The hex grid is nice and feels right. The non-stackable units injected about 1000000x more tactical play into their shitty combat (although it's still terrible). 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 a mad 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.