The interface will flagrantly tell you a diplo value (say friendly) and show a diplo total (say +15). If you have a vassal with which the AI is annoyed, the game averages it and does not tell you. You are instead mislead by a -1 "we are upset that our rival is your vassal" now showing a total of +14, when the reality is that the AI is cautious with you.
Ah, okay. Yes, if that's the case, then the UI should reflect it. I'm not certain whether I'd classify it as a "blatant lie" (as you do) or as an overlooked modifier, but the distinction is probably academic, no one of us can determine whether the UI was consciously or accidentally written this way. Anyway, I agree with you that modifiers that drive the AI should be open and correctly displayed. I do maintain that Civ4 does a pretty good job at that, actually much better than most other complex strategy games, especially when played with mods like BUG/BULL. But I don't deny that there may be single cases which aren't handled correctly.
If you don't use hotkeys and control shortcuts, you won't realize that they are broken. That does not change the fact that they are broken.
Well, I do use shortcuts, and they don't seem to be broken in my games. I don't use the keyboard directly though. People have actually labeled me as some sort of an input efficiency fetishist. I play with a 10-button programmable mouse and a Strategic Commander which currently has about 60 keystrokes programmed into two profiles. I regularly use Shift and Control for input (I mapped them to the "forward" and "back" buttons of my mouse) and your problems with these keys haven't surfaced in any of my games since 2005.
I also can remember only one time when I accidentally declared war on an AI instead of opening the trade window, but that was my own mistake since I had misremembered the shortcut. I did experience a "sticky Control key" problem with my old keyboard for a while (it was a wireless and there was a problem with transmission between keyboard and receiver), but that could appear with all software on my machine and I actually can't recall it ever surfacing in Civ4. Likewise, I never had a problem with selecting multiple cities when I only wanted to select one.
I usually have no problems stopping move orders. If it's necessary to stop units, then it's the first thing I do after getting out of the "Your city has produced X" loop and unless I'm very unlucky, the units in question haven't moved by then.
I actually appreciate the fact that units with used-up movement point aren't selected by the "select all units of this type" functionality. I use this functionality to group and move units around and for this, I'd have to remove units without movement points manually had they been selected. Not selecting them in the first place suits my usage of the functionality much better.
I acknowledge (as I already said) that the interface has problems with moving units between selection groups. I regard that that as an annoyance that can be remedied, though not totally solved, by mods like PLE. I wish that Firaxis had implemented this functionality better, but imho this is not severe enough to trash a UI element that otherwise works well for me.
If you want to give them a pass for shoddy AI, fine.
I wouldn't call the Civ4 AI shoddy by any means. I think it does a pretty good job considering that it's limited to ad-hoc decisions. It obviously can't satisfy the needs of the top-notch competitive players, but that's a pretty small segment of the game's customers, and for those, Firaxis released the complete AI with an SDK for the modders six months after the game's release (which no competitor has done ever before or since, usually you're lucky if you can tweak some variables and modify some scripts meant to handle specific situations).
The one thing that I wish had been different is that the Civ4 AI doesn't run on its own threads. That's the limiting factor in a lot of AI development, since it forces the AI to make all of its calculations in a very short time frame. However, switching to a multi-threaded AI was probably to risky a decision by the time Civ4 development started.
It is 100% inexcusable to give them a pass for neglecting major gameplay control issues for years, and that alone removes "polished game" status. However, having incomplete VICTORY conditions IE "object of the game" is also really bad, and 2 of the game's victory conditions (UN and apostolic palace, with a B for broken on the latter) are in fact incomplete.
Well, I see your point and I understand your perspective. Still, the things that you label as broken actually
do enhance my enjoyment of the game. It's not that I didn't wish that some things were implemented better or had seen more polish (and I agree with your assessment that most functionality that was added post-vanilla could have used a few iterations more), but I still like these things being there. Also, some have been improved by modders (like the random events). I definitely appreciated Firaxis' approach of slapping a lot of content on BtS because tweaking this content later to "get it right" is a task that modders can often do, while introducing features that were never included in the engine (perhaps in favor for a more polished appearance) is much harder.
I think, however, that much of our different views originate from me bein a pure single player, whereas you appear to be a very competitive player who enjoys multiplayer games. This leads to a totally different way of treating the game.
. All that does is prove Blizzard isn't perfect, which would hurt them more if there were any competent competition.
.
