Yea, the suspension of disbelief was blown in places just for the `awesome` aspect. for some, the totally immersion busting GDR did that.
The GDR is a joke and the game rarely lasts long enough for me to see it in action (AIs also rarely build them). I found it quite fun (and I like the graphic), just because they had the sense to call it a Giant Death Robot emphasising the humour value, rather than to treat it as a serious tech advance.
I also find city states very strange too. I would`ve liked it if they could build up and become a Civ too, even if they have no animated leaders, it really is natural to do, otherwise they don`t really have a reason to exist except for the player (yes, gamey).
Other civs fight over their benefits as well - if you find yourself immersed in the geopolitical elements of Civ games, city-states definitely come to feel like strategically important minor powers. However, there are too many asymmetrical quests that only the player can fulfil, and it can be immersion-breaking to find that a CS wants you to discover a Natural Wonder that other civs have already discovered (or, in at least one case in my experience, is in a then-hidden part of the same CS's own territory), or connect a luxury that everyone else already has. G&K has revamped the messages that come with the quest system and they do a surprising amount to make the CSes 'feel' more real, though.
Also, I don`t like how barbarians don`t develope either or found a city. They did in Civ 4 if they did well enough. Let`s not forget that many of our civilizations came from little more than barbarian bribes that beat other barbarian tribes and settled.
Civ II is the only incarnation I remember in which barbarians would actually expand an empire after capturing cities - the Civ IV barbarian cities worked much like camps in Civ V. I do miss barbarians taking and keeping cities, though (and they never even make efforts to take cities in Civ V - is it even possible to get the achievement for barbarians taking city?) I do however prefer the spawning system in Civ V - the spontaneous generation of barbarians nowhere near a settlement on Civ IV made them feel more like a random game hazard than a coherent group.
Not being able to group forces together makes it too plodding for me.
Yes, this appears to have been poorly thought-through. For years most games with something equivalent to a 1UPT system have used a control group system where you can shift-select multiple units to move together.
Pretty much all reviews were overwhelmingly positive - although this particular review might interest you.
http://www.1up.com/reviews/civilization-v-review
I've read this one before, and it's very good, but bear in mind that it dates to before major patches perceived to have solved many of the issues with early vanilla (I delayed buying Civ V myself because of poor reviews and - rather shallowly - its console-game appearance, so I never encountered pre-patch vanilla), as well of course as predating the expansion.
City Specialization is not as important as it used to be.
This, I suspect, is something you'll find not to be the case at higher difficulties. Having played higher difficulties in Civ V than Civ IV, I'd have said the reverse, particularly as maintenance costs and lower tile yields in Civ V force specialisation more than in Civ IV, where cities can produce large quantities of most resources, science and gold come from the same 'pot' (commerce), and fast build times, slavery plus no maintenance costs mean you can build duplicates of everything in any city you want without penalty or even much hampering production. But I've read here that Civ IV becomes more complex to manage at higher difficulty levels, and I concede that that's possible.
Domination just means taking out enemy capitals (damn, I can't believe we wasted so many lives marching across Europe and island-hopping across the Pacific, when all we had to do was capture Berlin and Tokyo, and WW2 would have ended instantly!)
Well, in fairness is that any less plausible than needing to wipe out entire nations to end a war? An open-ended process like civilization doesn't have victory conditions, so whatever they come up with will be arbitrary. Taking capitals in Civ V doesn't end the individual war (indeed civs are often resistant to making peace if they have a shot at recapturing it).
Notwithstanding that Germany's involvement in WWII did, in fact, end with the capture of Berlin, while the motive for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to avoid the need for a land war to capture Hokkaido which, indeed, would probably only have ended with the capture of Tokyo.
When I read about the inclusion of City-States, for me it was actually one of the factors that helped push me to buying Civ5 (okay, I probably would have got it anyhow). It was a concept already seen in the "Minor Races" of Galactic Civilizations 2. Im not sure the idea is implemented as well here, but it's still kinda cool.
Never played GC 2 because I was underwhelmed by GC1 comparing it with Master of Orion 2. My point of reference for the minor state element is the Total War series, which features numerous minor, unplayable factions. These do however work much like standard factions and can be engaged in diplomacy on the same basis - in some campaigns minor factions can become more powerful and control more territory than some putatively major factions. This is true to some degree of Civ V City-States, except that however powerful they become they still always act like CSes, and don't have their own objectives or start their own wars.
