Not really, although culture and Space Race get monotonous after a while, and diplomatic invites conquest itself.
There's a definite inconsistency between the reply "Not really" and the following comment "it's just that only the 50% of victory conditions that involve conquering things are any fun"...
Besides, the builder aspects of Civ IV are immeasurably more fun to me.
To each his own. I find "building chains" an execrable idea (not that Civ V has done away with them altogether) and Civ IV's paint-by-numbers specialisation (stick all the buildings that produce X into city/province Y, add all the buildings that modify X by a percentage, and you're done) as tedious as - to bring the thread back on topic - Rome 2's not altogether dissimilar province specialisation.
Civ V doesn't do noticeably better than its predecessor in this regard in any practical sense, but purely for flavour I'd much rather build a market that acts to bolster trade revenue than one that just gives a flat bonus to tile output and that works in exactly the same way as the next building in the chain, or to equivalent buildings for science or culture. Civ IV's buildings and Wonders make no attempt to disguise the fact that they're just names the game applies to cookie-cutter effects at different 'levels', and for me that helps kill immersion.
Considering how Civ5's main reason of sucking was that it was entirely thought as a wargame and the "Civilization" part was mostly forgotten, inverting the "wargame accusation" toward Civ4 is mindboggling to say the least.
I wasn't making accusations of any kind, simply pointing out that based on his comments the previous poster was approaching the game as a wargame. In that regard yes, Civ IV is a better game - Civ V handles warfare rather poorly.
Even if it was true that Civ V was focused as a wargame at release, which is highly arguable, the direction the designers took with later patches and expansions to overcome the AI's weakness with 1UPT has been to increasingly penalise the player for going to war in the first place. You might as well argue that Civ V brings back ICS, because for a short time after release this was fully viable, when two years later the general consensus is that Civ V has gone too far towards promoting tall vs. wide empires.
Like Akka, I'm confused by Phil's implication that Civ IV is more of a wargame than Civ V is. I've also found the "tactical" elements of the map, that were designed to make it more like a wargame, to be the major problem of Civ V.
It's not "more of a wargame" - the Civ games have always fundamentally been wargames. Traditional wargames like Tactics use a stack system very much like those in the Civ series pre-Civ V; the change to 1UPT wasn't a move that made Civ V "more like a wargame". Civ IV is simply better at the war side of things relative to its peacetime games - as has already been said, Civ IV is a rather tedious experience when going for science or culture victory, and at the same time its AI is more capable at using its combat system. The Civ V AI uses 1UPT poorly, and at the same time the game both penalises going to war excessively (particularly with lost revenue in the early game) and offers more to do in peacetime.
But while Firaxis generally does make Civ games significantly better with expansions, I'm more skeptical that Creative Assembly will be able to do that. If they release a demo (preferably with a demo of the campaign as well), I'll give it a shot, but it seems like even more of a mess than Empire was when it came out.
They seem to have done a fair bit of work on the battle system, but I don't think Rome 2's campaign is fixable - I haven't tried the campaign pack DLC, but that may solve some issues. I played very briefly with patch 8.1, the one just before the current one (which I have yet to try), and my verdict then was that the game could be mildly entertaining for a short period, but nothing more. It doesn't have any immersive factor or much to keep you playing, and while gameplay has improved a lot more since release than I'd have thought likely it still suffers from core game decisions such as the army recruitment system, not to mention serious interface problems.
Given that TW games are mostly pretty much the same as one another, at this point R2 really doesn't offer any incentive to play it over Shogun 2.
EDIT: Just played a continuation of my Roman campaign with the new patch - may be best to start a new game to see how that plays with it. Battles seem quite a bit better in terms of duration, and aside from walled settlements the AI can mostly put up a fight. However, the old 'if your army is hidden the AI will go and sit in a corner and wait for the timer to run down' thing is either back or was never fixed, and despite the promised focus on siege AI this now seems to be worse: in an attack on Rome the Etruscans immediately abandoned their ladders and ran round to a side gate to attack with torches. When I moved to counterattack with my garrison, a bunch of AI units outside the combat just stood back dumbly and watched.
The campaign AI still has room for improvement - it made a few clever moves, but also launched that attack on Rome with a woeful force (allowing me to walk into Ariminium next turn), Carthage took Cosentia and then, instead of holding it or moving on Brundisium or Neapolis, went back to Syracuse the next turn so I could recapture it, and fleets still roam around the Mediterranean aimlessly. And despite my being in two wars and having several nearby factions who hate me, nobody else is declaring war. The AI also seems to play a very stereotyped strategy - it has settlements it wants to take and will never deviate from that (for instance, the Etruscans will always try taking the Italian Peninsula settlements in Rome - if beaten they'll just sit in Alalia and keep suiciding armies at you, instead of trying to move on Massalia, Karalis or any other territory). This is all on Very Hard, however I think the difficulty is the same as Legendary (the difference being that Legendary adds player handicaps).
