There are numerous threads on late game tedium that discuss city spam and how it can ruin the fun of finishing the competition off.  Basically, victory has already been decided and all that remains is a long boring grind that only ends up grinding the players patience. Unfortunately the alternative, other side of the spectrum isn't much better either.

Losing key super cities that are the lynchpin of your whole empire can be just as frustrating depending how easily they are taken or the amount of time and expenditure required to establish them.  So small empires are also a problem.

There you go, now you've read something of substance explaining why city spamming is a bad idea for empire building games.  Happy?

I am a big fan of MoM, AoW, MoO... and I am very new to Civ.

I would say Civ 5 cannot satisfy my desire for a 4x game. I love culture, wonders, happiness, specialists, all of the mechanics around cities. My main problem is that there are too many penalties for basic actions in the game. The way that unit maintenance costs scale is both hidden and arbitrary. The huge costs in happiness and an inability to quell rebellion in the early game is pretty disappointing. The unit variety is fairly limited in terms of combat mechanics. I only play on the easy difficulty setting because otherwise the amount of gold/happiness generated is so small that I feel like I have no options to do something crazy like conquer a city early on or a buy libraries in each city.

Basically my main problem with the game is that I spend way too much time clicking the end of turn button instead of making meaningful choices. In master of magic you get to choose what spell to research next (you get to cast spells, unlike research in Civ), you can field much larger armies so you are busy with that, there are monster lairs to fight with your heroes, you want to capture cities of certain races so you unlock certain units... all that stuff is much more fun than balancing the budget for 250+ turns.

Not quite happy with that explaination.  People want different things out of their emprie building games.  For the most part I prefer long games having multiple big empires.  Some people prefer shorter games with smaller nations.  There are settings for that (or there where in previous Civ games).   Late game tedium was always a factor in Civ games for me.  When I reached the point where a win was assured, and/or I accomplished all that I felt like doing that game, I ended it.  I rarely played a Civ game out to official finish.  Once the thrill of potential defeat was removed, I lost interest.  On smaller maps with smaller empires this moment comes quicker and holds less satisfaction.  The big exception to late game tedium being the Fall From Heaven mod where the end game was something I looked forward to.  I'd  spend the whole game working towards the end game.  Isn't that the point?  FfH mastered the cure to late game tedium.  A win is not so early assured etc.  So I know that a 4X TBS game can be designed to be enjoyable in the late game with huge empires.  To my liking anyhow.  People won't all agree.  But like I said, that is what map and game speed settings are for.  A good game design allows us to play the game to our preference.  When I read city spamming postings, I mostly see people arguing to take away something that some of us enjoy.  I say design the game with the depth required to suit us all... within reason.  It has been done before.  And now the man behind curbing Civ4's late game tedium is Senior Producer on Elemental! I can't wait!

It is a matter of perception, but for me Civ V plays just like Revolutions, only with the "arcade" factor being taken away for a long and tedious pressing End Turn button for 25 turns with nothing to do.

I fninished my first game with 15 cities on a small map - interestingly enough I was not able to "max out" the population even in my first city. I personally created 4 cities, the rest were conquests exactly for this reason: there is not enough time in the game to "max out" a city if you start it later in the game. Exception is extraordinarly fertile land, which is a matter of luck rather than strategic prowess.

And I agree with UmbralAngel: on higher "difficulty" there is just not enough to do in the game, other than moving my units from one end of the map to the ther to finish off the next empire - that being ecessary, because the pathfinding in this game sucks horribly. Its like non of their programmers ever went to college and took "Theory of Graphs and Networks". 

Well it is as you say a matter of perception. Obviously both Revolutions and Civ 5 are games in the civilization series so they should have some things in common. However many of the things you complain about are things that have been in every version of Civ. Particularly pressing the end turn button over and over while you wait for something to happen, which is perhaps one of the most iconic experiences of playing Civ that there is.

Actually in both previous Civs and Civ: Revolutions there was always something to do. In previous Civs I would build cities and improvements in my ever-expanding empire - it would sure take a lot of discipline to want to continue just to see how many points I can get, but - it was something to do. Civ: Revolutions IS a fun game. It is uncomplicated, and has an arcade feeling to it (which I like while playing XBox games), but still, it is fast-paced and you can get a game done from start to finish in 3 or 4 hours. It has more funny animations and has an overall feeling of deliberate design for gaming systems and completed, polished execution to it.

Civ 5 is unfinished Revolutions 2 in slow motion. The happines and gold PREVENT you from doing anything. It is not like that it is an argument whether it is pointless or not to build and develop extra 6 cities. Can't do it, period.  

I feel the same way as many of you do about Civ V. It looks good and is kinda fun but it is lacking substance and polish that Civ IV has. I think they put way too much Civ Revolutions into this game.

Luckily, the mods are what will save Civilization V for me. There is no limit to what people can or can't do with the modding tools. They are a little complicated but nothing too difficult.

Anyways, I know were not really supposed to discuss or bash on Civilization V but, honestly, the game industry NEEDS honesty to understand what they are doing right and wrong. In my opinion, the gaming industry is having some problems right now and they need to look into their "best practices" and design concepts. As a lifelong gamer and Civilization fan I don't like the direction we're heading.

You might want to look at Civ 4 more closely. Comparing the depth of Civ 4 to Civ 5 is like comparing the Laurentian Abyss to a pond.

Hmm...well I agree that if you were to count total number of features between Civ 4 BtS and Civ 5, then Civ 5 would be found wanting. But I think there's sort of a quantity versus quality thing going here. Religion and unhealth didn't add much to game play for example but the new combat system in civ5 adds a great deal.

Edit: Note too that when talking about the vast gulf of features between Civ 3 and Civ 4, that there are many people who think that Civ 3 was the superior game in terms of actual gameplay.

I think we can ALL agree that Colonization was the best civ game of all time

SMAC beats Col any time of the day.