this is not true, since in CIV beginning at Monarch you had to really specialize your cities to get best results (or even manage to pull through).
The thing is...if you wanted to have every building in every city in CIV you probably could... and it was matter of your optimization to not have it.
In this edition of civilization there is not such choice. You certainly won't have enough hammers+gold to have everything everywhere so you're forced from beginning to build only few buildings.
I have to say, IMHO that’s one of the most insightful comments posted on this forum to date

...and, IMHO, epitomises one of the key differences between Civ 4 and Civ 5.
In Civ 4, the combination of greater (especially early) hammer availability, lower hammer build costs and slavery (which enabled you to convert food to hammers) provided the means for you to construct a very large number of buildings in, or infrastructure for, your cities, if you wished. Moreover, a comparison of the hammer build costs versus the benefits provided by each building gave you a significant incentive to construct each building.
However, one of the pieces of genius in Civ 4 IMHO was that this attraction was a double edged sword. If you spent your time constructing buildings and neglected your military for instance, you’d end up getting DoW’d and seeing your empire crippled, if not being completely killed, by an AI who’d invested their hammers in military units instead. It’s why the difference between the good Civ 4 gamers and the great Civ 4 gamers (and I certainly wasn't in the latter category

) was simply this: their ability to make the right decision to build the right thing (whether that be a building or a military unit) at the right time. To those who don’t believe me, take a look at the Civ 4 forum...and you’ll find that it’s littered with games in which people have built a whole host of wonders and / or other buildings, only to lose them all to an AI who DoW’d them because that gamer had built no military to speak of. They decided to build the wrong thing at the wrong time...and paid the price. The best gamers found a balance between constructing military units and buildings that saw them defeat such AI - and go on to win the game.
By way of contrast, the lack of (especially early) hammer availability, higher hammer build costs and the absence of slavery in Civ 5 means that it now takes much longer to build anything in this latest incarnation of Civ. If you want it quickly, there is now just one option: you buy it. That said, even if hammers or commerce were sufficiently plentiful to enable you to construct and / or buy every building in the game, the combination of building maintenance costs and smaller building benefits in Civ 5 seems to actively discourage you IMHO from building anything but a skeletal infrastructure in all your cities. Returning to the excellent point made by vranasm, this combination of Civ 5 features means that you are now being actively discouraged IMHO from even constructing a sufficient number of buildings to properly specialise your cities – even on the lowest game skill settings.
If anyone wants to disprove that last sentence by the way, please be my guest.

I’d love to see a forum hosted game in which a civver constructs all of the buildings in each city appropriate to its specialisation, and yet still finds time to conquer the world. (Of course, the game would have to make an exception to allow the gamer to overcome the one instance in whch Civ 5 actually discourages city specialisation, meaning you’d be allowed (or maybe even required) to construct any pre-requisite buildings in all your cities to enable you to build the national wonders.) If someone could do that, I think they’d go a very long way to disproving the notion that Civ 5 is less complex than Civ 4. As it stands however, the imbalances in hammer availability, building hammer costs, lesser benefits provided by buildings, maintenance costs and so on, all seem to be conspiring IMHO to actively discourage the civver from building anything more than a skeletal infrastructure before waging war. As such, that element of genius I mentioned earlier in Civ 4 has, IMHO, been lost in Civ 5.
The key question of course is whether this different balance in Civ 5 is a deliberate design choice (designed to encourage a new generation of civvers), or a design flaw that needs rebalancing. On the assumption that's its the latter (or in the hope that someone out there with some programming skills feels the same way I do

) may I close with a few suggestions that may help rebalance this particular area of Civ 5. Perhaps some mod builders, or even Firaxis, may care to implement some, none

, or all of them in a future update or mod (assuming that slavery or another means of converting food to hammers is not re-introduced, say as a social policy):
(i) Consider adding another hammer back to mines
(ii) Bring watermills back as a hammer boosting tile improvement
(iii) Re-introduce windmills as a tile improvement, but make them boost hammers (instead of food as per Civ 4)
(iv) Consider tweaking the benefits and / or maintenance costs and / or hammer costs of buildings (and particularly wonders)
In the meantime, I really look forward to seeing someone host (or point me in the direction of) the forum game I mentioned, to showcase the ability to specialise cities in a Civ 5 world.
