Um...
The Civilisation series is a Micromanagement series...
So you're basically holding back rage at thousands of the series fan's who are complaining about a lack of micromanagement because you see no reason why the whole concept of the game should be maintained for the sake of the fans...
And you wonder why you have to say it a thousand times?
Hmmm, I'm sensing a correlation between dumbing down and... no, wait, this could be construed as 'personalising'...
(Note that I'm using the term "interface" in the following argument in its broadest sense: what the player does to get the game to do what they want it to do. Not more specific definitions like "graphical interface" or anything like that. Just for the sake of clarity.)
No game worth it's salt exists for the sake of its interface. Especially not turn-based games. You can make a case with something like Starcraft vs. Starcraft II, since player actions are their own resource, and therefore making each action do less changes the way the game plays out. But in a game where you have all the time in the world to execute your actions (in SP anyways), that doesn't stack up.
I see you intend to speak for all the fans of the series, which IMO is a bit pretentious since obviously plenty of them don't agree with you. You can come back with "well
true civ fans like it this way," but you don't own the definition of a true civ fan. I've loved the series since II (although I thought III was a letdown), and I'm happy that the game is less about tactics and more about strategy. It removes some of the tedium and some of the "gameyness." The way I see it, it's just making the player click a bunch of extra buttons every turn. There's no real skill to it, there's no real intelligence behind it, it's just a set of extra things that in my opinion are neither engaging nor fun. To me, it has nothing to do with dumbing it down if there's any such thing to be had, it's found in thins like the tech tree being grossly simplified, not in the (IMO boring) parts of the game being streamlined. At the same time, I understand that some people disagree. I don't think that makes their opinions invalid on principle, and I don't think holding a view one way or the other really says anything about a person along the lines of what you hinted at and only didn't say for fear of being flagged by a mod.
As for changes to what you see as the core of the game, sometimes those changes are good things. They can (but don't always manage to) add extra levels of depth/entertainment/immersion to the gameplay. I'm not going to get into particulars here, but I think some of the major changes were good for the game and the franchise and the fanbase in general, and some were less than good or downright bad. But I don't think "well, we've always done it this way, so we better keep doing it this way" is a good way of designing, either. Even with all the changes over the games, there are
still people who say that the games aren't worth buying because there hasn't been enough substantive change to justify the sticker price. (I find that hard to believe, but nevertheless, some people feel that way.) You could argue that what you say is the core of the gameplay, the fact that there's micromanagement, shouldn't change, but I would argue that 1) that's not the core of the gameplay and 2) even if it were... well, see paragraph 2.
) and impose an increasing penalty for the extra units. Weaken seige against infantry/melee and let fly.
It does strike me as odd in Civ that if I gift a unit to a CS that unit takes X number of turns to arrive whereas if I trade, say, cotton for gems with a civ that's 25 tiles away we have our goodies on that same turn.
