Man Phil, one certainly can't blame you for not putting a lot of time into your posts. But your misunderstanding, which stretches through your entire post, seems to be that you believed I was claiming that Civ 4 doesn't include unrealistic elements or necessary abstractions. The only point you mention which a Civ 4 feature can't be abstracted form history is the founding of cities before agriculture. But since agriculture is usually one of the first techs to be researched I don't consider that very relevant. If all Civs started by default with the tech agriculture it would still be the same game we are playing.
I've already pointed out that many of these are far from "necessary abstractions", but my key point is that there is no qualitative difference between Civ IV and Civ V in this regard. You're allowing things in one system to represent 'abstractions' that you consider senseless in the other (I've already given examples of city states vs. civs being founded in 4,000 BC, and religious bonuses in one game abstractions but the same bonuses in the other magical).
Your point below about governments, for example, does nothing to demonstrate why, because changes in government have sometimes been preceded by revolution, it is less of an abstraction and more of an absurdity to present a scenario in which this doesn't happen (which also has historical precedent).
Regarding the rest of your points... Technological research: based on history (the abstraction being that "you" (the state) chooses what to research)
True in both games. One of the few points where Civ IV does score over Civ V in terms of "realism" is that its tech tree is a better representation of actual technological progression and you don't have the bizarre cases where you can build a nuclear submarine without having researched Nuclear Fission as you can in Civ V. But the "core concept" is no more or less absurd in either game.
Taxation: Having a state budget is a realistic feature!
Yes, and I've noted that it's a major lapse in Civ V that it has no taxation system. But having a state budget long before you develop currency is a criticism you levelled at Civ V as being historically unprecedented, and yet exactly the same is true of Civ IV (and yes, you can buy things with gold before having Currency, as long as you have the Pyramids and Universal Suffrage).
I also find it disappointing that we usually put smaller emphasis on research in reality than it's done in the game, but the different values are obviously an abstraction (we can hardly expect the game to correspond with the differing percentages through history and across the world).
That's true, but it's an abstraction that distorts the reality of historical progression - economic incentives have driven historical civilisations far more than technological advancement.
About gold before currency, you are right, it's there visually, but at least we can't do anything with it, therefore it could be imagined as some other thing of worth, used for trade, like precious stones, pearls etc
And why can't you imagine the same of the "visual" gold in Civ V? You can buy things with it, but before the development of Currency why can't you just think of that in terms of the equivalent gold value of pigs, cattle or other items of barter? This is where you're falling down - in applying this double standard to the two games. I point out the same absurdity in one game you've criticised in the other, and suddenly it's an abstract representation of more varied trade goods rather than literal currency, while still apparently being literal currency in the other game.
Maintenance on the other hand makes perfect sense; of course expansion leads to profit eventually, but not before having to spend costs on logistics, buildings, etc.
But not before the development of a currency-based economy, because you don't have a state budget at that point...
Government: We have had revolutions throughout history, and very many of them were accompanied with civil wars or periods of anarchy.
As I've pointed out. We've also had both many periods of more gradual change better-represented by Civ V's approach, and periods of anarchy and civil war that result in no change of government at all but simply change the ruling dynasty or indeed are unsuccessful (and Civ IV dispensed with the civil war mechanic, except as an occasional random event).
Happiness: It's rather keen to say that civil unrest was usually caused by quarrels among politicians, though of course this was one reason. The real reasons are obviously not as monocausal, and have to be abstracted in a game like Civ. But in general, it is not far fetched that the growth of cities, which leads to higher population density, smaller availability of services and goods, development of slums etc, leads to unhappiness
Once again this is a very modern perspective - historical cities took a long time to reach population densities where these features emerged, and I'm aware of few if any real-world cases where "It's too crowded!" was a major source of unrest, let alone the major source as in Civ games. The largest historical cities in the world at various points, such as Angkor, Edo and London, do not appear to have suffered civil disorder as a result of overcrowding. Arguably, with the exceptions of very few, very large megacities like Mumbai, it doesn't even happen in the modern world.
Though whether you consider it realistic or not, this mechanic is common to both Civ IV and Civ V so doesn't make either any more or less absurd than the other.
in contrast to Civ 5's absurd unhappiness triggers, such as being victorious in war or building another city.
There is no unhappiness trigger for "being victorious in war". Civ V happiness is an aggregate of unhappiness in your empire - if you capture a city in Civ V, it is unhappy. This is also true if you capture a city in Civ IV. If you imagine Civ IV's local unhappiness as being aggregated into a single figure, you would have increased unhappiness from capturing the city there as well, since your base happiness of native cities would remain the same but you'd have inherited an additional, unhappy conquered populace.
I've already agreed that using happiness as the expansion-control mechanic results in the rather absurd situation that increased numbers of cities result in increased unhappiness.
Religion: You admit yourself the sensible connection between diplomacy and religion in Civ 4 as well as the magical bonuses in Civ 5, and still come to the conclusion that Civ 5's system is more plausible?
Read my commentary again. For a start I previously disputed the overriding importance of religion on diplomacy depicted in Civ IV, however what I was pointing out here is that the lack of realism comes from the fact that religion in Civ IV is decoupled from the rest of your civilisation's development. You get a few "magical bonuses" from it, but the concept that religion's major importance in the development of civilisation is its influence on diplomatic relations is completely off.
As for the "magical bonuses" in Civ V, my point was about the system (i.e. the core concept) rather than the specific beliefs. Is the Civ IV civics system a complete absurdity because the effect of Universal Suffrage makes no sense? Civ V has some badly-chosen beliefs, but it has others that tie in to the role of religion historically better than those in Civ IV - religion can promote cultural development, calling on religious fervour can be used to recruit soldiers, and a greater output of faith is more likely to promote the spread of your religion through missionaries, temple-building and passive cultural exchange (represented as religious pressure).
Culture: Culture generally makes a lot of sense in Civ 4, in that the magnificence of a city emanates into the surrounding land, causing its influence to grow. Where it becomes unrealistic is in determinging political borders among rivaling nations up to city flipping, something I have always criticized, by the way.
Except that, as a game mechanic, this is
all culture does in Civ IV. Generating culture has no other function in the game than to seize land. However magnificent the culture, and however far its influence extends, it is not going to cause a city to exert physical control of even neutral lands and the resources those areas contain.
That said, in itself the system follows a sensible logic, i.e. in showing that the people living in a tile are culturally heterogeneous, depending on which nations have influence over the tile. But I'll give you credit here that while I like this display of different peoples' cultures, actual borders were usually determined differently.
It's actually my favourite game mechanic from Civ IV, but it's also one I've described before as being possibly the most gleefully unrealistic element of the game.
Why thanks a lot for this well written insult! If you draw such a thick line between teachers and scientists, I could tell you about how I used to be a "real" historian after completing my master in history as my first university degree and working in my city's museum for ethnology for a year, before I decided to study again to become a teacher instead.
It's not aimed as an insult at either you or the profession - we criticise science teaching for the curricula and its tendency to teach established concepts by rote while ignoring the basic elements of scientific reasoning or explanations of the evidence for particular scientific theories being taught. In many countries, teachers are not even required to have degrees in a relevant subject - this is why I made a comparison with journalists. A teacher's role is communication of concepts to an audience, and they needn't be in a field in which the teacher has personal expertise. I'm aware that in the UK at least history teaching has regularly been criticised by historians by focusing on increasingly narrow, populist historical periods (such as WWII and Rome) and ignoring or downplaying major areas of the country's history (such as the English Civil War).
Challenging? Definitely. You will need much longer beat the game on emperor (immortal/diety) in Civ 4 than in Civ 5.
As well as the genuinely higher difficulty threshold in Civ IV (although Civ V is by no means "too easy". Even when you're experienced with both it and previous Civ games it will always present a challenge on Immortal unless you deliberately game the system or play a domination game, and in any event Civ games have always been more about the experience than about winning), Civ V has a tendency to
feel a lot easier.
This is I think largely an artefact of the greater number of options in Civ IV; it's not a particularly hard game to get a handle on once you've learned the basics, and most of the options provide obvious best solutions, but a game that looks more complex always feels more rewarding to beat.
Also, for those who grew up with the original Civ games, winning the game was about getting the highest score on the arcade-type score table. This table is now sadly mostly meaningless - I won a recent game without playing for a high score, and still ended up as rank 2, a rank I don't think I ever achieved in Civ I.
