I guess that's why they removed the slider and the ability to switch civics?
The ability to switch civics is awkward with the cultural victory condition - though I think it should be doable, it's a design choice that has little bearing on the fact that this is a more macro-focused game than its predecessor.
As for the slider, I have to admit I can't see a good justification for removing it. What I can be fairly sure of is that generic 'dumbing down', and I haven't seen a more specific charge, is unlikely to be the explanation - there's little disagreement here with the notion that console games are aimed at a 'dumber' audience than PC Civilization, and yet from another thread it appears that Civ Revolution had an economy management mechanic that was both more complex than Civ V's and forced micromanagement more than the traditional one.
Or the ability to Alt-Select every city you have and select "emphasize production"?
Quite honestly I never automate my cities (possibly a reason later games seem tedious in older versions of Civ, but on the occasions I've selected automate anything in earlier Civ games the AI has consistently made poor choices, or once a worker's finished improving an area, goes back and changes the old improvements just for the sake of giving the worker something new to do), so I hadn't noticed either that you could automate production for all cities at once, or that that had gone.
Civ IV was superior in both empire management and city management. You can play the game without ever entering a city if you want to. You can set all workers to "auto".
If you want to lose, sure. But it's not much argument that the older Civ games could be played as pure empire management games if the only way to win was to micromanage your cities. Unless of course you have a perfectly good explanation for why automated cities would never address unhappiness until they were in civil disorder, for example. Same argument once again as the 'flexible' tech tree that I think you yourself made - "Yes, you have the option to choose Polytheism rather than Bronze Working. By the way, if you do, you won't win".
As for whether Civ 4 did empire management better than Civ V? Sure, maybe it did - and as above I made the point that my comments were irrespective of which you believe to be the better game. All I can say is that the 'feel' of having an empire wasn't really there -your cities got the same benefits from sharing tradeable resources, say, as any random AI city with the same trade links to your cities. Other than building a monastery and missionaries, you couldn't do a lot to influence religion in your cities - and you could use the same missionaries on AI cities in exactly the same way (albeit usually less reliably). I used to love watching my cities connect each other culturally or, in older games, with the shared city radius borders ... but I think largely that was because it was the only sense the older games gave of playing an empire rather than a loose amalgamation of cities.
And it doesn't matter how much you automate the individual cities and their attendant workers if there isn't actually anything you can then do other than adjust a slider - you may be able to do away with all the micromanagement you want, but there simply wasn't any macromanagement to replace it with.
You can spread out your units in a tactical way, simular to the Civ V battle system, if you want to.
...and promptly lose to any stack the AI throws at them, since it doesn't play the same way.
And that's the key. You get to choose. You're the master, you're in command.
And if you choose wrong, you lose. That's a perfectly valid way for a game to play, but don't confuse options that are presented in order to make it more challenging to select the correct strategy, or to make the game more varied at 'casual' levels of play, with strategic diversity.
Truth be told, I've generally avoided the highest difficulty settings in Civ games - all the forced plays make them just too constraining to be interesting when I want to play a game that allows me to explore "what if gunpowder was invented in 900 BC?" type scenarios. Granted I also wasn't terribly good at the higher levels because of those very same constraints...
If you're tired and want a quick game, you can play it as casually as you want.
If you're tired and want a quick game, why would you choose Civilization over, say, an online version of Tigris & Euphrates, or whatever? I've never really felt a desire to play Civilization in any incarnation as a quick pick-up game, and if anything I'm more inclined to play a few rounds of Civ V that way than Civ IV.
That's not how Civ V works. Civ V forces you a certain playstyle. City specialization is gone and the slider is gone.
There's a whole menu on the city screen devoted to automating city specialisation if you don't want to specialise it yourself. There are even achievements unlocked for specialising a city sufficiently that it produces 100 gold, or 100 culture, or 100 science. You have exactly the same array of specialists and building types as in the past, forests and hills still produce hammers at the expense of food, and so on and so forth.
More happiness -> more cities -> more science/units/gold
Remove "More happiness" and this is a very apt description of the single winning strategy allowed by earlier Civ games. Certainly Civ V has problems, but for the most part you aren't addressing those (e.g. infinite assignment of population to work squares; you complain about losing the slider, but not about tying science to pop etc.), rather you seem to be looking at a "stripped-down" Civ engine and complaining about the very features it still has in common with the older games - strategic limitation, forced playstyles to secure victory, overemphasis on expansion and science over alternative strategies, bad automation, inability to play as a quick 'pick-up-and-play' game...
And there's absolutely no way to control it in the macromanaging style that you talk about. You can't raise the lux tax, you can't switch civics, you can't switch religions, you can't stack extra defenders in the city. There is not way to manage the empire! The empire manages itself.
You can't raise the luxury tax, but you can secure more luxuries. You can choose where to focus 'happiness production', rather than having to build happiness building X in every city. You can buy happiness buildings without interfering with production, rather than having to queue them, buy them, and wait a turn for their effects and to free up a production slot. You can't switch civics, but you can adopt policies that boost happiness and have permanent effects. You can't switch religions, but that gave a very situational way of controlling happiness in the past. You're complaining that the solutions the new version offers aren't the same as the ones the old game did, that's not the same as arguing the controls don't exist.
If you play without attention to securing the appropriate resources, without controlling your expansion appropriately, without making good calls about when to raze/puppet/annex cities, without focusing on social policies that will boost your happiness ... then happiness will clearly limit your play more than if you do any of these things. Testimony on this very forum asking for advice on controlling happiness clearly indicates as much.
And the explaination is simple: Shafer wanted to focus more on the war aspect. In Civ IV, the player was heavily penalized for waging war. People got unhappy and you often had to neglect research to be able to build enough units. Then the AI civs would hate you and stop trading techs with you. Capturing new cities hurt your economy.
Shafer thought this was unfun, so he decided to remove things like war weariness. And by getting science from population, there is no risk that you fall behind in the tech race, because you immediately get beakers from the cities you capture.
It's quite funny actually. Soren removed maintainance cost from buildings and increased the penalties for waging war, because a lot of people wanted to be able to play in a more peaceful way. Then came this punk, who thought that war is the only fun aspect of the game, and turn it to an oversimplified boardgame. He removed all the penalites for waging war, and instead added new penalties for building stuff (roads and city improvements). It's so obvious.
While no doubt wholly appriopriate for a rant thread, this is somewhat separate from the case I've been arguing. Warfare is present in all Civ games regardless of micro/macro balance.
I'd probably agree both that war is too easy in Civ V (at the very least there should be social policies that have as a downside a war weariness penalty, and at any rate people should become more unhappy if their army is losing), and that the constraints on it in Civ IV (as so many other things) were too limiting, as well as a poor simulation - in the real world, even in supposedly peaceful democracies, people rarely object en masse to wars their nation is winning, often very much the reverse. Dissatisfaction in the UK over the Falklands War, for instance, was much lower than the increased approval rate for the incumbent government as a result of the same conflict.
Quite often, conflicts actually act to promote social cohesion, sometimes even when a nation is the aggressor - again take Britain in the two World Wars (certainly our national story is that we entered the war in each case to protect allies elsewhere in Europe, but it's still the case that Britain declared war against Germany, not vice versa, when the island was at little prior risk; in WWII the German leadership had actually made efforts to keep Britain neutral in the conflict).
for every two citizens instead of the +25% bonus. It may not seem such a big deal, but it removes a lot of the strategy.
The game is what it is. It could of course have been a lot worse and I feel it will only get better.
