I figured I'd throw in a few of my thoughts relative to this.
Great aspects
I pretty much agree with all of these.
Social policies
the upgrades don't have any downsides whatsoever thus never forcing a player to make real choices. Since whatever you do, it will be good. Or whatever you do will be a bit better than good. But never will it be a bad choice, or never will it be a choice truly defining your civ. This concludes in many civilizations feeling and being the same with only their unique abilities to differentiate them as every civilization will end up with the same social policies with only a few minor choices.
I disagree. The choices you are making are which ones to adopt. Granted, I haven't played enough to really see how this works out in general, but it seems to me that you are not going to be able to adopt everything. So, you have to make choices about which bonuses are going to be best for you, and by managing to fill out 5 whole branches you're rewarded with the opportunity to win the game for your efforts. There doesn't need to be some kind of penaly to go with the bonuses... in fact I think the game is built around the need to attain these bonuses as you advance further in the game.
In a sense, your choices with these trees does add more uniqueness to your civ, as it could evolve to be quite different than the choices made by other civs.
Where is the distance to capital punishment for instance? The policies don't effect the cost of placement of your cities at all. Even the civics in Civ 4 had more dept.
I never cared for the distance from capital penalty myself. Instead of there being costs associated with where your cities are, there are costs associated with how many cities you have (unhappiness).
However I will say I do miss the Civics system a bit. I think that system was really well-done and I miss having to make specific choices about how my civ's government is run. I'm hoping they expand the social policies system in future expansions to bring back some of those aspects.
No more cultural powers
Now it [culture] just seems to be another resource like gold to just simply buy things with the only downside that you cant buy everything at once. (which isn't a real problem since you can't buy anything negative or bad)
I kind of like this. I was never at all interested in cultural output (beyond what is useful for border expansion) or victories in Civ 4, but it seems something more worth grabbing in Civ 5 to me. Maybe it's just a playstyle thing... but I find the system easier to understand and make use of now.
City states vs religion
City states are more boring than religion. There is no logical reason why they removed religion and introduced city states.
I think there's no logical reason to assume one is meant as a replacement for the other... but anyway...
The execution of city-states at this point isn't flawless.
The same should be said about the religions in Civ 4...
Not only is there no real difference between the various city states aside from the city name. They can be 'bought' pretty easily, helping you win the game without ever having to deal with other civs. The assignments/missions they present to you are not very spectacular and usually not worth your time.
There are differences between the 3 types for sure, and with only 2 per civ that means you'll have to compete with other civs to get all of the benefits. The missions often give big boosts in influence, saving you lots of gold. Some of the missions I've been getting are pretty interesting and varied, such as acquiring a certain resource, connecting with a road, or getting a certain type of great person.
As far as religions go... while I mourn the loss of that aspect of the game, I don't think they were implemented particularly well in Civ 4. If you were unlucky, you could easily get screwed out of founding any religions, which could really hinder you in the early game. If you were lucky enough to found more than one, it could really give you a lot of benefits as well. The whole system felt kind of convoluted and tedious to me. Maybe they'll reintroduce this feature in a streamlined way in future expansions.
I can not seem to find out how long it will take for a tile improvement to finish when workers are already constructing it.
If you select the worker unit, it tells you what it's working on on the card at the bottom left, and how much progress its made/how many turns left. In the simplified view, an icon for the improvement is displayed, but greyed out, and a progress bar appears beside it as well.
There is no way knowing what techs the opponent has aside from the units and the wonders etc. not the biggest problem but it was nicer to know how well you were doing tech-wise without having to study the enemy closely.
I'm sure espionage is a feature they'll be adding in a future expansion.
There is really no way of knowing what the opponent is 'thinking', since you - cant see the pros and cons anymore they feel towards you. Plus you cant ask them how they feel about other civs?
While useful, having a list of numbers to quantify another civ's regard toward you always seemed a little too hackish to me. Can you so easily quantify how other people feel about you in real life? No, typically you have to interact with them to get an idea. Though, I do think it would be good if there were some more overt indicators of how other civs felt about you, and I agree on the lack of being able to see how they feel about others.
No techno-trading
I don't really get why this was removed? It made diplomacy more interesting since you had something to bargain with. At least they should have made techno-trading optional. Techno-brokering was a bad thing in Civ 4, but it would've been fun to see this as an option at least.
This confuses me... you admit it was a bad thing but you don't get why it was removed? May I suggest it was removed because... it was a bad thing? I think this feature gave too much of an advantage to teams or allied civs, as they could divide and conquer too easily. It was also a bit unfair to people who weren't in the know about how this all went down. Many players don't realize how bad it is to trade a tech to a civ on their turn, or that if you sell a tech to one civ, you better sell it to them all. I like the research project feature in this game, because it requires an outlay of resources and takes time, but still lets you get the benefit of a free tech.
There seem to be numerous graphic glitches in the game. Didn't they properly beta test this??
If the metric for a "proper" beta test of a PC game is the absence of any bugs, then I submit no PC game is ever "properly" beta tested.
The combat AI
The AI will never be able to be as good as a human of course, but this really shows now when it comes to tactical battles they don't understand the concept of choke points and don't calculate losses as you can easily use units as bait to lure the AI out.
I don't have a lot of experience with this so I can't really comment... but I'm sure (hope) this will improve over time
Civ wide happiness and no more health
Some may like it but I don't think its a good thing. It's adding to the dumbing down and the lessening of variables in the game. It really doesn't matter anymore where you place yours city aside from the potential growth and resources aspect. There are no more 'bad' factors which can make a city fail. With the civ wide happiness it doesn't really matter if a few cities are placed in crappy spots, you won't get punished for it any longer, making the game easier to manage. The same goes for removing health, go place your city in rough terrain, go built factory's, it doesn't matter anymore.. thus dumbing it down.
I think this is a mixed blessing... I always found managing individual city happiness to be tedious and not very fulfilling. It would absorb a lot of time going through each city from time to time to find the optimal configuration of workers to maximise happiness etc. With this more centralized happiness model, its much easier to handle and doesn't give you 20 different variables that you have to manage to keep things on track. I guess some people appreciate more complexity, and I didn't mind it myself, but I find the new system more enjoyable.
The removal of health/pollution is probably related to some of the other changes in the game. They probably couldn't figure out a way (in a reasonable amount of time) to implement this system given the other gameplay changes in a way that made it relevant without making it overly tedious or annoying. Maybe we'll see an implementation of this in future expansions.
Conclusion for now
Civ 5 is a stripped game. Which didn't have to be a bad thing. As Civ 4 was a stripped game compared to Civ 3 + exp. But the problem is the lack of depth and variables that made civ 4 fun are missing in civ 5. There is a great basis but it lacks the details and some of the fun-factor. In my views Civ 4 minus the stack of doom minus espionage + this combat system + tweaked city states + civ 5 graphics would've made a better Civ 5 than it now is. Hopefully the modding community will repair this hurt game.
I think it would be unreasonable to expect this game to be as rich and varied at release as Civ 4 is... especially considering how many big changes were introduced. To be honest, in most of the cases where some depth or feature was removed, I don't find myself missing it, and in some cases realize I like the updated version better. I think we have a lot of great things to look forward to as the devs start to see how people play the game in light of the changes and see where improvements can be made, and add new features. What we have here is a really great platform for turning this into the best Civ game in the series. I'm eager to see what the devs are planning for future expansions.