Decent, but I completely disagree that 1upt caused it all. To me civ5 is awesome despite its flaws b/c of 1upt and hex-map. I don't see how global happiness was a forced decision b/c of 1upt. I don't see how imbalanced civs was a forced decision b/c of 1upt. Etc. Vastly overstated point! Can anyone disprove me? How did 1upt force those decisions?!
You are perfectly right, that 1UPT alone didn't cause it all.
Of course, despite 1UPT there could be better diplomacy, better social engineering system than Social Policies, local hapiness, health and so on. Even 1UPT could be implemented better, so the game overall would offer much more rich and satisfying gaming experience.
However, as Sulla explained in his article, 1UPT is quite an important one among other problems and causes a lot of dire consequences: with overcrowding and traffic jams at the first place.
Look then, how design team tried to counter them:
- too many units? Then let's reduce production rates (makes game dull), and add active defence to cities so they will need less defenders to repel attack (encourages ICS)
- no space for maneuvres? Let's make distants between cities larger. Oh, holy crap, that will strengthens cities too much (increased from 21 to 37 number of tiles within city radius is hard to grasp for human player and increases production rates>> overcrowding) so we have to nerf them again with low tile yields (makes city placement meaningless, dull gameplay)
- we have nerfed big cities, and player is falling asleep during early gameplay? then lets strengthen small cities!(ICS...)
- units are too valuable - they costed a lot of production while being too vulnerable to its counter within paper-rock-scissor mechanic with no possibility of combined arms defence(1UPT)? Then lets strengthen them with insta-heal and more hitpoints, making them virtually indestructible in hands of skilled player (four horsemen of Apocalypse to conquer the world, imbalanced kill ratios >> no challenge, dull gameplay)
Moreover, some inherent qualities of 1UPT inclines me to think that it is not valid mechanic for Civ-styled (I mean empire building) game. Biggest problem is tremendous imbalance between combat and building parts of the game: player doesnt longer need strong economy to win over opponent. What is the meaning of your entire production base, if there are only 6 units on the front line combating? Limited unit numbers, increased dependency on combat outcomes and low production rates just strengthens the trend. Then goes subsequently spacing and scale (mentioned shortly above) and a lot of other details that are widely described in other threads.
There is no coincidence that two different wargame genres evolved: one tactical and second more focused on strategy. Taken into account acceptable level of abstraction ("accessibility", understood as simplicity of rules that disallow putting together too much), there is not too much common points between those two that can stand for coherent and appealing entirety.
Problem is that devs possibly still could find better (though not ideal) solutions to these problems, e.g. maintenance of units in food, higher maintenance in gold, different maintenance for various unit types - higher for later units. Regrettably, they went straight into braindead tactics of cheap and easy tricks (nerf, nerf, nef, penalty). I can see where they took their ideas from: gameplay>>reality, "streamlining" and "accessibility". That perfectly questions their design skills and proves what Sulla said: they simply dont understand how their game works, not only Civ 5, but whole Civ 1-4 series alltogehter as well.