Not dumbed down, just missing an awful lot of stuff

[Ricci]

So you're telling me that vanilla Civ IV was not like a stripped down version of the complete Civ III? Vanilla Civ IV had everything in it that the complete Civ III did? Nothing was taken away or made easier or streamlined?

Right...

In a broad sense yes, that's what I am saying.
Remember when in the original civ you conquered, or were conquered, a capital city there was a chance that your empire split, representing a fallen government and a civil war coming along. Ok, no one would dare to say that civ was better than civII in any complete fashion, yet there was a nice feature which never saw a come back along any of the sequels (of course it should have been accordingly transformed and balanced.. etc etc). My point, through out all of the series there were always some particular issues or aspects here and there gone from sequel to sequel which you could live without because the game diagram was kept almost intact, only widthen and depthen as well.
When I got a hold of cIV I never ever again touched civIII, for me it had completely surpassed the former in this broad sense I mentioned. I really don't feel this is the case for a whole bunch of players with the new ciV.

 

[Auncien]

"An engineer knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Perhaps Civilization VI could be a painted block of wood with a happy face on it (paint will come in the first expansion, happy face could be DLC).

 

[Bridog7]

I have problems sometimes. It freezes. Also i like how religion is gone. but the one thing that gets to me the most is Montezuma doesn't smile when he's mad . I would give it 9.2/10 not 10/10 because monetezuma doesn't smile when he's mad

 

[Ricci]

...
It pretty much was not. Nothing in civ3 except needless micromanagement and "flavor" things were lost. A couple things were changed, maybe for the worse (siege units) but not removed or lost.
...

As a side note Earth, siege in civIII was a micromanagment cow, and of course AI would almost never make good use of it in a proper manner. Siege in cIV ended up being very criticized, and for a good reason. It started in vanilla with a good 25% chance to retreat giving it a substantial surviving chance in a battle, problem was they were too powerful (due to this and other issues), well I don't need to comment this further on to you, or many other posters here for the matter. I sincerely believe the nerf took a wrong approach at that precise moment (afterward they took the combat line promotions, etc, etc, etc); maybe more promotions to reduce collateral given to the bombarded units, or less collateral all together, or..