I concur, and fully believe Civ V is a fantastic game...to be honest, I see a lot more fundamental flaws with Civ IV than with Civ V...

Here's a short list of some fundamental things that I think make Civ V better:

• Science is tied to population, not gold, dissociating what makes a powerful economy and what makes for high tech development
• Culture is an empire-wide phenomenon, making it useful for all cities all the time
• The Hex combat system with a 1 unit/tile limit prevents the "Stack of Doom" and makes sieges far more strategic
• Nature of strategic resources (1 needed for each unit/building) makes them less game-changing
• All civics are viable and useful
• "Larger" is not always better...small empires can still be on par TEC and culture wise (if not better at certain stages)

There are a lot of great improvements that Civ V has over Civ IV, these are just the ones I can think of right now...

My three biggest gripes about Civ 5:

• Gold is still a little too dominant, mainly because it is the primary tool for getting city-state allies (expansion pact promises to change this)
• I really wish they had artillery dueling (like in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) for artillery units and naval units...this limits the overwhelming advantage that striking first has...
• That damn instant heal promotion...I HATE IT...one should not need a mod to get rid of that awful mechanic...

That's true.  I'm still a noob, but I'm growing my empire in peace.  Built the Great Wall (that Wonder is actually useful now!  Yay!), and simply growing my population does plenty in the way of buffing my city's bombard attack.  I'm garrisoning one unit per city anyway simply for the happiness (I filled out all the Honor policy tree).   Possible invasions are of no concern to me.   And the second half of the game, I get all the military units I need from my militaristic City-state friends--I don't even have to build any.   There is no juggling military defense vs. civics building--it's just all civics building and let defense take care of itself. 

Looks like Civ V's 1UPT system improved my biggest gripe about Civ IV somewhat:  in the time it took you to mount a good attack, everybody's already researched the next set of unit upgrades or even advanced an entire age by then.  Civ V you don't build as many units and everybody has 2 movement points, so....   But still, it takes a lot of turns to set up your trebuchets, bring in 6 units to assault the city, etc..  Playing on Epic would probably help that. 

Yep, I enjoy Civ 5 as much as Civ 4. Fall from Heaven was awesome, and I still play it every once in a while, but Civ 5 'has the newness and still fun' vibe where FFH has the 'classic, still fun but not as much as I've had in the past' vibe.

Also agree with you on Heroes V. The "gaming community" hated way too much on that game (and well, every HoMM game since 3) when every game since has had interesting mechanics and addictive gameplay. I always have to laugh when I see the "Why don't they just remake HoMM3 with better graphics?" rants when HoMMV was exactly that.

Epic pace bothers me because The early game precludes taking cities until catapult and you often end up just sitting there. Playing on normal makes the game play correctly, but you only spend 50 turns in the early era, which are the best ones IMO. 

I only like epic pace on larger maps, where normal pace can make your units obsolete by the time they get across a continent...

I actually like Civ V as well. I've played it far more than anything else on Steam--400 hours plus... It's not Civ 4.5, which is not all bad, because there are some things I like better (maybe some of the same things that others hate). I think Civ V is less tedious and more fun in warfare. I like the 1UPT and the auto-embarking units (instead of having to build and load transports). 

There are some things that I miss from Civ IV, like tech trading, vassal states, the Apostolic Palace and the U.N. resolutions (the U.N. is pretty lame in V). I hope they re-introduce some of those things. I also hope they eventually include the features from the InfoAddict Mod, many of which were in the Civ IV info screens. But having gone back and played Civ IV, I'm glad that the games are different. 

You're right: it really was after the expansions that IV really took off. Hopefully Firaxis shows V the same amount of love; they've already done a good job with patching in my opinion.

I never tried multiplayer in either. I was perfectly happy to bash about the AI on the middle difficulty levels. I think I'm already close to having played IV and V equally and I haven't even played V for the past 2 months or so.

Civ V has some some nice ideas on paper but too many were poorly executed on release.  Glad to hear it got better.  Still gonna wait from a friend if it will be worth purchasing on release.  No more preorders.

Don't rip Civ4 too hard guys.  Sure it had its flaws but through mods Civ4 opened the 4x to fun new options like not comquering a empire nation but instead causing a nationwide revolution splitting up your oversized overreaching opponent into a handful of smaller ones.  There espionage plays an extraordinarily potent role without being imbalanced.  Another mod you could create and then trade manufactured resources such as guns for example to give any third world country access to a first world unit riflemen without trading the technology itself.  Of course when if they turn against you then what your Civ giveth your Civ taketh away.  Cold War diplomacy was never the same after that and that's just the tip of the iceberg.  There was just so much time, effort and love that was invested in by the community and it paid off.

Marble already does this for all wonders...

Germany gets a reduction to the maintenance paid for supporting land units...not the same thing but pretty similar...

I would say on a per GP basis, great artists are the weakest...that being said, they are also overwhelmingly the easiest to get and can always be used for golden ages...their landmarks also are essential for culture victories...definitely more of a "niche" sort of great person but still pretty useful IMO...

Just a heads up, Get the mod "Unofficial Patch and Vanilla Enhanced". This mod real does the game justice (with exception to diplomacy ya that is still an eye sore but they did some improvements). You can download it in game mod search or download from their site (they always have a beta going on). This mod is updated like crazy sometimes a few times a week! (other mods I play ya update every other month or twice a year.)

You get overhauled UI and yes is looks and functions really nicely. New units, units rebalanced, random events with more events are being added all the time (more good than bad ones at the moment), lots of new promotions, rebalanced leaders and civs for more fun factor, the game is harder you will have to bump the difficulty down a level or two, rebalanced policy tree, rebalanced terrain, buying terrain is way cheaper, cities can expand father out (city still only works off 3 tiles away), rebalanced wonders and national wonders too (only need 75% of cities to have libraries, barracks, etc...), several new buildings, difficulties retweaked, and ya thats just to name a few...

I can't play with out this mod. I am enjoying Civ5 a little too much and just before finals, crazy... If you have requests for adding features to the mod just post your thoughts. I have being posting on the ui lately and got some of my requests to go in. My features were added in a week...

Here are some links      Goals      Todo     Forum      Getting Started       Beta

IMHO, the whole "you're a noob, so you're not qualified to speak to the game" is a cop-out, anyway.   If someone said, "I have logged 600 hours on Steam playing Civ V, and I can say with authority that Civ V sucks," then what would people say?  How much expertise do people tend to acquire in games they don't like?