OK - I'll take a whack at disagreeing...
This is in response to the numerous polls and suggestions that Civ V is "dumbed down" or less complex than Civ IV. I do not mean to suggest that Civ V is perfect in its current state (it needs obvious bug fixes and ai improvements, probably a little building rebalancing also). What I do suggest, is that Civ V is certainly more complex in its basic mechanics than Civ IV. To wit:
Building maintenance- Civ IV had no building maintenance costs. This made the decision of what buildings to build, and where to build them far simpler, a step backwards in complexity from even Civ I and II. In IV you could spam every building everywhere in your empire, without regards to min/maxing or whether it would be worth it or not. Try that in Civ V, you will bankrupt your empire.
You
could - but no good player would build everything everywhere. There IS a min/maxing -- cities did have underlying maintenance costs and even beyond that, there was still always the
opportunity cost. I have no problem with building maintenance costs -- but it's terribly unbalanced. Maybe they need to bump everything up a factor or 2 and add more pinpoint variance because now -- there are a lot of buildings I don't even bother with... Defense buildings? What's the point? They're just gold sinks. Food buildings? Maybe in a few extraordinarily rare situations, but they, too -- sit unbuilt for me everywhere. Maybe you can fix those things by fixing the military AI (not a lot of confidence in that) and maritime CS (more confidence that can be done). Plus - as someone said - if you're going to have maintenance costs, you ought to at least be able to demolish buildings. Lock in the rote paths, fine (i.e., cannot destroy a library if you've built a uni) - but you'll never convince me to build a wall -- much less a castle or military base, if all it takes is a little conquest to make those improvements nothing but a gold sink.
If IV was too prone to "build it all" paradigms, V goes too far in the other direction - build NOTHING unless it serves your victory goal. There are too many building types that are completely untouched.
Personally, I think the best way to solve this is to put a stop to the "single purpose building" madness.... spread out the effects, as CiV did effectively... granaries helped health AND growth. Libraries science AND culture. Monasteries religion AND science. Castles defense AND trade. This adds variety and made the opportunity costs of buildings less cut and dry. You'd have to get rid of the silly 1-2-3 benefit progression to make it work, but this what V should do to make buildings fun again for us builders.
Combat- Stack combat was a gross oversimplification. Build some melee or gunpowder units, a bunch of seige, group together and click go-to button next to enemy capital. Not exactly rocket science. Now, in Civ V, one unit per tile is infinitely more complex. So complex, in fact, that the ai has not mastered it (one of the actually legitimate criticisms of Civ V). However, I appreciate the more rewarding and complex new mechanic, and look forward to vastly more exciting and complex multiplayer action, and single player games after ai improvements.
Well, I'd agree -- except -- I have close to zero faith the AI
CAN be fixed. It was never "fixed" per se in IV -- but that was OK because 1) using the blunt force of AI lower costs to create massive stacks at least made the military aspect something you needed to worry about, and 2) Civilization was never supposed to be a military strategy game anyway... from panzer general to the many Paradox titles -- there are better games if it's a military strategy game you want. That, in effect, is the reason for my lack of faith -- creating an AI that functions effectively from a tactical standpoint is a monumental effort. Games that take this into account do nothing BUT focus on the tactical AI. Can Civilization do it? Maybe -- but again, Civilization is not supposed to be a military strategy game! I think the doveplay is excruciatingly boring -- too much "next turn next turn next turn" -- so you have to do SOMETHING about the military AI.... but if that's the focus, then I guess I'd just toss up my hands and say "why bother?" I'd much prefer playing TW or one of the Paradox HOI titles if it's military strategy gameplay I wanted -- they focus on it, they get it (largely) right. I don't expect Civilization to meet those standards, but they've put themselves in a position where they really have no choice.
...and I say all of this as someone that desperately DOES want to like hex/1UpT... I just think, at this point, it's been a mistake for the series. I used to play Panzer General. I liked Panzer General. I have little desire for Panzer general with cities.
Government- In Civilization 4, your choice of civics had zero long term repercussions. You could easily change Civics after a short period of anarchy, even that easily mitigated by golden ages or religious trait. While admittedly slightly less simple than the likes of Civ 2 (where you could run democracy, then pop into monarchy for a couple turns to declare and fight a war, then pop back into democracy) even Civ IVs civics system is very simplistic. By contrast, in Civ V, you have to consider several things when adopting a social policy- the short term versus long term benefits not only of the current policy choice, but of all other policies farther down the tree. You really have to plan ahead with a grand strategy, making social policies in Civ V much more complex for the player than its predecessors.
OK - but once you've gotten through the trees, then what? You know what works for what VCs and style of play. It ceases to become long-term planning and instead - becomes just automatic button clicks (and then waiting for the next button click). Civics were malleable because games were malleable -- there were times when you were at peace and wanted to max certain benefits. There were times when you were at war and wanted to max other benefits.
I like Social Policies -- but they should have been an addition to, a limiter, and perhaps a modifier of SOME type of government (be it simplified II-style governments or IV-style civics). Was there too much flip-flopping in IV? Sure -- but by combining SPs with government/civics, the answer is painfully easy and obvious... simply toss a 50% culture penalty at the player or whatever. You make changing governments a significant cost - thus eliminating free-form flip-flops - but you keep the concept of an empire
changing as gameplay requires it change. Locking people in is just a poor idea --- it forces you to decide far too early: Am I going to be the largest empire? Or am I going to be a small empire that maxes culture/science? The game shouldn't do that -- the course of the game should dictate that.
It's not more complex -- at least, not once you've played with the SP trees -- it's LESS complex because it becomes rigid and rote... it becomes automatic and unchanging. I mean -- the first time you waste culture on the liberty tree as a 3 city Civ that has few plans to expand further, it hardly becomes complex or difficult to remember not to do that again.
Expansion- Prior civ games had no effective check on expansion. Founding an additional city was nearly always advisable, bigger was always better. In Civ V there is a very real cost to reckless expansionism. There are benefits too, and therin lies the essence of complexity. A larger empire will generate more hammers and gold, but it will be difficult to keep happy. Founding a city to gain an additional resource may help with happiness or military power, but detract from your ability to accumulate social policies. There are all kinds of tradeoffs, and the optimal strategy may very depending on your situation and what victory condition you are aiming at.
I have to disagree entirely with this one. They DID have an effective check - maintenance costs would soar. Gold and Science would actually plummet. Unhappiness in far flung cities would skyrocket. There were trade-offs in IV - and they were just as complex and subtle.... what's worse -- the V system is so painfully easy to game. The only "cost" to expansion is culture and happiness... the solution? Simple - NEVER build new cities until you've popped the next culture level. Even at deity -- I have yet to have any problems with the AI stealing my spots, so what do I do? I have 5 settlers sitting in their spots - perhaps with a unit nearby if I'm still concerned about barbarians. Then - I just wait until I pop the next SP - and boom... 5 cities. Sure - the next SP cost goes up, but it's a simple matter of rinse/repeat. All it does is make expansion more jagged and uneven. What's even worse -- it contributes to sprawl. The "wait" approach means its even in my own interest to send my settlers all over creation -- 40 turns to get to the other side of the continent and snag that whale? Who cares -- I've got 30 turns until the next SP, so might as well.
Plus - if you're not going for a cultural victory, you can easily get by with with just a couple of SP branches.... once you no longer care about SPs -- and if you're going to be expansive, it's pretty obvious which SPs to snag to deal with unhappiness -- you end up with a ton of 2 pop/no building "resource depot" cities. If I've decided to forgo any thought of the land spaceship (excuse me... Utopia project), I just spam these tiny cities next to resources like mad, set them to max production to limit the population unhappiness, improve only the resource tiles -- and they become nothing more than camps. My last game (huge map, marathon, deity) -- I had more than 20 2 pop/no building cities.
If V is supposed to "check expansion", well... it doesn't work too well.
Happiness- Civ IV had the easiest and most simplistic happiness system in the series. Not only did your cities only have localized happiness, but they didn't even experience revolt or civil disorder, merely an unproductive citizen. You could effectively ignore all of those angry faces in Civ 4, until you got around to dealing with them. With Civ V global happiness, you ignore happiness at your peril. Reduced empire wide growth, lack of golden age accumulation, loss of rationalism science bonus, penalty to combat, etc. (I am aware of the existence "ignore happiness" strats, but these are mainly for specialized late game situations. Further, I believe they are something akin to an exploit which will be fixed by increasing the "very unhappy" penalty in future patches).
I will say this -- as someone that generally played RoM/AND for the most part -- what you say of vanilla IV/BTS might be true, but, the revolutions mod put a stone cold stop to "just ignore the angry people". That was a recipe was partisan disaster and before you knew it, you were actually booted out of office or you suddenly faced an empire fracturing into multiple squabbling nations.
But - that was a mod, not vanilla...
The problem with happiness here is that it's so illogical... you might as well not even call it happiness... just call it empire 'sprawl' and be done with it. Add another empire-level tree when you just buy 'sprawl reducers'. Do you even pay attention to WHERE you build a theater? I sure don't -- unhappiness creeps towards zero? Just randomly click through cities that haven't yet built a theater or coliseum or whatever and buy it. That's just a thousand times wrong -- and it's made even worse by the fact that, since happiness buildings, like everything else compound in such a straight-line fashion, you end up simply maxing a single city to control happiness.
I'm fine with
something approximating happiness at a global level, but there should still be city-level impacts, city-level modifiers, and a city-level cost-benefit.
It all adds up to "cities" -- which were always the engine of Civilization since I -- becoming less and less like "cities", individual things to be managed, and more like empire "slots".... it doesn't matter what they are and they have little inherent differences... might as well just get rid of city build queues and make a global, empire level build queue. Add a city, get a new global slot to build building type A, B, C, D, etc. Happiness is the worst aspect of that -- but actually, I feel it in virtually all levels.... I look at my city list -- and it really pains me that there is so little deviation. Other than national wonders - and the smart player handles them just like Social Policies (i.e., park settlers and wait to actually found the city until you've built the heroic epic, national college, et al) - the city variance between hammers/beakers/gold/culture is usually so tiny that there's very little reason to specialize or even much attention to what's happening in each city. If you're going for a science or cultural victory -- you simply build all of those building types everywhere....
I actually used to have my own system of made up city names in IV -- it was just pointless fun, but I enjoyed it because it felt like individual cities DID have a character. After 2 weeks of V -- I don't even bother... they don't "feel" different, so there's little point in dealing with names.