The tactical aspects of CiV 5 make it superior to the previous games. The hex and 1 unit per tile were brilliant design decisions. It's also not as hard to win the non-militaristic routes as people make it out to be.
Having said that, the AI at the medium and upper medium difficulties is awful. It doesn't know (at least before the last patch) how to seige, defend or use horses correctly. It's city placement is also bad to atrocious depending on who the opponent is. It's also very easy to speed tech key units in order to crush AI opponents.
Second, the MP is unplayable. There is no combat log and no game replays, so it's next to impossible to both play the game or figure out what you've done right or wrong after the fact. The simultaneous turns also ruin the experience. You basically end up in a "who can click faster" match whenever your units are near the enemy. It's also impossible to tell what's happening when there are no unit animations or a combat log to parse. Lastly, the MP is unstable (to put it nicely) over the internet. It constantly drops players or crashes the game all together. I was only able to complete MP over a LAN because the friend I was playing with lived a block away.
Civ V could have been a 5/5, but it was only 50%-60% complete when it was released. I've played about 5 full SP matches at King difficulty and up. I also played 2 complete MP matches with a friend and then threw the game in the trash. It would take another year of patches before the game was both feature complete and bug free.
If you want to play the game and learn the hard way how bad it is, these are the best free game and strategy resources that I've found online:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=372188
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6279243/p-2.html
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?93620-Civ-V-Handbook-for-Despots-amp-Dictators
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?92952-The-Ever-Adaptable-Strategy-Archive
edit: I think the best indicator that the game was released half done was when community members found the half complete game replay files and began creating an open source project to read and show them over the internet. You're telling me the developers couldn't do this better and in a much shorter period of time?
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388160
/rant off and I'm still only this angry because the game could have been epic, especially in MP.
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