, one era at a time. Civ has always been steeped in its boardgame roots, and I really think this iteration is a breath of fresh air by being honest and embracing those roots, in a way that I think really works.
Exactly, but no.
Exactly in the sense that Civ isn't about historical realism, and other franchises are (which is why they're broken into smaller eras). No, because basically I disagree with how Civ V ends up approaching this. If that was the design goal, I think it's laudable. However, I find the execution lacking. That's just my personal take on how the game plays. I definitely appreciate your post, though, and agree with a lot of what you had to say.
