I was never a big fan of V, thinking they pretty much nailed it with Call to Power II and Civilization III in the early 00's, and that V simplified the wrong elements (like removing unit stacking and reducing the depth of the diplomacy/trading system) while adding a bunch of needless complications in basically having three tech trees - science, civics and religion while removing the concept of cultural borders and area of influence. I think VI has some way to go, I probably wouldn't recommend it strongly until there's at least one major expansion out, but the core game is way more enjoyable than the original release of V was before they actually added content to it with expansions.
VI returns some of Call to Power's city tile stuff, does a weird reimplementation of unit stacking where you unlock the ability to stack increasing amounts units at arbitrary points in the tech tree. I'm not a fan of how either V or VI handles workers, but I still prefer VI's limited uses over the insanely long time it took for workers to do anything in V, like centuries of in-game time to construct roads between cities and stuff.
I didn't really have any problems getting into VI, but the pace of the game feels very off to me, even a marathon game is over in about 10 hours, while we were talking about 30 hours in the previous games, you kinda roll through the tech tree at a rate that makes pretty much all tech in-between the major steps like defensive city barrages, ranged ships, gunpowder and flight is useless - most units take longer to build than it does to reach the next major milestone in technology, which is not a problem I encountered in previous games. This kind of stuff will likely be tweaked with expansions though.
I really wish they would bring back palace customization, that was such a silly and wonderful aspect of the game. Like how Alex described the palace in Prague just could mix all kinds of architecture as you progressed through the ages.
Log in to comment