Yes, the corruption is appalling. I understand that the developers took steps to make it hell for a player to attain/manage, say, 100+ cities, and combat infinite city-sprawl, but the fact that:
no government fully eliminates corruption, and democracy only has a marginal impact;
the 'communal' attribute doesn't do what it says it does a la Civ I;
and I have no competitors on a fairly sized continent, yet with two capitols on opposite shores most cities (at size 12 or more) are producing only 1 gold and 1 shield per turn
...is ridiculous.
There are also the 'culture coups'. Citizens, at their own volition, switch allegiances without any warning because an adjacent city of a different nation has more 'culture production'. It was a great idea that proves to be an alternative to conquest/rapid settlement, but it should have been implemented something like this:
a city to be engulfed by another's sphere of influence should stage a revolt first, the success of which varying on the military forces in the city and gov't type, after falling into disorder;
the revolt should be financed by the aggressors civilization;
the latter should be grounds for war;
none of this should take place after the potential victim has discovered nationalism
...instead they opted to make it cheap and uninteresting. The city just changes hands, its military units withdrawn. This is perhaps applicable before the concept of national borders, but what about more recently? Would the United States' frontier settlements have declared allegiance to Mexico, just because their closer, well-developed towns had churches?
They also degraded combat and made the game's sequence irrelevant. Now, the defender has a decisive advantage throughout the whole game, unlike in the prequel where the relative quality of the units' defense bonuses changed [to coincide with actual history]. This also increases the value of ancient units, when both attacking and garrisoned, as immortals, the Persian swordsman counterparts, attacked eight elite panzers [of varying health] and never lost. It's even worse than Call to Power, since ancients now consistently extirpate units millennia more advanced.
They removed zones of control which has a similar exasperating effect: now advancing into territory requires no decisive battle. Defending certain venues doesn't matter, either, since mounted units, though unable to use your roads, can attack interior cities while retreating from attacks. The AI doesn't even attempt to take your well-defended cities; rather, they pillage improvements and 'steal' hapless workers [how realistic!].
Which reveals another flaw: why don't AI civs ever inform/threaten you before going to war, or even allude to it? At first, they are manifestly 'polite', willing to make exchanges, and then they send, say, five chariots into your territory. When you ask them to leave, they declare war [odds against them, to some extent, notwithstanding]. This could be because the diplomacy developers really streamlined dialogue, which is now restricted to asinine insults/praise.
The title, after all, is a caricature of history.
.
. And Firaxis is not saying that right handers should be whiped out, they are saying that left handers are inferior to us righthanders, they think southpaws are supposed to be slaves
. But the fact that this is historicaly inacurate is reason enough for us to never buy another Sid game 
, or atleast say we wont untill a patch comes out to fix this monstrosity of an error 
