Been playing Civ 4 BTS on and off for a few years, and I was waiting for a "complete edition" of Civ 5 before buying, but last Friday I couldn't resist when I saw the flash sale on steam (got all DLCs + BNW for 30$).
So here's my (biased) 2 cents. Overall I like Civ 5 better, in no particular order:
- Better graphics, yet running fine on my 5 years old computer
- Less micromanagement (less cities, less workers), but what you micromanage is still very important (be careful with roads)
- No need to build transports to move your units oversea
- Hexagonal tiles
- Better interface, I really like the event list where you can click on each event one by one to miss nothing
- Trade routes, a good example of an interesting mechanism that doesn't require too much micromanagement
- Strategic resources limiting the number of units you can build
I'm not sure about 1 unit per tile. It's a good idea and it works well early game, but late game when you have a lot of units with different range, and you have to move on hills or in forests, it's a big mess.
Also some people think that Civ 4 has deeper strategy, but I think that it is more about carefully planning everything, micromanaging workers and cities, and knowing every mechanism by heart (for example overflow). In Civ 5 you still have to think, but it's just less "hardcore", and for me it's less "painful" to play (never liked having to micromanage 30 cities and 30 workers late game).
Anyway, I don't think I could go back to Civ 4 and enjoy it as much as Civ 5 now. The game just looks better, requires less micromanagement (yet there's still a lot of important decisions to make), and overall I'm having more fun. But then it's all new and fresh to me so I'm biased.
