Oh Civilization, what happened to you?
Civilization V was one of the biggest disappointments I have suffered to date. I was expecting more Civilization magic, but all I got was more crap. I will, of course, list that crap here for people who wish to go a bit deeper than simply "IT SUCKS!!!!1!!!!11!!11!!"
I consider my computer a high end computer. I got it quite recently and it runs video games quite well. It runs Windows 7, known for being good with video games. However, every time I play Civ V, my computer quite inexplicably chokes on the game. I have to set the graphics to their very lowest and meager settings, and still the game runs rather slowly. Naturally, I was outraged. On a related note, the game was prone to crashing quite frequently.
The game has gotten quite a bit easier as well. The paths to victory, as they are, are much easier to see in the technology chain. You have your science, culture, war, money (diplomatic), and such. Each technology chain for each victory is quite obvious and easy to gain.
Speaking of victories, the diplomatic victory is about ten times easier in this game. All you have to do is pay off all the little city states, and you've won. No planning to be friends with the AI. It is quite simple. A bit dumbed down I would think.
Great People are no longer as exciting as they were in Civ IV, although that is not the biggest complaint in the world. Still, if they were going to keep it, they shouldn't have dumbed it down so.
Workers are not nearly as important. City planning hardly comes into play. The happiness statistic is much simpler. The health statistic is removed altogether.
Religion has been removed, something that added to Civ IV immensely. Of course, I don't have any other comparison for it, I haven't played any Civs before IV.
The game runs on Steam. Why? I don't understand why you would do that. I had to download this completely arbitrary and pointless program just to play the game. I've never had to do that before. It's stupid and it seems to be a simple way of the producers making more money selling it to Steam.
The concepts of the hexagonal tiles was not that big a deal, surprisingly.
And I only give it a 4.0 because it was entertaining for five or six games. However, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone really, especially at this point when patches are desperately needed. Don't buy it know, wait until it is fixed to the point of playability, or better yet wait for the inevitable expansion packs and buy the combined set. Surely, by than the game will be fixed.
All of these little errors and broken gameplay are things you would expect to see in some no name game company experimenting with the genre. This is Civilization. The game series that has given many people countless hours of addicting and fun gameplay. This series, this game, should be better than this. This is half finished and is in no way worthy of being called Civilization. It feels like this game merely exists to put money into the pockets of the people who made the game. They've even payed off most of the game review sites, it would seem. This game does not deserve the near perfect scores it keeps getting, not by a long shot. I wonder if Sid Meier had anything to do with the game at all, other than putting his name on it for advertising. If he did, he's losing his touch.
The bottom line: Go back to Civ IV.