This is entirely your personal opinion, has not been experienced by the entire player base, and therefore is a point that cannot be argued with. It's as if you have said "I like the color pink." Good for you.
2) Inconsistent mechanics
Buildings are now rendered useless by many of the games restrictions.
Gold exists. Use it to buy those buildings. You don't need a stables in every single city.
Wonders are weaker in this Civ than in any other. While its true that every civ game has had its fair share of useless wonders, this one seems to have even weaker ones. Coupled with longer building times, this change makes even less sense.
Examples please.
There are too many units, especially in modern times. You cant build them all, or even a good fraction of them, when unit maintenance costs and build times are higher, and when the stacking mechanic has been removed.
First it's that there's too much restriction, now it's that there's too much freedom! I believe I've hit on what the problem is. You cannot be pleased.
Conquest has been rendered impossible or extremely slow lacking a genocidal bent. I will pay special attention to this one, as I find it to be one of the most game breaking and poorly conceived mechanics in the entire game. Just like in Civ III, where the costs of overexpansion were too high as a result of the corruption mechanic, there is a strong incentive to raze entire empires because you cannot afford to keep those cities. Annexing the city makes little sense as the cost of a courthouse in terms of maintenance and the happiness hit until that building actually erects is prohibitively expensive. Turning cities into puppets is just as expensive since the AI seems to like massing buildings, which eventually empty your offers in maintenance costs. Even without these mechanisms, massive conquests are too costly, as the happiness hit, even without the occupied city effect, is too restrictive for anything but slow and incremental conquests.
Kay... work with it. All you've really done is state that you can't just mass up and take the map in one swoop.
This is actually the only point that's pretty dead on the money. The AI is poor right now. It needs to be looked at pretty drastically.
Diplomacy is supposed to be inscrutable. If you play a board game, there's no "Diplomacy Meters". You guess what your opponent is up to based on his/her actions in the game proper, not on some +1 system.
5) Inflexible and shallow victory conditions
The same ones that have been in the Civ Series for years, but ok.
These are the most problematical aspects of the game. Given the restrictions mentioned in the first section and the requirements for some of these victory conditions, players must now choose a victory at the beginning of the game and stick with it. There is little flexibility to shift toward a cultural victory, for instance, when you conquered your neighbor or overexpanded. I cannot count the number of times in previous Civ games where the flexibility to change strategies to pursue another victory condition was needed, whether it was because I fell behind the tech race, angered too many AIs, or lacked the ability to conquer my foes. The option to change added depth to the game. That is now gone.
Oh noes! Is now possible to lose! I can't just jump into whatever strategy I want to at any second?! This game is too restrictive!!!
Like it's supposed to be.
Cultural victories are the best illustration of this problem. Build/conquer so that you have more than 5 cities and this path becomes inaccessible due to the very poor scaling of social policy costs relative to the number of cities. Puppeting cities does not help this because, as mentioned, they will bankrupt you.
The only case where this example is true is if you don't know what you're doing. Create trading posts around puppetted cities terrain and it FORCES them to produce money. Build a market, and a bank. There's an entire HoV Challenge going on where the top guy, finishing at 1620 at that, does precisely this strategy that you say is impossible.
Diplomatic victories couldnt be more shallow. In past civ games, the player was required to actually build alliances and improve relations over time. In Civ IV, the AI even kept a memory of your past infractions. Now all that is needed is to buy off the city states before a vote.
The only flaw I see here is that the AI doesn't see the value in City states, it seems. This goes back to the only point you've made that's actually valuable, Poor AI.
Even STILL, you are required to have a TON of money and invest in the necessary policies to see this through.
Dominance victory conditions are broken due to the already covered restrictions against conquest (happiness, maintenance costs, and poor social policy cost scaling) and the incentivization of genocide. My one dominance victory consisted of a small number of cities destroying every city I conquered, save for the capitols, which is prohibited. At the end of the game, the world had one continent with a few former capitols and my continent that was only 25% inhabited. That looks and feels ridiculous. There should be more options than genocide.
"Genocide" is a funny word to be using here. It's a game. These are the rules.
Dominance victories are also too easy given the atrocious AI. I conquered the world with about 10 units in a relatively short time period.
Again, point three is well taken.
6) Tying it all together: A note on the meta-game
I would argue that you're attempting to jam your own perception of what the meta game should be into a game with a completely different approach. Perhaps it's your own thinking that's out of step, and not the game. But let's continue anyway.
The meta-game is the overall approach to playing. The problem with Civ V isnt any one mechanic. In isolation, all the aforementioned problems are not game breaking. The problem is that when taken as a whole, these mechanics break the meta-game.
Literally an impossibility, but ok.
The happiness/gold/low production mechanics coupled with the inflexible victory conditions restrict too many strategies.
In that they make it actually possible to lose, that is true.
It sacrifices depth of play for ease of play. When there are fewer options and only a few mechanics to focus intently upon, the game becomes more manageable, more accessible, and more streamlined. The cost is depth. You are forced to utilize only a handful of strategies. Gaming acumen means less now because the aforementioned restrictions dont allow much room for maneuver. You have to pick a strategy and stick with it. The strategies are simpler (i.e. only need to conquer capitols for domination, shallow diplomatic victory, etc.) This must be done with fewer cities and fewer mechanics to balance. Even all of the options, such as buildings and units, given to you are illusory, as they are either redundant or poorly implemented, a result of trying to use some of the advancements of prior civs, such as buildings that give XP on creation, with a whole new system of mechanics that render such advancements pointless. The sheer sloppiness of design in this game is apparent at every step.
Oh for the love of... the game has been out for less then a month and already every single strategy has been discovered! OK everyone, you can stop playing now! A random person on the internet has declared that every possible strategy imaginable has been discovered within a three week period! Throw the game away, there's no point to carry on, because in THREE WEEKS every possible thing that we CAN know about a game HAS BEEN KNOWN!
Sheesh, doesn't it sound ridiculous when people say ridiculous things?
For many Civ veterans, this is boring. We are accustomed to more strategic depth. Sure, accessibility has its advantages. This is obvious. But civilization, for all its critical acclaim, was never a very accessible gameit is a niche title appealing to hardcore strat gamersand I do not understand why the developers want to turn it into one now.
I firmly believe that the systems that are in place are strong ones. If you play this game with people, the game is intense and incredibly engaging. The only actual flaw in the game is the AI. The AI cannot handle itself in this game quite yet, and until it can, even reasonably, there's no way that the game is going to have the lasting appeal of other titles.
That said, you are comparing a game that has been out for THREE WEEKS with games that have been out for YEARS. This is foolish, and a logical fallacy at that. It's the same thing that we've seen again and again in the gaming community where people cry about insignificant things, and leap to conclusions to their own detriment. Just play the game, enjoy it, and get creative and weird with it.
Can we please stop it with these stupid threads that talk about how flawed Civ5 is while giving NO ACTUAL POINTS. How many times have I seen this, "I won't go into detail of how badly designed this game is because it's well tread." The reason you're not going into it is because you can't.
Sheesh.
