This is another "rant" kind of post. It will be long. But I am hoping to get some answers (real ones, not abuse) - am I being too pessimistic, am I missing something here or is the game really been simplified so much that it won't be able to reach the complexity of civ4 even when patched and improved? Are there simplifications and flaws in the design or am I just not seeing the genius here?
I think this is a common problem many people are having. People see that many of the strategies and options from CivIV were removed and then they think everything was dumbed down. What they fail to see are all the new strategies that were opened up. There are a number of new additions that are incredibly complex, even if they seem simple at first glance.
The removed stuff - generally - well, I understand that some options were easy to exploit - but why remove them instead of fixing them? Some were simplified - why not make them complex? Even if flawed, they added another dimensions to the strategy you needed to employ - if they are not fixed, tuned or replaced, the game becomes simplified.
There is one thing you have to realize, you are comparing a new game to a game that had several years of refinement and expansions. There are only so many development resources available to make the game and they can't add everything at once without half-assing them. Its much better to have fewer, well thought out features now and add more later through expansions (as they did with CivIV) than to have lots of features that barely function and are completely imbalanced. If you can't get a feature working it is much better to cut it and come back to it later than to release it in a crappy state. Despite what some people seem to think they did add a ton to the game, which means some things had to be cut.
- Cottages. What was wrong with them? IMO it was one of the most inventive additions to the game since civ1. In another thread someone complained that in latter stages of the game he had to defend towns cause they were hard to rebuild after being pillaged - now that's why they added to the complexity. I rather expected more terrain improvements to grow after being used by the city, that would a natural decision. Now from what I can guess by playing the demo, they stay the same for entire game.
- science now is down to pop mostly. How can I influence the science output significantly? OK, it may be "realistic" to say you can never FORCE a nation to suddenly become a source of new ideas and technologies, but this is not a real life sim, it is a strategy game, in which all aspects should be controllable, but always at a cost, ie more science = less food/gold/happiness/tanks whatever. Just let me control it even indirectly.
I combined these 2 because they really go together.
The problem was that in CivIV towns were too good at too many things. They gave science, gold, culture, and later on even some production. Because of the slider and its ability to instantly adapt to whatever situation you were in your decisions didn't really have many consequences. In the vast majority of your cities all you needed was enough food to work the cottages and the cottages did everything else for you if you used the slider properly.
Decoupling gold and science and removing the slider in CiV are huge changes, but its not dumbing down. You still have the ability to control your science and gold output, just not instantly due to the slider (I'll admit culture output is harder to control). You have to plan ahead and the decisions you make have consequences. If you want more science then you need more farms, which means you have to sacrifice gold production because you have fewer trading posts (or mines/lumber mills for production). So yes, more science does in fact mean less gold/happiness/tanks/etc. This becomes a balancing act and increases the number of strategic options available, rather than just having one awesome improvement that does everything.
Finally, the point about improvements growing with time or not is again not dumbing anything down. Cottages growing adds even more to your decisions having consequences, while trading posts not growing allows for more flexibility for changing situations. These are both very good things in a strategy game. The key is to find a balance between them. I suspect that because they removed the crazy amount of flexibility given by the slider they had to add some back in by not having improvements grow over time. Again, this is not dumbing down, its about finding the right balance between flexibility and consequences.
- religion - again, added a lot of options, a lot of choices, like building temples in cities that wouldn't otherwise need them at the time, to help another city's culture by allowing a cathedral. I agree this was almost a one way road (ie the more religion(s) in your cities the better) and had too much influence on AI diplo - but it was easy to change. Why not? Now we're back to just constructing "a temple". Cool.
Religion was simply a mechanic for diplomacy. A method for creating alliances and enemies. Not a very good one either. Diplomacy was reworked to use pacts of cooperation/secrecy instead of religion. Its just a different mechanic, which I think the jury is still out on. I will admit it would be nice to be able to see under the hood a bit more though (not being able to see the modifiers doesn't make it dumbed down though, just harder to learn and game the system).
Also, being able to build a building in one city to help another is still very much present, just not based on religion any more. For example, you could easily build a circus in one city to allow another city to grow. Options were not removed, just shifted around.
- health - another thing that allowed to tie a lot of aspects of the game. A simple growth factor to that led to infinite options. Allowed to represent the influence of industrial development or unhealthy surroundings or having access to many/too few food sources. The more advanced you were, the more use you had of the food resources (granaries/groceries), but the bigger your empire, the more of the resources you had and the again there was diplomacy and gaining resources from other players. Removing health just deleted a whole dimension from the strategy. Please tell me, what do we have in exchange? And no, social policies and better combat is not an answer.
What we have in exchange is additional strategies. The combination of removing health and moving happiness to empire wide opened up a ton of options and decision points not present in CivIV. If you make happiness civ-wide and still have a cap on individual city population is basically removes the benefits of making happiness civ-wide. This is why health had to be removed. More on this in the happiness section.
- not having to connect a resource to the city to be able to use it? Really? I haven't played that much but does it mean that if I build a city 15 hexes away from any settlement with no road and sea access, it will be able to use all of my strategic resources? And if that city has a strat. resource, I can use it on another continent? Thsi point may be down to me not having a full game.
This is a sacrifice that was made to remove the silly spider web of roads that plagued CivIV. Now think of your roads as major highways for quick access between cities and other strategic locations.
The real reason for this though is with 1UPT roads absolutely had to be expensive and less common. Otherwise the defender would have an insurmountable advantage in warfare. Imagine trying to fight in a 1UPT environment against someone who has a CivIV-like road network. The mobility their roads (and railroads) would give them to flank and encircle you would make it futile. So in order to account for the incredible complexity of adding the 1UPT system connecting a resource had to be simplified. However, this is really a net gain overall, making the game more complex, not less so.
- espionage - I never liked it in civ4, I thought it was a rushed and simplified addition but it was there as an option, as a strategy choice. It needed improving not removing. What is there in civ5 instead? As I said, I do not know civ5 extremely well so maybe I miss something there.
Here you are comparing bast game + expansions to just a base game. Espionage was not in the original CivIV. I wouldn't be surprised to see it added in an expansion for CiV too.
- generally, I have a feeling that almost everything was tuned down to have less influence. Resources do not increase output of the tiles as much as they used to (and there are a lot more of them), wonders do not seem to be so powerful, teh same goes for city buildings and after building a pasture on a tile with cattle I gained one hammer. Is it intentional? For me, it just means every choice I make is less important. Getting THAT resource before other do, building THAT wonder before others do was always something that drove me, that was worth investing in and made the challenge fascinating. Now it seems like everything just grows/develops at a similar tempo no matter what I do. Like I said in "health" paragraph - it was great for the strategy, that with time it became more and more important to have that resource, that holy city as bonuses were accumulating.
The difference is there are lots more of them. Instead of having that one super tile with cows on it you will likely have several slightly improved tiles. The net effect is the same. There is still plenty of incentive to rush for specific tiles before your opponents. In fact, with the change to strategic resources it can be even more important. Who cares if you lose an iron tile to someone in CivIV as long as you have one somewhere else? This is not the case in CiV.
Also, wonders are extremely powerful. Some might not appear to be at first glance, but when you play the game you see that they are. For example, the +8 culture from Stonehenge doesn't sound like much, but it can be a very big deal.
- corruption - where is it? I haven't investigated this too much, but from what I saw the distance between cities plays no role in the maintenance now. Or in their production effectiveness. If that's true, it is another huge simplification.
Here I agree with you. Not quite sure why they took this out.
- happiness is now empire wide. I read the arguments for it and I don't agree with them. The way I understand it, it simply replaced number of cities maintenance cost as a growth limit (while probably omitting the distance factor) - so it is not NEW, BETTER, it is simplified again. Someone claimed it means you need to use diplomacy and economy to manage the "new" happiness. Ermm... and in civ4 you didn't have to??? (my last BTS game for most of the time I spent a huge portion of my income on acquiring lux resources from other civs as I didn't have them in my territory and I had to be nice to some nasty neighbours). Now supposedly the city specific happiness was a bad thing. Was it? Firstly, there WAS an empire wide happiness factor (war weariness). Secondly, as there WAS (now absent I guess) an empire wide growth limiting factor (maintenance cost+health in general), the city specific happiness was ANOTHER NOW ABSENT factor in the game! It limited a super growth of a specific city (usually the capital) - how many times have I been forced into choose: go for Monarchy and her. rule to let my capital grow packed with warriors OR choose some other more needed tech (or get an extra religion AND not allow an enemy to have a holy city - another now removed strategical factor). So, what replaced it?
Here's the big one. Happiness civ-wide is not at all simplified, in many ways its far more complex. It adds all sorts of new options and decisions to the game. Now instead of simply growing every city up to its happiness cap you actually have to decide how you want to allocate your citizens. Do you even out your population among your cities? Do you marginalize some cities to allow you to have a couple of maga-cities? Do you have your unit producing cities stop producing units for a time and build happiness structures so your other cities can grow even more? How do you balance unhappiness from the number of cities with population for optimum results? All I can say is if you think this is simply to replace maintenance cost as a number of cities growth limit then you really don't fully understand the mechanic. It combined many mechanics into one. On the surface it looks simple, but in reality it is extremely complex.
Here's a simple comparison. In CivIV, every time you placed a new city you increased your civ's total population cap. No matter where you placed it, you always got at least 4 more added to your cap. Once the city was placed there was no cost for growing it to said cap either. Just give it time and it will get there. All you had to pay for was the maintenance cost of the city. Now in CiV, every time you place a new city it actually lowers your civ's total population cap. Plus every additional population you decide to allow there is at the expense of one somewhere else. You still have to pay "maintenance" for the city itself, just not in the form of gold, in the form of lowering your total population cap. However, you can, if you choose to, build a happiness building in that city. By doing that you are then paying for the city with gold like you did in CivIV. You can even build more happiness buildings in this city to allow your other cities to grow if you wish. It sounds to me like CiV's version has more options and more complexity, not less.
- social policies - a lot has been said about them. I just like to add that I always thought there should be two things in the game: a civ's social values AND (as a separate thing) political/government choices. The first should not be a subject of player's free decision, rather reflect his general play - ie if he goes to war early, his society should become "warlike", if he builds cottages etc, they should become merchants. These settings should be very hard to change during gameplay. On the other hand, the political choices should be almost free to choose, just like the civics system worked. Now the policies system seems to be none of the above, just acts like an "extra tech tree" with the only difference being that you will never research all the "policies". Nice idea, but as an addition to "social values" and especially to civics options, otherwise, another strange simplification.
While your idea sounds interesting, nothing like what you suggest here has been in any Civ game. So I don't know how it can be a simplification to something that never existed. SPs are certainly no more simple than civics in CivIV. If you preferred civics to SPs, that's fine, but its not a simplification. Personally I'm not sure which i like more. I like that SPs give culture a more interesting role in the game. However I also liked the flexibility of civics.
Like I said at the beginning, I really think you are having the same problem that many others are before getting to really know the game. You only see the places where your options and strategies from CivIV were limited and not seeing where they have been opened up. CiV is an incredibly complex game.
And if that fails, then you can't handle the difficulty your on 
)
The threads complaining that rivers are ugly, that trading posts look stupid and that the clouds are "too hexagonal" seems to show that most people do value graphics. Although by the sound of it, some people would like to go back to civ1 graphics 
