Quote Originally Posted by frogbeastegg View Post
I find myself long since resolved to wait for a demo for this one.

On the one hand I don't want a game that's too similar to Civ4; I've already got that, still play it, and see no reason to replace it with a hexier (har har) version. On the other hand some of the changes they've made don't immediately strike me as something I'd like. Army management in particular. Warfare has always been my least favourite civ aspect and now it sounds even less appealing; building stacks and relying on dice roll combat was bad enough without needing to shuffle around every single unit by hand sprawled out across a large area.

I'm also kind of concerned they will have continued to evolve in the direction of the Civ 4 expansions, namely the 'everything and the kitchen sink' school of design. All that stuff they added in the expansions detracts from the core gameplay and forces you to track/maintain/manage less interesting and useful aspects, thereby taking resources and time away from the really interesting stuff. My ideal version of Civ 4 would be the vanilla game with the expansion packs' civs and start up options added, nothing else.
Warfare in Civ has always been a bit micro management heavy, to say the least. If they can make it less so in Civ 5, and yet more tactical that should be interesting.

RPS' preview made the interesting point that civ5 is deliberatley not trying to re-do civ4 and going back to basics in some respects, and probably ending up on a different tangent. Civ4 + all the expansions is probably as deep and detailed as any Civ game, civ 5 sounds like it might be a bit more civ "light" -although that may mean civ with a more rounded experience. Let's just hope the city/building side is not civ "casual".