First off most buildings only have one benefit and the only penalty is maintenance, so once you decide what the specialisation of the city is, it's easy.
First off, don't ignore opportunity cost, especially if you're effectively counting that when you refer to the decisions made in civ4. There are still some choices in civ5. e.g. Suppose you want to increase science output, maybe you'd say the library is the obvious choice, but maybe the granary would be better to build first to get the population increasing, or perhaps a monument first so that the city can expand onto one of those grass tiles which you can farm to increase population. In civ5 there are still times when you make a decision between multiple buildings that advance you toward some short or long term objective, and which you pick may also be influenced by other needs of the empire (especially now that individual cities have the option of building things that have an empire-wide impact).
No more Civ 4 choices due to buildings with multiple benefits, like "Do I build the temple first or the library?
Well, unless you were spiritual, there'd be no reason to build the temple first if it was for culture. Perhaps you meant the monument? If you needed both science and culture, and the culture wasn't extremely urgent (where you'd build a monument or use a missionary) you would almost every time build the library.
I need the culture real quick, but that extra science boost might get me a tech 1 turn quicker" or "Do I build the bank first or the grocer? I need cash fast, but my city's also about to get unhealthy"
True, this was an important decision, but in many cases it would have been better to do neither and instead build wealth.
More importantly, you don't need to specialise your tile improvements. Three hex radius means you have way more tiles than you'll need, so pick a good spot with hills, put mines on hills and spam TPs. Build farms in your science specialist cities. When you need to build something, set citizen priority to Production, otherwise Gold. You have plenty available to maximise both. In the beginning, buying tiles is more cost effective than building too many culture buildings in non-culture specialised cities, because the near radius, plain tiles are cheaper to buy. Money is plentiful, so you can save up from the maintenance cost of too many culture buildings to buy tiles instead.
All true, but you miss out on the accrued points towards new social policies, but you'll probably counter that with making use of cultured city states.
Your building choice is dead simple... you have 4 or 5 main "specialist" cities: Culture, Science, Money and Military and maybe Wonder. The last three are really only partial specialists, because they won't be doing much "specialist work" most of the time. For the first two, you build the science or culture buildings when available. With military, you build units when required, but you loose so few in this game and upgrade everything, this won't be needed much. You should build a forge, XP buildings if you like, but I find just letting the units fight is good enough. So these cities should have a secondary specialisation. All cities, with nothing special to build at the moment, should build economic or happiness buildings if available. If not, any city without enough hills around should build production bonus buildings. You get the idea. You only need 6-12 well built cities to win even on a Huge map and all you got to do is keep following this set build order.
While true that there can be set build orders that work really well in most of your games, how is that not also true in civ4? In fact, in civ4 the granary was so overpowered that in almost every city regardless of specialisation it was the definite first build. The only exceptions were really when the city needed an early culture boost and there weren't missionaries available for that task. In science specialised city, you'd always build the library next. Not exactly a tough decision there either. After that, if universities and observatories were available, you'd always pick the uni first until you'd unlocked Oxford.
In military cities, it was only the hammer improving buildings like the forge, factory etc. and the barracks. Again, not exactly difficult choices. If the city was big enough, you might need some happiness buildings.
Not many buildings available from the industrial era on, so it becomes even simpler as you go... don't worry about city building, just go eXterminate everyone.
True, there's a lack of buildings in the later eras. But I think the idea is for the game to start coming to a head, and besides, people have been complaining about how powerful buildings like the hospital supposedly come too late in the game to have any impact.
Really, the game just holds your hand when it comes to city specialisation.
That's one way of putting it. I would say it makes the task of specialising cities a bit more intuitive. It's all in the phrasing.
By the way, I know I say "true" a lot.
