The horrible, horrible combat system that cannot be trusted. Food and shield upkeep for military units.
Settler units being responsible for terrain improvements.
It’s not actively painful to play, but there are a lot of ancient mechanics that make me wish I was playing one of the newer iterations in the series. These days the original Civilization is an astoundingly clunky experience. Cities in Civ V exist purely as resource gathering and production nodes, and while this is certainly how they are supposed to function mechanically I feel that the game loses something for not having them feel like places. Open up the city screen for your newest colony and you’ll see exactly the same thing the numbers might be smaller and the lists shorter, but there’s nothing to really differentiate the two as entities apart from the name. Open up the city screen for your capital and all you’ll see is a big list of numbers, symbols and building names. I found myself cranking through yet another game of Civilization V the other day and a thought crystallised in my brain that’s been niggling me ever since I started playing it back in 2010: for a game that is based so much around cities and the civilizations built from them, a city in Civ V is a staggeringly two-dimensional entity.
