I agree with most of the critisism to Sulla and as a tester for Beyond the Swords I also wish they put some more time and effort into quality assuring civ5 before releasing it.
With that said I have to give credit to Jon Schafer for some seriously inovative ideas and most of the gameplay ideas I LOVe, the problem lies in the implementation.
I love science as its now tied to population, more realisitic and fun, Also the way gold actually is quite relevant is good.
The hapiness system as it is now is really good.
I dont like the way you can only field small armies without crippeling your economy in the modern times (they cost so much you cant afford say more than 10-20 with 6-8 cities) Why I dont like that is not because im just a warmonger, but because the new combat system begs for big fights over large lines of battle. I know this would mean the system specs is higher with mroe units on the battlefield at any given time, hopefully this will come in expansions when peoples hardware are better. And I hope and wish the combat AI will be better. And yes this is harder to do without the stack of doom but I dont feel its impossible to make a good AI for games like panser general, battle of wesnoth etc.
I totaly agree with sulla that the resources system is messed up, why would i want a a sheep when i can have a farm thats better? I dont really see how this passed quality testing.. yikes.
Also the multiplayer system is "streamlined" a jargon word by marketing that basically in this case = not used much time on at all and kept as simple as possible. I hope they will look at this in expansions. Either a better AI or better mp, preferably both, or this game will not have a longitivity at all.
I wish I had time to write more but as a busy law student my contributions to civ5 will be much less then what it was for civ4.