EDIT: That should have been slavery creates more UNhappiness than it saves with small projects.
Interesting. thanx for the civ4 info.
If a civ6 comes out phill, from your perspective how do you wanna see that game? with civics or social policies?
I don't think either system is quite ideal, but I think one thing that should be retained is the link to culture. It's one of Civ V's biggest advances that not everything is tied to the tech tree - in all past incarnations, whatever your ultimate strategy you had to beeline certain techs that unlocked governments or certain civics (in every past Civ game, rushing Monarchy was important, for instance).
Also, culture in Civs III and Civ IV was rather like tourism in BNW in the sense that it was a resource mostly without purpose other than to win a certain victory condition. It was better-integrated into early game stages than tourism is in BNW, but it was definitely the least useful resource for general play. Tying it to policies has made culture a much more relevant part of gameplay.
The only real advantage of civics is that they can be changed more or less at will. I di like the flexibility of this, and the government systems of prior Civ games, but it's difficult to see how it could easily be integrated into the social policy system.
Where I dislike policies is in the tree system and its finishers - with cultural victory now decoupled from completing policy trees, it should be more viable to "mix and match" policy branches to allow more varied strategies, but the finishers and the faith purchases they unlock mean that it's still optimal to fully explore your chosen paths, and you still have to follow a very restricted route to get to the individual policies you want in each tree. I prefer the way the ideology tiers are structured.
In both Civ IV and Civ V I think there's something thematic missing, however - the social policies and civics fundamentally represent governance, but quite aside from some rather oddly-chosen names for some of Civ V's 'government' policies and branches (exploration and aesthetic governments?), you don't get any real sense of identity as to what your government actually is. Civs I to III had a very simple system - you had Despotism, Republic, Monarchy, Theocracy, Communism, Democracy and so forth as specific government types. That's not mechanically very satisfactory, but in an empire-scale game like Civ not having name-checked government types also feels very unsatisfactory. You do have them in the names of some policies, but no one pays attention to policy names in Civ V, only the names of policy branches.
Civ IV mostly unlocked certain civics with government techs of the appropriate name (Monarchy provides Hereditary Rule, for instance), which makes the link between policy and government more obvious but as above has the problems associated with linking civics to the tech tree.
how do you wanna see the tech tree?
Now that the branches are better-balanced, I like Civ V's tech tree a lot more than I used to, but the early branching pattern does make it rather binary (you still go down the "Bronze Working path" or the "Theology path"). I also think that, with BNW adding so many new features but hardly any new techs, some techs are now a bit too 'bloated' with features and should be split:
Trade (prerequisite: Animal Husbandry), for instance, which takes the trade route and caravan from Animal Husbandry and the Caravansery from Horseback Riding - the latter could replace the Caravansery with extra range for caravans
Literature (prerequisite: Drama and Poetry) and adding the Writers' Guild and National Epic.
Code of Laws (between Mathematics and Civil Service): unlocks Courthouse and Open Borders.
Priesthood (prerequisites as for current Theology tech, leads to Theology): unlocks Temple, Borobodur.
As far as tech progression is concerned, I still prefer Civ IV's either/or prerequisites for some techs, since (while supported by a visually terrible UI and worse Civilopedia that made the system somewhat awkward to learn) something like this is the only way to avoid either a system that forces you along one of several mutually exclusive paths (as with G&K/BNW) or that forces you down a single, giant tech path with limited options for deviation (as with Civ V vanilla).
from your point of view what you like the most the empire based growing or each city apart like in civ4?
If it has to be one or the other, I prefer my empire builders to feel like building an empire, and Civ V wins on this count. Strategically I also much prefer being able to direct how my cities develop by choosing how allocate my available global happiness to population vs. new cities to the forced management of Civ IV which I described in an earlier post.
Having said all of which, the game needs more city-level micromanagement, and this feeling is all the stronger for having played several mods that add micromanagement mechanics for health and local happiness.
the combat? hexes with one unit per tile or squares with stacks of doom?
1UPT, less because of the system itself and more because you simply don't need as many units. One thing I like about Civ V is the slowed production times - you have to make meaningful choices about what to produce when, and moving to unit production sacrifices some other element of empire production. People who dislike 1UPT use this as a criticism and point out that they dislike 1UPT less for the hex combat and more for the attendant changes - in my case it's the reverse, the attendant changes are a major improvement in my view.
I noted on another thread today (in the BNW forum) that this system has also had another very positive effect: air combat. No previous Civ game, in my opinion, has captured the way warfare changed so drastically with the development of flight, or has made air superiority such a fundamental part of late-game warfare. With the old stack system, although the mechanics were somewhat similar to Civ V's aircraft mechanics, air combat was much less decisive - air units were just flying artillery, and dealt collateral to a certain number of units in the stack when they attacked. If the defending stack was powerful enough, the plane died - even if there were no fighters on the defending side. This is because ranged unit mechanics worked differently - siege units attacked and defenders dealt damage back, rather than the Civ V system where only the ranged unit attacks. Planes take some damage from attacking in Civ V, but you can't beat them by spamming land units as you could in the past - you need AA or fighters of your own.