Civilization V: What Went Wrong?

Reference
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

All credits to Sulla, this post from Sulla (I believe this is her/his name) pretty much sums it all what are failed in Civilization 5, which leads to hardcore players belief that the developers do no know their franchises.

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That's all I had to say about the patch. I'm going to finish with Civ5 by analyzing what went wrong with the game's design, in order to explain why things were derailed so badly. I have five major issues to go through, but before that, here are some smallish gripes that I jotted down while playing:

Minor Complaints
* Barbarian units can spawn regardless of line of sight. It is maddening to move next to a barbarian camp, and have a new full-strength barb magically appear out of thin air on a tile where you had full visibility. Immersion-breaking? There's a reason why barbs could only spawn in fogged tiles in past Civ games...

* Horsemen and archers/crossbows were both nerfed in the patch to reduce their combat values against cities. Simultaneously, cities were buffed to be much stronger and heal damage much faster. In order to capture cities now, you need strong melee units or siege units. There's just one problem: strong melee units means swords/longswords, and siege units means catapults/trebuchets. All of those units require iron. What happens if you don't have iron? Currently, the answer appears to be "you are screwed", and enemy cities can only be taken with very heavy losses using non-iron units. This is not an example of good design.

* The food box graphic is still broken on the city screen, and also shows as full regardless of actual food count (see screenshots above). The whole city interface is just bad in general; it's far more difficult than it should be to swap tiles around and set up a production queue.

* The interface for diplomacy is still awful. You have to click between three different screens to see all of the information, and there are further scroll bars on each individual screen - you can only see information on three AI leaders at a time. With more than 50% of screen space not even being utilized, this is atrociously bad design.

* The default length for a trading agreement is 30 turns. That's a really long time, and there's no way to change it. (On Marathon speed, the default length is 90 turns!) It's also impossible to cancel Open Borders once they've been signed, so sorry, sucks to be you if conditions change 25 turns later and you want to remove those Open Borders. The whole system is practically begging players to declare war and invalidate these agreements, pulling lump sum gold out of the AI civs for free. By the way, you can also trade a resource for lump sum gold, pillage your own resource, and then immediately re-sell the same good again once it's re-connected, all without any kind of reputation hit or penalty. I think this all could have been handled much better.

* Research agreements are a broken game mechanic; you can get any technology in the game for a paltry 250 gold (does not increase over time, which rather breaks the lategame!) and it's possible to game the system by investing one turn of research into all of the techs you DON'T want, thereby choosing your own "random" free tech. Completely exploitative and game breaking, turning every research agreement into a free Great Scientist. Note that fixing this bug wouldn't solve the issue either, because then research agreements would deliver something extremely powerful or hopelessly weak out of sheer chance.

* Occasionally AI leaders will pop up in diplomacy simply to insult your civilization in some way. What is the reason for this? Does it serve any point whatsoever? I can't imagine that someone thought it would be fun to receive random insults like this.

* Even after several patches, the various civilizations remain totally unbalanced. Winners like Greece, France, or Babylon absolutely destroy losing civs like America or Ottomans. Other civ abilities are wildly random, like Germany and the new downloadable Spain. Perhaps you'll get a ton of warriors for free, or pull hundreds of gold out of the air for finding natural wonders. Perhaps you'll get absolutely nothing. This is textbook bad design: civs with abilities that are either crazy overpowered or completely useless, with random chance determining the outcome.

* All of the victory conditions in Civ5 are pretty badly designed, especially the new Conquest (get all the capitals!) and Diplomatic (buy the city states!) versions. The static endgame screen, still with no replays or graphs, is an embarassment to the franchise.

* The Civiliopedia and "Official Manual" remain laughable, with vague information or flat-out misdocumentation rampant, and will likely never be fixed now. It's the sort of thing you expect from an indie game working on a tiny budget, and feels incredibly amateurish and sloppy in a flagship strategy game.

* Forced Steam installation. We can argue about Steam all day, and the forums have been full of the back and forth. Personally, I simply wish it were an option and not mandatory. I don't think it does much of anything to stop piracy, and I hate the fact that if Steam goes out of business, I can never play the game I purchased again. I find the downloadable content system, selling off extra civilizations one by one, to be a distasteful business model. Ugh.

Major Flaws
5. Global Unhappiness and Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) Conflict
4. Uninspired Mechanics and Unnecessary Penalties
3. Inscrutable and Meaningless Diplomacy System
2. Multiplayer Failures
1. Bad Implementation of "One Unit per Tile" Idea
(Read the original post for details)