The hex grid is nice and feels right. The non-stackable units injected about 1000000x more tactical play into their shitty combat. Allowing land units to automatically embark into the ocean, instead of requiring you to micromanage transports, is a godsend. Tracking happiness on a national basis instead of a per city basis is nice. The scale of the map and how quickly your influence expands has been tweaked so that there is a lot more free space even at late game, which is nice - you don't end up with scramble for viable city locations like you did in older civs.

Also, I'm a big fan of how building a million cities is no longer necessarily a good thing. There are advantages to keeping small.


I think Civ 5 is the better game. Although it had worse intro music, of course, and it's multiplayer is unreliable as hell.