Quote Originally Posted by TinCow View Post
Civ is my favorite game series ever, and I am extremely disappointed in this game. It is, frankly, pretty boring. I haven't touched it in a week and far prefer to spend my time playing Minecraft and Borderlands. Hopefully patching will spruce it up, but I doubt it. If I want to play Civ now, I'll go play Civ IV instead.
I'm of the same mind. I played a few hundred turns of an easy game by way of introduction (the frog methodology for aclimatisation) on release and then tried another blast of a new game last night. After 2 hours (on Prince) and mid way through the medieval age, I was quite bored and went back to sociological experimentation in dwarf fortress.

I just feel like the Civ5 experience is pretty thin -compared to Civ 4 anyway. It's polished for sure but it just doesn't grab me by the balls like Civ 4 does. I don't feel very engaged, it's almost too easy to do things. Want to make friends with a city state, spend some cash: bam. Barbarians pose no-where near the challenge they do in Civ4 -maybe because you no longer need to garrison cities but probably also because I've only seen barbarian brutes and triremes. The challenge in civ4 for me was always to get enough bronze and axemen early enough to deal with the "awakening of the wilds" when barbarian cities appeared.

When I played the demo I thought the polish was good as it made things accessible and kept you informed, now I think it's polished because there isn't much depth behind it. I don't find myself making anywhere near the number of long-term challenging decisions I did in Civ4, e.g. balancing useful tech with religious to make sure I had a religion early enough not to face the fairly crippling unhappiness you get. The tech gamble just doesn't seem like a big deal in civ5. City planning also seems so simple compared to civ4, little balancing of food vs reources seems to be required -or at least its not so harsh/specialising as Civ4.

Then again, given my tolerance for things like Dwarf fortress (a current fad, if you hadn't noticed), I may count as one of the weirdos who like games that give them a headache.

I hope the expansions add depth becuase at the moment I'd almost rather play Elemental.