Here's a feedback from the creator of CivV about features and changes in V. Notice how he adreses a lot of isues stated in this very thread:
Jon Shafer
Below, Ill be sharing the design lessons I learned during and after Civ 5′s development
Interface
My one disappointment with the UI was the general lack of power features tailored for hardcore fans. Ultimately, we didnt end up with as many information overlays, screens or modes as I would have liked. One of my early goals was to have an alternate expert switch that you could flip, adding a significant quantity of detailed information to the screens and mouseovers. User-created mods have added this feature to both Civ 4 and Civ 5, but integrating it into the full games is obviously preferable.
Diplomacy
My original goal was for the AI leaders to act human. But humans are ambiguous, moody and sometimes just plain crazy. This can be interesting when youre dealing with actual, real humans, but I learned the important lesson that when youre simulating one with a computer theres no way to make this fun. Any attempt to do so just turns into random, unproductive noise.
I came to realize that while diplomacy is a unique challenge, its ultimately still just a gameplay system just like any other. Regardless of whether your enjoyment is derived from roleplaying or simply a games core mechanics, if your opponents goals and behavior arent clear then youll have absolutely no idea whats going on or what to do.
In Civ 5, you might have been lifelong allies with a leader, but once you enter the late-game he has no qualms backstabbing you in order to win. With this being the case, whats the point of investing in relationships at all?
By no means should AI leaders be completely predictable. However, they do need a clear rhyme and reason behind their actions. The computer opponents in Civ 5 were completely enslaved to their gameplay situation, and as a result they appeared random and very little of their personalities shone through.
They were all crazy, and in the exact same way. In the months after the game was released I modified their behavior to be more predictable, but it was too late to completely change course. The biggest takeaway from this is that the only thing which matters in a game is the experience inside the players head. It doesnt matter what your intentions are or whats going on under the hood if the end result just isnt fun.
AI
The AI in the base version of Civ 5 was
not as strong as it could be, shall we say.
Working on this system was another experience that taught me a great deal about design and development. I wrote the AI code that handled the computer opponents high-level strategic goals, economy and diplomacy.
Like most engineers, I really enjoy architecting elegant and flexible structures. Civ 5′s AI was a beautiful mesh of interwoven systems, and even included the ability to record virtually everything to a massive log file. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of building caused me to fall in love with the design rather than its actual impact. I was very proud of my code. But it really wasnt very good.
Another problem with my AI was the randomness, which is something Ive already talked about at length. The computer opponents were weighted towards a variety of possibilities, with a healthy serving of RNG (random number generator) on the side. This meant they floated from one strategy to another without any real cohesion behind those decisions. This approach is nice in theory, but if you want a strong AI there are times when you need to force it to behave in very specific manner.
Resources
One of the big changes I made to Civ 5 on the economic front was the shift from resources being boolean (where you either have them or you dont) to quantified, where you can have zero of a single resource type, or two of it, or maybe eighteen. I still feel that making them quantified was a solid design decision, but for a variety of reasons the execution wasnt everything I wanted it to be.
In Civ 5, players ended up with easy access to a bit of every resource and there was almost no reason to trade. In the real world, swapping goods is worthwhile because of the effects of supply and demand. In Civ 5 there was almost no demand since you could be virtually self-sufficient.
My removal of the health system in Civ 5 also had repercussions elsewhere. This greatly reduced the value of non-strategic resources (like wheat), and in retrospect its clear that I didnt manage to fill that void with something else.
Another issue with the Civ 5 resources system was that the difference between having 2 and 5 Swordsmen isnt really a big deal when compared with the possibility of not havingany Swordsmen. If I were able to go back and change the design I probably would have resources show up in more limited quantities and make the units and buildings they unlock much more unique and powerful.
Economics
My intention with the global happiness mechanic was to make it possible for smaller empires to compete with much larger ones. The problem was that a global metric butts heads with the natural cadence of the entire genre. I mean, the second X in 4X stands for expansion for crying out loud! I lost sight of this as I pursued other objectives.
The problem was that happiness strongly encouraged you to stay small and the penalties for not obliging with this demand were quite harsh. It was virtually impossible to build the large, sprawling empires which had always been a feature in the series and served as the entire point playing for many people. I still believe that there are ways to make smaller empires viable, but it shouldnt come at the expense of those who enjoy expanding. Penalties should be challenges to overcome, not an insurmountable wall to be frustrated by.
My removal of the research/commerce/culture sliders also came with positives and negatives. Ive always found fiddling with sliders in strategy games to be boring busywork, and in that sense I dont miss them. But the sliders also had a hidden value that I didnt realize until later they gave players the ability to shift directions at any time. Unfortunately, once the sliders were gone players were basically permanently locked into their past economic choices. There was no way to sacrifice research in order to upgrade your army, for example. Rewarding long-term planning is certainly a worthy endeavor, but you still need to provide tools to allow players to change course when necessary.
Policies
I like both the Policies system featured in Civ 5 and the Civics system from Civ 4, which are simply two different takes on the same concept: the ability to shape the character of your empire. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses, but I now find the design of Civics more appealing, because of that capacity to make sudden and dramatic shifts.
Combat
By far the most significant change I made with Civ 5 was to way in which wars were fought. Instead of large stacks of units crashing into one another as had always been the case in the previous Civ games, there was now 1UPT (one unit per tile). This forced players to spread out their armies across the landscape, instead of piling everything into a single tile.
This was a model very much inspired by the old wargame Panzer General. On the whole, I would say that the combat mechanics are indeed better in Civ 5 than in any other entry in the series. But as is the theme of this article, theres a downside to consider as well.
One of the biggest challenges unearthed by 1UPT was writing a competent combat AI. I wasnt the one who developed this particular AI subsystem, and the member of the team who was tasked with this did a great job of making lemonade out of the design lemons Id given him. Needless to say, programming an AI which can effectively maneuver dozens of units around in extremely tactically-confined spaces is incredibly difficult.
Speaking of scale, another significant issue with 1UPT was that the maps wasnt really suited for it. The joy of Panzer General was pulling off clever maneuvers and secretly encircling your helpless enemies. Unfortunately, in Civ 5 nasty bottlenecks arent uncommon and this tempers much of the natural value added by 1UPT. Ultimately, there just wasnt enough room to do the fun part.
Speculation aside, the reality was that the congestion caused by 1UPT also impacted other parts of the game. In every prior Civ title it was no problem to have ten, fifty or even a thousand units under your control. Sure, larger numbers meant more to manage, but hotkeys and UI conveniences could alleviate much of the problem. But in Civ 5, every unit needed its own tile, and that meant the map filled up pretty quickly.
To address this, I slowed the rate of production, which in turn led to more waiting around for buckets to fill up. For pacing reasons, in the early game I might have wanted players to be training new units every 4 turns. But this was impossible, because the map would have then become covered in Warriors by the end of the classical era. And once the map fills up too much, even warfare stops being fun.
So is there a way to make 1UPT really work in a Civ game? Perhaps. The key is the map. Is there enough of room to stash units freely and slide them around each other? If so, then yes, you can do it. For this to be possible, Id think you would have to increase the maximum map size by at least four times. Youd probably also want to alter the map generation logic to make bottlenecks larger and less common.
