This is a complete digression in itself. I haven't noticed anyone on this thread suggesting that there are more bugs or instability on this initial release than on the first release of Civ4, or whatever else. But the bugginess of the game is not what the OP was talking about.....
I wasn't replying to the OP... I was replying the post I quoted, and replying to the comment that was made that suggested computer games in the past were more bug-free than modern games, which I couldn't help but comment on that one particular statement. PC games have always been a wide and unpredictable animal just due to the variety of environments that they can be found in.
Wich results in Civ5: bizarre diplomacy; broken tactical AI; a sub-literate Civilopedia (not much feedback from that one from the developers, I note, hey wassup bro?) and a hideously unusable user interface among 2,000 other things. Gah.
Civ 5's diplomacy is far less clear than 4, but 4 in itself was a departure in making diplomacy more transparent. I'm not saying Civ 5's diplomacy is perfect, but you can't really say that it's broken because you personally don't like how it was done, or dismiss that in most of the Civ series it was just as mysterious as now (except then you couldn't rely on City States, which have far simpler relations to track, to have your back)
Broken tactical AI is relative. There are some ways I think it can be tweaked, but there was a lot broken in previous AI's as well. Civ 4 didn't have a good tactical AI, it had a stack of doom that would try to include counters for every possible unit type that you'd throw at it. You try to counter this with seige weapons, but it counters this by just making bigger stacks. However, it was easily exploited and countered by tricking him into attacking your stack of doom instead. How many Civ 4 wars were won by declaring war against the Civ once you get into a defensive position, let him beat himself to death on your wall, and then clean up after you wipe out his main force?
How about the easily manipulated pathing AI in Civ 3 that you could trick into wasting dozens of turns by opening and closing pathing gates in areas that are supposed to be in the fog of war anyway?
All the harsh criticism of a poor tactical AI seems to be missing the fact that all the previous games had poor tactical AI's as well and mostly relied on cheating and cheesing to be competitive with the much smarter human players.
And a "sub-literate Civolopedia" and "hideously unusable interface"? I think that there were improvements made in both of these, but they aren't perfect and made a few missteps. I'm baffled as to why a few of the options from Civ4 didn't make it to Civ5 (and I don't mean espionage, corporations, or religions, those can stay out in the Civ4 incarnations), but to describe them in these words is obviously very subjective (and a pretty gross exaggeration).
The fact that simple things like hotseat and "workers don't destroy old improvements option" and the inability to save multi-player games were left out clearly says to me that the game was completely rushed. Why do you think that we didn't see any previews of ciV multi-player until the month before it was released? They were obviously working frantically on it up until the deadline.
It's ludicrous to think that something that is worked on up until the dead-line because it wasn't in a playable state, weeks before release, is going to be feature complete or bug free.
I'm the wrong person to comment about Hotseat. I always had the thought that Hotseat was a way to make a multiplayer game that frequently was painfully slow, even more painfully slow. ;-)
Workers not destroying old improvement options was not originally in Civ4 on release, if I recall correctly. My recollection (which is possibly faulty) was that was added in a later patch. Why that (and a real world clock in the upper right hand) were left out, I can't figure out either. However, I did notice that there is an option for workers not destroying old improvements in the .ini file, but I haven't tried it yet. Honestly, due to maintenance costs on roads, I don't automate workers much (and I do believe that is something that should have been addressed, but it's still a pretty minor qualm).
As far as I know, the game does have the ability to save multiplayer games. It's strangely missing from the menu, but Ctrl+S works, and also it auto-saves every single turn in multiplayer.
I'm not saying I don't have any qualms or complaints about Civ 5, or things that I wish they had done differently, but it just seems that many of these are blown out of proportion to epic degrees. Even if the game isn't perfect, it's far from the rubbish that some seem to be making it out to be.
