I love me some civ 5, Steam has me at over 240 hours played. Yet in all that time I've only ever completed 2 games. This is because in the mid game, maybe around the 1700s, I lose interest. I don't know how to stay motivated and keep going. In the early game I'm very focused, I have my objectives and my plan to complete them. I want to explore and expand my 2nd city here, I want to cut off this land with my military until I can settle it. I need to get my religion founded and get my economy moving etc.

Once the mid game starts (or mid game in my mind at least) I completely lose focus and don't know what to do. There's nothing glaringly obvious I need to do, my Civ is running perfectly fine, everything I work towards seems like a small bonus in gold or culture or science, nothing is essential.

How do you guys stay interested in a game? what do you focus on in the mid game?

Increase the difficulty or get the expansions, if you haven't, as they add a bit to mid-late game with tourism and archaeology. Otherwise, yeah, this is pretty much the bane of Civ 5. Eventually, unless you conquer mercilessly, you'll be stuck hitting "end turn" more times than not without going anything else. I usually end up completing games, if only to start again.

I have similar problems. I found that mixing up my strategy or playstyle kept things exciting mid game. I went with trying to get a many city states on my side as possible and rather than outright attack Spain when they had a higher score, I put an embargo on trade with them causing them to lose gold per turn instead of make it. Later on to push my tourism on Spain more I proposed and then lifted that same embargo knowing that Spain could not recover from the centuries without trade.

Try to interact with the other Civs and City States more often is my only advice to you, but I've also only played Civ 5 for 78 according to steam so I'm still a newbie.

I usually figure out ahead of time (like when choosing my Civ) what kind of victory I want to achieve. Then I just min/max my entire way through until I achieve it.

This is why I don't play Civ 5 or Civ 6 anymore. I don't like playing for military victory because I find it one-note, but if you play anything else you're essentially playing a veeeeeeeeeery slow-moving board game, where every upgrade either takes 10 turns, or is functionally useless. It becomes a game of micromanaging workers and re-organizing artifacts in your museums and trading for priceless art, which could be fun, except you spend about 30 seconds doing this and another minute waiting for enemy turns to resolve. I think this is an inherent problem in a lot of 4X games; Endless Space alleviated that for me a little, but it still devolved into making numbers go up very slowly.

Ironically this post has played the long game - 4 year old thread! Valid post about the topic, so not complaining, I just find it ironic.

@captain_insano: Ha! I didn't even realize this was a four-year-old post, my bad!

@acharlie1377: I’ve been wanting to get into Civ again, but you reminded Me exactly why I stopped playing 4X games.