fursav: Has anyone here played Civ 5? There is a decent deal on it at amazon but I know the initial user reviews were horrible. So has the game improved at all since the release?
For me (and many others, check the forums at CivFanatics aound release time) the game is so spectacularly bad that it almost hurts to play it. The problems (atrocious AI, less choices for the player, removal of many game elements, crude UI that hides many values from the player and requires tons of clicks to get those that aren't hidden, etc.) are so severe, and so deeply ingrained in the design, that no amount of patching or modding is going to totally fix them. On top of it, it requires Steam. Personally, I wouldn't even buy it for 5$. There also is little chance that more non-superficial ficing will be done, because the lead designer was fired (or left voluntarily, details are unknown) in the meantime.
However, I belong to the (rather large) group of people who liked Civ4 very much. Civ5 seems to appeal more to people who didn't. In essence, the game now plays like a wargame with some additional elements tacked on. This appeals to the people who always played that way (which was tho only strategy in Civ2, a very successful strategy in Civ3, and relatively difficult in Civ4). For people who like Civ games for the atmosphere, for the feeling of being immersed in the creation of a complex alternative history while being a part of it, Civ5 has very little to offer.
