Two threads (Downside of 1upt and Simplification) have both discussed how Civ5 is being "dumbed down for the masses", or "has complexity / micromanagement removed". I think that's not true at all. I will argue just from the point of raw amount of compexity or micromanagement, and not about if it's actually a good or bad thing. To get my point across, pretend we started a new game of Civ5.
Where do we build our second / third city? Some newer players would suggest to "have as little overlap as possible while remaining close". Well, that would involve settling 7 tiles away as cities each grow out 3 tiles. But there's a big problem to this. The culture gap between cities is now massive, and takes a LOT longer to grow than Civ4. Due to several reasons, including barbarians, an early war, maintenance, or just taking advantage of good resources, it could be a costly mistake to build this far away. So we build closer, causing overlap. In fact, most of the time I think the optimal distance will cause at least 6 tiles overlapped! In the most extreme case, there are 18 overlapping tiles! In fact, 4 individual cities can share the exact same tile! Any advanced Civ player knows about the micromanagement of switching tiles between cities to optimize city growth, and to give production, among other things. Having a good resource overlapped between two cities is a very big advantage and lends a lot of flexibility. This feature just went into overdrive in Civ5, and will be a lot of micromanagement and depth. I think city placement just became harder, and has maybe too much micromanagement to it.
It's no lie that combat just became much more complex. This is a point for the "downside of iupt" thread. The raw number of decisions has increased drastically. I think we can agree that more micromanagement has been added in war. Even during peace, the placement of troops just in case of a sudden war is a lot more complex.
The currencies in Civ5 add a lot more interesting decisions. In Civ4, all that happened was all remaining gold was converted to science, and culture wasn't so much a currency as just something that "happened over time". Now, we have to worry about how we spend our gold, valuing tiles against each other. We also can spend our gold for other gifts from city states, and hurrying production as a staple ability. Same with culture, as we choose between different policies. These are complex systems that don't have easy answers.
The policies system has more decisions than religion, civics and espionage combined. In Civ4, face it, most civics were just better than others. As a result civics were really just a bonus from researching. The most complex they got was after building a specific wonder and even then the choices were more or less obvious depending on your playstyle. Religion is a system with lots of cogs and gears, but the choices the player has to make at the end of the turn are rather simple: Choosing a religion is easy, and then spreading the religion also takes no thought. The same could be said about espionage, which is a system so meaningless that I could find myself ignoring it and it not influencing anything. The best feature about espionage was using the spy for LOS, which I could do even with no espionage points. On the other hand, policies are something which a lot of thought must go into. It will take resources away from your empire to specifically grab culture to buy policies, and the player will be forced to choose between which policies to buy.
There are loads of other features which I haven't touched upon, like city states, the improvement of sea warfare, leader uniqueness, and more. So I ask again, how is Civ4 more complex / more decision making / more micromanagement?
Where do we build our second / third city? Some newer players would suggest to "have as little overlap as possible while remaining close". Well, that would involve settling 7 tiles away as cities each grow out 3 tiles. But there's a big problem to this. The culture gap between cities is now massive, and takes a LOT longer to grow than Civ4. Due to several reasons, including barbarians, an early war, maintenance, or just taking advantage of good resources, it could be a costly mistake to build this far away. So we build closer, causing overlap. In fact, most of the time I think the optimal distance will cause at least 6 tiles overlapped! In the most extreme case, there are 18 overlapping tiles! In fact, 4 individual cities can share the exact same tile! Any advanced Civ player knows about the micromanagement of switching tiles between cities to optimize city growth, and to give production, among other things. Having a good resource overlapped between two cities is a very big advantage and lends a lot of flexibility. This feature just went into overdrive in Civ5, and will be a lot of micromanagement and depth. I think city placement just became harder, and has maybe too much micromanagement to it.
It's no lie that combat just became much more complex. This is a point for the "downside of iupt" thread. The raw number of decisions has increased drastically. I think we can agree that more micromanagement has been added in war. Even during peace, the placement of troops just in case of a sudden war is a lot more complex.
The currencies in Civ5 add a lot more interesting decisions. In Civ4, all that happened was all remaining gold was converted to science, and culture wasn't so much a currency as just something that "happened over time". Now, we have to worry about how we spend our gold, valuing tiles against each other. We also can spend our gold for other gifts from city states, and hurrying production as a staple ability. Same with culture, as we choose between different policies. These are complex systems that don't have easy answers.
The policies system has more decisions than religion, civics and espionage combined. In Civ4, face it, most civics were just better than others. As a result civics were really just a bonus from researching. The most complex they got was after building a specific wonder and even then the choices were more or less obvious depending on your playstyle. Religion is a system with lots of cogs and gears, but the choices the player has to make at the end of the turn are rather simple: Choosing a religion is easy, and then spreading the religion also takes no thought. The same could be said about espionage, which is a system so meaningless that I could find myself ignoring it and it not influencing anything. The best feature about espionage was using the spy for LOS, which I could do even with no espionage points. On the other hand, policies are something which a lot of thought must go into. It will take resources away from your empire to specifically grab culture to buy policies, and the player will be forced to choose between which policies to buy.
There are loads of other features which I haven't touched upon, like city states, the improvement of sea warfare, leader uniqueness, and more. So I ask again, how is Civ4 more complex / more decision making / more micromanagement?