Which mechanics are those? I personally really like the hex grid. I'm not a fan of 1 unit per tile, or at least how it's now implemented.
I actually just played Civ IV for the first time in a while, having got rather fed up with a few attack-heavy Civ V games in succession. Things I find disappointing about Civ IV looking back (and not all were fixed in Civ V by any means):
- A long-term big problem: the overreliance on religion in the early game, particularly for happiness control. I decided not to prioritise religion, expecting (as has often been recommended here) to have cultural transfer from another civ. Naturally it was some time after making this decision before I found my island was uninhabited except for me (it was a reasonably big island). The most important consquence is that there are no other early-game means for controlling happiness except for resources (and the only happiness resource on my island was sugar, needing both Calendar and Iron Working to use).
vs. Civ V: Civ V's tech tree is balanced to ensure that you're never more than two techs away from securing luxuries, a necessity given the way happiness works in this game; no more Calendar halfway down the tree. There are also more happiness-producing buildings, while at the same time temples' happiness bonus is still linked to religion through the Piety policy branch (which, incidentally, is another improvement - plainly Hinduism and Buddhism are much more useful to obtain than Islam due to the difference in the game stage when you can obtain them. Piety standardises when each civ can start gaining 'religious' bonuses).
- Health: I've argued elsewhere (to the well-supported and persuasive counterargument "No it's not!") that health is a redundant mechanic, since you always get to the stage where you want to control population long before it becomes an issue, and incidental health benefits you get from buildings like granaries you'll usually be building anyway ensure you pretty much never get to a point where it's an issue. I've been assured that this is not the case, so I was paying particular attention to the effect health had in this game. The answer: zilch. I had a well-sited capital with fresh water and forests, but I built a coastal city with no water or forest, and a city adjacent to the two sugar-bearing jungles (which was otherwise surrounded by forest). City placement had no detectable effect as far as health issues were concerned. My cities always exceeded the happiness threshold, making it pointless to grow them any further due to striking workers, long before any health problems would have arisen. The main effect of health was to prompt me to avoid building barays on the basis that they're nearly pointless... I was playing on Prince, however this gives only a +2 health bonus based on level, and all my cities were consistently more than 2 above the threshold for ill health.
Khmer are however an expansive civ, which might help. Tried another start, as Pericles, and likewise no effect of health (and I'm not a fan of having to build an otherwise pointless aqueduct to build Hanging Gardens, should I want it).
Incidentally, this made two games in a row with no copper. And now I had other civs to deal with, I faithfully kept up relations, maintained open borders, shared the Aztecs' religion - only to have Montezuma declare war on me while the slightly less positive Portugese (unhappy because I was sharing their borders) remained cautious but non-belligerent.
This is only one recent anecdote, however comparing with the Civ V system I can't help seeing a shortcoming. I instinctively thought, when weighing whether to settle near Portugal to get the best access to resources, "is this worth the risk of conflict?" In Civ V, you make a decision one way or the other, and it's going to dictate whether you have a war on your hands.
In this instance, at least, in Civ IV, the leaders' personalities seemed to make any diplomatic decision-making on my part entirely redundant. Yes, settling near Joao was a bad move diplomatically, but he's a friendly enough sort so no harm done. Montezuma by contrast is notoriously belligerent, whatever I do to appease him, down to sharing his religion.
I'd stress this is a single anecdote - one of my main criticisms of Civ V is that it's very hard to control diplomatic relations, and at least in my memory Civ IV was generally better in that respect. There do appear to be examples like the above, however, that represent the exceptions which prove the rule.
Aaargh! I meant to quote rather than edit this, and ended up losing a whole lot of other comments I'd made. These include:
3. Workers cost food to produce. This makes sense for settlers, but for workers it's just (a) an unnecessary cost at the start of the game when you have little option but to make them, and (b) a way of circumventing population growth penalties later in the game by centralising worker production in developed cities, one of several mechanics that makes population control less challenging than it really ought to be.
4. Copper - or, more specifically the fact that until gunpowder most units are resource-linked. Shortage of iron is a problem in Civ V that's been discussed a couple of times here, however in Civ V there are weaker but serviceable alterantive units you can use if you find yourself without a relevant resource. In Civ IV you have ... Warriors, Archers and Catapults.
5. Maintenance. Maintenance exists to stop ICS, which it does. Unfortunately, this is more or less all it does. Gone or substantially reduced are meaningful penalties (other than production time, which likewise exists in other Civ games) for building units in large numbers, duplicating every building you want in every city and so forth. In Civ V (and in Civs I-III), choosing building X over building Y or unit Z was a meaningful decision because each came with a maintenance cost of its very own. This is exacerbated in Civ IV by the low value of gold; in Civ V you not only have to juggle maintenance costs for units and buildings, you have to do so while keeping your GPT as high as possible. In Civ IV, where gold was notoriously of little use, you just needed to prevent your income being negative for too long. Of course the Civ IV trade off is that the higher your maintenance cost, the more science you have to sacrifice. Which works to a degree, but this mechanic is still there after a fashion in Civ V, and simplifying decisions about building location and identity, unit numbers and identity, and city placement all into a single slider is a rather shallow mechanic.
6. Tile improvements. Civ IV has a varied and interesting array of tile improvements - but before you reach Machinery or Metal Casting, you have the standard three, and the choice between them is more of a no-brainer than in Civ V. Population in Civ IV is a double-edged sword, so farms are not universally useful (and are limited in where they can be placed). Production values for all tiles are higher, so mines are less useful generally. Conversely, not only is science tied to commerce but trading posts give much higher output than the other improvement types, so until you reach techs that make Workshops useful, any tile that can't use a water mill and isn't a forest (which in Civ IV gets replaced by the cottage but not the lumbermill) is just somewhere to spam cottages, Civ V has not, in all honestly, solved this issue - it's notorious for trading posts being the de facto improvement, but at least the way I play it's less pronounced.
7. Restrictive tech tree. The tech tree has a lot more options, but a lot fewer 'right' options, and a lot of techs (like Aesthetics) which are mostly there on the way to something else rather than anything you'd shoot for in its own right. Take the 'wrong' tech paths and you spend a lot of the early game without building options or unit options (take your pick depending on which path you take), you take longer to get to the point where there's anything for workers to do other than spam cottages, and so forth. In Civ V, I feel, the tech tree is there to offer alternative viable strategies to suit different situations, while in Civ IV the larger tech tree is there to make it more challenging to select the few ''right' tech paths from a larger number of 'wrong' ones. Of course, the problem with this approach is that once you've cracked the solution, the tech progression is the same every time; playing the Civ IV tech tree is more akin to filling in a crossword than playing a strategy game.
