The combat system is a lot more fun since the first major patch, and hopefully it will be even more fun after this one.
I had a recent game - Emperor difficulty (playing down slightly for me, Immortal is about the right balance, Deity I can win but it's like 25% win rate or something, Emperor it's probably around 80-90% win rate) as Alexander. English to the north, Romans to the south. Fought a small war against the English using a group of 2 companion cavalry, 3 hoplites, a swordsman and a great general - I had the double xp policy from Honor and the +15% if there's a friendly unit adjacent, so they quickly became very elite and I won the war pretty handily, taking most of the outer reaches of their empire, but they had a series of narrow chokepoints to get through if I wanted to take London and their other remaining city. Accepted a favorable peace agreement and consolidated my gains.
I then fought a minor war with Rome (they were attacking a City-State I had allied with, so I crushed their expeditionary force and took a city as spoils, but I didn't really have the interest to press the attack too far). At that point, I was boxed in between England and Rome with little further land to colonize. Rome was strong, England was weak, so taking over Rome was the eventual goal but I didn't want England attacking me while I was engaged with Rome, so I turned on England. Turned out they had about 8-10 Longbows behind that narrow pass, and I was just feeding my men into a meat grinder. Lost every significantly veteran unit I possessed before ultimately punching through with just waves of newly produced Longswordsmen and siege weapons.
I thought it was pretty cool having the terrain favor the defender in that case so heavily, and having to fight a war that went very atypically because the defender had appropriate units to defend its ground. In Civ IV this would have just been a stack of doom taking down the capital of a mostly-defeated neighbor; in Civ V it was much more than that, enough that I considered letting England survive simply because they had put up such a valiant defense.
