Civilization V

I think a problem with CiV is that it doesn't iterate on what made things work in the previous games.

It had a fresh new designer without the experience and talent of Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds or Soren Johnson.

As an example, consider Starcraft 2. After the competitive community discovered walling as an effective Terran strategy in the first game, Blizzard maintained it as a defining trait of the race in SCII with lowering Supply Depots. Unbalances can be patched out if the core gameplay is there.

Civ 4 built on Civ 3's successes and corrected degenerative strategies. Maintenance costs were introduced to stop settler fast expands. Wonders were weakened to stop wonder spamming. Overflow was introduced so people didn't need to micro their tiles for resource optimization¹. Of course this made certain old strategies nonviable, but their most devoted players were brought on board to playtest and make comments.

And they backpedaled when the changes were too much. Early prototypes had more natural terrain, but they went back to a more solidly defined tile system when it became confusing for players to understand tiles, which made it hard to develop strategies.

Of course Civ 4 wasn't perfect. Sushi engine was overpowered while most of the other corporations were useless (Standard Ethanol, moer liek Standard EthaLOL m i rite), Inca fast-expand is broken at marathon speeds, diplomacy was easy to game and cottage spam is...well cottage spam.

Hex tiles and new combat rules help fix Civ 4's stupid Stack of Doom mechanic. But where Civ4 fixed old mechanics, CiV gutted them instead. Corporations, religions and espionage are out entirely. Cottages were removed because the culture mechanics were changed. Civics are an entirely different mechanic now.

Perhaps most contentiously, diplomacy is entirely black boxed now. The old system had flaws, and maybe the new system is better. But if you want a serious strategy game, it's never a good idea to obscure mechanics from the players. Maybe they wanted the AI to behave more like people, but that was something Soren Johnson explicitly cautioned against when designing game AIs. If I wanted realistic diplomacy, I'd play Diplomacy. Against people.

CiV is still a new game, so it's a bit early to call it bad. But it's definitely a wait and see at this point.

Certainly good looking though.

1. You can still do stupid things though: barracks, swap queues @ 1 turn to complete, 2x chop, swap back @ chopping complete + whip => $texas. Which goes to show, you just can't keep a good scheming player down.