Oh, and as far as Civ 5 vs. 4. I don't actually mind the new systems in 5. I think they're pretty decent. Civ 5 feels like a smaller game though, with its fewer units and archers shooting over swordsmen and NPCs, I mean city-states, that you do quests for. It'd be awesome to mod it as a much smaller-scale game, for that reason – Civ 5 seems like a better fit for imaginary hundreds of people doing stuff instead of imaginary thousands/millions.
The main problem with Civ 5 is that its endgames are the worst/slowest of any version of Civilization to date.
This was brought home for me about an hour ago, taking a Civ 4 BTS game to its final stages. Playing Japan, cruising to either a space or cultural win (dunno which will come first, kind of backed into the cultural trajectory with a couple of corporations), not really worried about anybody. On another continent, Gilgamesh DOWs Mansa, Mansa turns out to have been beelining Industrialism, punks Gilgamesh's riflemen with a stack of tanks (when does the AI ever use tanks?!), vassalizes both Sumer and its colony, Babylon, then starts to go completely apeshit on the really backward countries. He yells at one of them and gets a third vassal, then DOWs Genghis who is halfway around the world from him, and I realize, frickin' Mansa Musa is going for domination. With tanks. I buy peace from Mansa for Mass Media and Fascism, but see, now I have to deal with that, and I've never seen Civ 5's situations develop anywhere near as surprisingly.