This is in response to the numerous polls and suggestions that Civ V is "dumbed down" or less complex than Civ IV. I do not mean to suggest that Civ V is perfect in its current state (it needs obvious bug fixes and ai improvements, probably a little building rebalancing also). What I do suggest, is that Civ V is certainly more complex in its basic mechanics than Civ IV. To wit:
Building maintenance- Civ IV had no building maintenance costs. This made the decision of what buildings to build, and where to build them far simpler, a step backwards in complexity from even Civ I and II. In IV you could spam every building everywhere in your empire, without regards to min/maxing or whether it would be worth it or not. Try that in Civ V, you will bankrupt your empire.
Combat- Stack combat was a gross oversimplification. Build some melee or gunpowder units, a bunch of seige, group together and click go-to button next to enemy capital. Not exactly rocket science. Now, in Civ V, one unit per tile is infinitely more complex. So complex, in fact, that the ai has not mastered it (one of the actually legitimate criticisms of Civ V). However, I appreciate the more rewarding and complex new mechanic, and look forward to vastly more exciting and complex multiplayer action, and single player games after ai improvements.
Government- In Civilization 4, your choice of civics had zero long term repercussions. You could easily change Civics after a short period of anarchy, even that easily mitigated by golden ages or religious trait. While admittedly slightly less simple than the likes of Civ 2 (where you could run democracy, then pop into monarchy for a couple turns to declare and fight a war, then pop back into democracy) even Civ IV’s civics system is very simplistic. By contrast, in Civ V, you have to consider several things when adopting a social policy- the short term versus long term benefits not only of the current policy choice, but of all other policies farther down the tree. You really have to plan ahead with a grand strategy, making social policies in Civ V much more complex for the player than its predecessors.
Expansion- Prior civ games had no effective check on expansion. Founding an additional city was nearly always advisable, bigger was always better. In Civ V there is a very real cost to reckless expansionism. There are benefits too, and therin lies the essence of complexity. A larger empire will generate more hammers and gold, but it will be difficult to keep happy. Founding a city to gain an additional resource may help with happiness or military power, but detract from your ability to accumulate social policies. There are all kinds of tradeoffs, and the optimal strategy may very depending on your situation and what victory condition you are aiming at.
Happiness- Civ IV had the easiest and most simplistic happiness system in the series. Not only did your cities only have localized happiness, but they didn't even experience revolt or civil disorder, merely an unproductive citizen. You could effectively ignore all of those angry faces in Civ 4, until you got around to dealing with them. With Civ V global happiness, you ignore happiness at your peril. Reduced empire wide growth, lack of golden age accumulation, loss of rationalism science bonus, penalty to combat, etc. (I am aware of the existence "ignore happiness" strats, but these are mainly for specialized late game situations. Further, I believe they are something akin to an exploit which will be fixed by increasing the "very unhappy" penalty in future patches).
It'll have to wait until tomorrow though, right now my ability for coherent thought is impaired considerably by severe lack of sleep (i.e. I'm in danger of falling asleep on my keyboard again). I'll get back tomorrow though.
