As a player that prefers IV to V, (but can appreciate some of the risks V took), I'll have to disagree with a few of these points. Well, one mainly... Micromanagement was never boring to hardcore Civ gamers, unless you're talking about hardcore gamers in general that don't play strategy games in the first place.
IMO, espionage is weak in both IV and V, and religion in V is weaker than in IV, where it's impact on diplomacy is far more evident, while in V, it's basically just another resource (faith), akin to culture and the whole policy system, (which as a whole, was modeled after WoW skill trees). True story.
You realise of course that WoW skill trees were ultimately (as Diablo skill trees) modelled after the style of branching tech tree first introduced in a game called Civilization?
The slider system also added a layer of complexity completely lacking in V, where gold is the be-all-end-all, (and while I'm griping, might as well list what I don't like about V - mods feels free to move this to the rants thread).
Well, not really since science was the be-all and end-all... Gold wasn't much use for anything past city maintenance, so as long as you either had a stockpile to sustain negative income or your income was at least 0, you mainly just wanted to maximise science. Adding espionage to the slider was a nice touch, but I rarely found a need for it since Great Spies gave you such a huge boost.
[*]Global happiness is terrible compared to local happiness. Global happiness dictates that I'm always going to be building the exact same happiness buildings in every game, I'm going to be adopting the exact same policies in every game, and I'm going to adopt the exact same religious perks in every game. On the other hand, local happiness encouraged city diversity and city placement.
This neglects the main point of global happiness - it's to present a choice in number of cities you settle, not city placement (the effect of which on happiness was trivial in previous games, since all luxuries throughout the empire could be connected to any city within it). All you're saying above is "if I play in exactly the same way every time, settling the same number of cities, I play in exactly the same way". And even this is an oversimplification - there are lots of alternative routes to happiness; I'll build more happiness buildings to compensate if I want non-happiness related religious beliefs for instance. Where I build the happiness buildings will vary; I no longer need to duplicate every happiness building in every city as it grows to population level X in a rigid Civ IV build order. Alliances with CSes, luxes available from other civs, whether any CSes are mercantile, whether I have access to foreign religious buildings (cathedrals etc.) will all determine how I manage happiness. There's a lot of variety in starting locations that can also define how I'll play the happiness game - sometimes luxuries will be clustered and I'll have access to only one or two types, sometimes they won't.
[*]Which leads me to terrain. It's awful. There's no customization at all, as improvements themselves offer little to no added benefits (why was the cottage system removed?) The current terrain/improvement mechanics scream for worker automation, as there's little to no point in micromanaging them for little to no added benefit.
The cottage system was replaced by tech-based developments to improvements, and in some cases policy-based ones. You try playing to the late game without developing your tiles, and you'll find out just how much difference not having 4-5 extra food/production/gold makes, or not gaining science from trading posts.
[*]The tech-tree is more or less a bottlenecked straight line. There's little to no differentiation from game to game, what with the lack of dead-end techs and either/or techs. Believe it or not, the tech tree used to be even more restrictive in early builds of the game. What we're playing is the expanded version. Imagine the current tree with a y-axis of 5 instead of 8-10... Again, true story.
If anything vanilla's tech tree, despite having 5 fewer techs or so, was actually less restrictive in the way it could be pursued.
[*]Diplomacy. Is bad. CIV V went for "realism" where the AI tries to "win." Unless you've got the best AI coders in the galaxy, this will never be achievable, and what we're left with is an AI that is incredibly predictable. They will attack you, they'll attack early, and often. Roleplaying on the part of the AI based on their historical personality is non-existent. Just a matter of taste here on my part, but I'd rather Gandhi played the role of peaceful ally - and the quote from Firaxis that takes about how if Gandhi doesn't nuke you at some point - then they haven't done their job - is ridiculous IMO.
You're talking about one specific in-joke that dates back to the dawn of Civ games - Gandhi has always tried to nuke people. Civs differ much more markedly in personality in Civ V than I recall from Civ IV, where aside from one or two poster children, all appeared to be very anonymous (sure, Monty and Shaka are aggressive, Isabella puts a premium on religion. What was, say, Joao II's defining characteristic?) And that characterisation alone testifies to the one-dimensionality of Civ IV personalities - they varied on one axis, not much more. By contrast someone created a thread a while back describing in detail (and broadly accurately) differences between Civ V AI civs that make them feel like distinct people. No, for the most part they're probably not terribly representative of their historical personas, but they certainly have the feel of distinct personalities.
If that's what you're going for, what bother even animating your leaders? Why give them dialogue in their own language? What's the point, if they're all going to play the exact same way in every, single, game. Stick figures would suffice if that's the goal - would definitely help cut down on load times too.
Individual civs often act the same way in every game, which is rather the point of giving them personalities - I can be a more reliable ally with Nebuchadnezzar than with Alexander, say.
[*]Cultural Victories - (and pretty much all victory types) box you into specific play-styles from the very start of a game. This goes against the sandbox play-style in previous Civ games that let you adjust your strategy throughout the game as for what victory type you were going for. Cultural victories particularly encourage non- expansion, and limit you to a select few policy trees, leading to no differentiation or customization from game to game. Not fun and extremely limiting for players that enjoy playing passive-aggressively.
I thought this early on, and cultural victories still are more constrained than other types, but there's more variety than it first appears. You can win cultural victory with a wide empire since unless you play very wide the cultural benefits of the various culture improvements will tend to outweigh the expansion penalty. But yes, tech progression for each victory type tends to be somewhat restrictive - although as three victories require the upper branch of the tech tree, you can conceivably wait until the Industrial Era to finally decide whether to go culture (but only if you've been playing culturally to that point), diplo or science. Domination tends to demand playing aggressively and teching to aggressive techs from the early game, where in previous Civ games you could pursue it in several different ways and at late game stages.
[*]Tactical AI. Nothing needs to be said here. It's not as bad as it was on release, but it's still bad. It may be more complex and deeper than IV's tactical AI, but IV's was able to use its own system much more effectively to the point where the highest levels were almost impossible for most players. The highest levels in V, IMO, are on par with the middle levels on IV once you figure out the tactical AI is terrible and can be easily exploited.
This is an issue, but the solution I've found is just to not play aggressive games (which aren't my tendency in any case). The AI puts up better competition for peaceful victories than it did in past Civ games; Civ IV and earlier instalments really only had the option of overrunning you to win.
[*]Lack of Stats. I want to know how many AI Swordsmen I've killed. I don't want to go through multiple menu's to see the simplest bit of information. We're using keyboards here, not controllers. We have more than 4 buttons. There's no reason to hide info to the extent that it's been hidden in V - as this is the style of game that caters to the type of player that wants to see stats. InfoAddict shouldn't have to come from the community, it should've been there at launch, it should've been included in the first patch, and its designer should've been hired yesterday.
Yes, Civ V's interface is pretty appalling.
[*]Clutter. There's too much junk on the screen by the time you've finished settling and improving your land. There's too many icons popping out at you, (icons that are necessary to determine what's what, as everything just tends to blend together otherwise). For a game that was heralded for its streamlined mechanics, graphically, it ain't streamlined at all.
I'd very much like an option to select which notifications I want to see and which I don't. You wouldn't then need a patch to eliminate 'espionage notification spam' - you could just tick a box if you wanted to disable notifications from/about unmet players etc.
[*]Load times. Worst ever load times in a Civ game - in fact, I can't think of a TBS that has longer load times.
Easy one - Total War: Shogun 2 (come to that, with its larger number of major factions, across three theatres of war, Empire could take excruciatingly long times). This is, however, with animations of other factions' movement etc. enabled. Unlike TW games, Civ V doesn't have an option to play with other factions' movement animations disabled.
