Well i thinks Civilization 5 sucks balls. Firstly it just boring, it doesnt have the Civ feeling of really being able to manage your empire, there are just all these little stupid points that break the immersion for me.
Points i hate: - no trading maps
- no trading tech
- no overview how much the ai hates/loves you
- "console interface" everything has these huge buttons where you have to click 10 times before you get the necessary information, blech
- again the interface; on the gamemap itself the yield icons (1 of the most important point in the game mind) are so fuckin tiny eye-strainovision that you'll grow to hate them pretty quick. I long back for the icons of Civ 4. Same with military units, very hard to see on the map. To add to the insult, they added a strategic map which basically turns the whole gamemap into a boardgame --> HELLO! As a game developer you're supposed to be combining aesthetics and functionality in 1 pleasing whole, if I wanter either extreme i would've bought a painting or started optimizing parameters in excel.
- crappy control: with the beloved (ok not so much) stack of doom it took 1 click to move your army somewhere. With the new system 1unit per tile it take as many clicks as you have units (times 2) and then often click again to confirm (bleh)
- No civics: Only the crappy leveling up system spoken of earlier: It sucks balls! Instead of giving some massive improvements like whipping or bureaucracy or drafting or shit it brings just some little parameter increases which influence your game only in a minor way (relative to the previous effects mentioned)
- Bad overview of costs: no nice overview of what exactly costs you what. You pay for units, building and improvements but you're left in the dark how much each units costs, where you have improvement thats are currently not used and therefore only a drain on your income. Of course you can say that you should watch the freakin map but it would be much more efficient and enjoyable if i actually had access to this info. I would definitely behead my advisors where I a king and they refused to give me this kind of info.
- The games runs fucking slowwwww; Really read on this forums of any gameforum for this 1 to see that the waiting time between turns is really immersion breaking. And the game is not that goodlooking and the ai is retarded so i've no idea where the GPU is spending its time on.
- less options in game menu: I like to put all units to fastmove, fastcombat etc. Not possible anymore. Why? No fuckin idea, maybe options are too much too handle for the console crowd. Also not possible to let automated workers leave improvements --> very annoying.
- Less aesthetics: no more wonder movie, or spaceship movie

.
- No overview at the end of the game --> i loved having my progress over the ages speed by in 30 seconds, why isnt this included??
Finally to top it all off; this game didnt remind me such much of a Civilization game, but, and this is completely subjective of course, it reminded me of that civilization fase of Spore --> just compare it, especially the interface is exactly the same!! its shocking.
Ok guys, please respond on this rant, thanx thanx.
ps: I forgot the bugs; i have to put of the intro movie and set the game to windowed to play it (just google, I'm not the only 1). Also some of the information in the game is wrong, i noticed that the civic culture level up thing in the rationalism tree that's supposed to give your trading posts +2 to science only gives it +1. End rant.
pss: Civicpedia sucks ass now. No more clear information on what requires what. For example if you see the lumberyard improvement you don't know that with industrialization you get another +1 production with it (taking it to +2, 1 above the mine!!). Also if you select the coal strategic resource you dont get an overview which units use coal; i had to manually check the units and buildings to see which uses what --> wTF? Did no one playtest this?
psss: As a really good 4x game i recommend space empires 4, crap graphics but great gameplay.
End end rant.