Civ 4's cultural borders are unique in the sense that they allow you to wage "cultural warfare," sniping tiles or even cities without having to fight over them. Whether it's because they're stronger than you, they've got a Defensive Pact with someone scary, you're tied up in wars on other fronts, or you just want one or two tiles but not badly enough to fight over them. With regards to 1, you still absolutely had to think about city placement, in fact possibly even moreso than in earlier installments, because your BFC wasn't immediately accessible. Until your borders popped, you could only work the eight tiles adjacent to you - and unless you're a Creative leader, it's probably going to be quite a while before those borders do pop. One of the most agonizing decisions about city placement in Civ 4 is whether it's worth moving away from a truly awesome BFC to get a pretty strong initial 8 tiles.
I do actually partially agree with your second point: It can be frustrating to be forced to eliminate or almost eliminate another civ when all you wanted was one or two cities but their remaining cities exert such strong cultural influence that unless you've got a Great Artist to bomb with somewhere nearby, you won't be able to work any tiles (this is also why, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, Creative is generally a better leader trait for warmongering than anything else). Civil Wars were done away with for a reason in Civ 3, and that's because as much as they're a cool concept, they ended up being more problematic than anything else. First, because if a player says, for example, "I want three opponents in this game," it's usually for a reason and they aren't massively enthused about having that number suddenly increase, and second because the AI simply didn't get the importance of preventing Civil war and so it became a magical "loliwin" button against them.
Your fourth point makes me question whether you've even played Civ 4. The amount of choices you have for cultural borders is pretty significant. Producing certain buildings, choosing certain leaders, running the right specialists, choosing certain civics, and debating whether to devote commerce to it are all major parts of expanding your cultural borders.
Civ's cultural borders aren't unique because Civ3 started the whole cultural border thing where you could wage cultural warfare, sniping tiles or even cities without having to fight over them. I remember having such encounters in Civ4 and it seemed to be the same concept and idea to Civ3, if arguably marginally more powerful, but barely notably so. Your Big Fat Cross has never been immediately accessible in any Civ game up to 4, I'm not sure what you're saying here or why you're saying it (Edit: yes, I'm misremembering, 1 and 2 you just had the BFC, nevermind me, it's old age etc). I don't remember having any major issues popping my borders. It's also been a trait of the entire series that the good tiles are 'awkwardly' not easily collected into one BFC.
For me, the change from Civil Wars to Culture Flips was monumental. Your criticism of Civil Wars holds up, but then when hasn't a Civ game had lolwin options, and since when has it's AI ever really been a sharp tool. If the enemy's Capital is placed awkwardly then taking the Capital can be no harder than having a normal full-on war with them and, not only that, but you might wish to prevent the AI going into Civil War, because, if want all their land, you don't want the new half to rope other Civs into the war with a new and fresh Diplomacy rep. And this all ties into the number of choices and consequences Civ2 made available to the player in how they approach war, just lots and lots of 'options', each with a situation-specific reason for being feasible. You can raze, you can fully conquer, you can partially conquer, you can inflict a Civil War. In Civs 3 and 4 the Cultural pressure forces you to either raze or fully conquer, so, from my perspective, war's options have been halved. Hence I say "less complex", even though the feature appears to be more complex
as a system than the Civil Wars system.
Civ 4 was more complex in two ways: First, it implemented a food/commerce dichotomy. Now instead of roads giving commerce and being able to combine them with irrigation, you've got to choose between farms or cottages. This was a massive change, and actually resulted in one of the more interesting aspects of Civ 4: The choice between a Cottage Economy, Specialist Economy, or a Hybrid economy. The advent of Great Person Points meant that a city running a lot of Specialists was a far more viable strategy than it was in earlier Civs.
Second, it implemented more specialized tile improvements: Workshops, Watermills, Lumbermills, and Windmills. A sort of rite of passage for Civ 4 players is the moment when they begin to recognize when they should begin to replace Mines with Windmills, or how to structure a Workshop economy. Civ 4's worker game slowly reveals more of itself to you the more you become familiar with the game, and there's a degree of decision-making there that no other Civ has matched.
It also introduced major resource bonuses, which I liked.
Yes, Roads got completely nerfed in Civ4, this was the very first thing I noticed. Roads were now just for mobility, instead of commerce and mobility, so, again, a previous norm had been halved in complexity. You say the new complexity, that of 'Farms or Cottages' is both better and more complex, to which, to me, just appears to be a fairly obvious binary choice you make when thinking about what to do with a tile, are we a bit low on food, shove a farm in, are we a bit low on commerce, shove a cottage in. Yes, I get that on extreme difficulties this might be more crucial than I make it sound, but, for the most part, for 'the base game' it's, in my opinion, a lame comparison to the dilemmas and choices with consequences you get from previous Civ games where when to produce workers is one skill, which tile to send them to is highly steeped in difficult options and what they can do when they get there is yet another set of choices, and, to top that off, you then have the choice of whether to stack them or not. So, In the previous game once you've irrigated your cow and put a road to the luxury resource your left with a whole host of difficult options, on every single square, which impact your long-term game dramatically, to the extent that if you go onto a Civ3 discussion board on Civfanatics then the phrase "Workers, workers, workers" will likely get thrown at you at some point with regards to high level play. In Civ4, once you've irrigated(farmed) your cow and stuck a road on the luxury resource then you're just left there thinking "I suppose I'll link up my cities now" while you twiddle your thumbs waiting for the next tech-tree tile enhancement.
I get your point about various economy focuses, but the previous games had this as well, should I run a Science economy, a money economy, a war economy or, for Civ3 shall I run a Culture economy as well, it was just the route to it came from different systems.
It's interesting that you mention bonus resources because when Civ3 introduced Resources (not to be confuses with bonus food/gold or luxury resources) I was actually really annoyed by that. The fact that you like that there's even more of those likely examples very well why we disagree so oppositely. In Civ2 the only prerequisite for creating a Unit was that you had the necessary Tech for the Unit. Suddenly, in Civ3 and onwards, Units and even some Buildings were now gated behind you being in possession of a resource. Yes, this increased the options and complexities in the game as a whole, there's now a whole new set of choices and consequences in how you get hold of a resource that you don't currently own. However, what I hated about it was... that if there wasn't Cultural pressure then you could have a quick war for the necessary tile, a one city grab, however, this option has been completely buggered up by Cultural Boundaries making the quick grab suddenly become a requirement to hack out half an AI Civ just to get
one fucking tile. On the higher difficulties this is alleviated by the AI likely being on Tech parity and you can trade for it easily, but on lower difficulties your only peaceful option is an exploit. So if you're trying to have a peaceful game, you 9 times out of 10, have to swear at the screen when it lollups up the Uranium 2 squares inside your primary ally's culturally solid border. This is ragequit material right here, two systems so obviously incapable of working together for specific scenarios they were trying to discourage by increasing the number of peaceful options for winning. It's like, does it even know its arse from its elbow?
You've actually got a pretty idiosyncratic view of Civ 3 leaders - at least over at CivFanatics, leaders were generally regarded as one of the worst parts of the game, and Scientific Leaders are specifically one of the main reasons why there's a substantial part of the Civ 3 fanbase that maintains that Conquests made the game worse. Randomly generating a leader that could auto-build a Wonder was just wayyy too chaotic and frustrating. Civ 4 completely fixed the leader system. The RNG is entirely controllable, and I don't know why you'd think otherwise. The potential Great People a city can generated is determined 100% by player input - specifically, which specialists you choose to run and which wonders you choose to build. Again, this is one of the things that gave more choice to the game: "I'm running mostly scientists in this city, because I'm hoping to generate a Great Scientist, but I really need more production than what my tiles can give me. Running a Priest or two would beef that up, but then I'm at risk of polluting my Great Person Points with a Great Prophet that I don't need right now."
It is true that a weakness of Civ 4 is that not all Great People are created equal: Great Scientists are by far the best for the first half of the game, and then Great Merchants are by far the best for the second half of the game, and Great Engineers are second best for the whole game. Great Prophets are extremely powerful but you'll probably never need more than one or two, and Great Artists and Great Spies are generally mostly useful for specific styles of play. Absolutely indispensible if you need them, but Golden Age fodder otherwise.
Great People in Civ 4 are what makes running a Specialist economy viable, and being able to micro your cities and workers to get just the right amount of GPP in the right category to generate the right great person at the right time is a pretty popular style of play. The degree to which you can make Great People an alternative game path in Civ 4 is greater than the degree to which you can do so in Civ 3, and frankly, less game-breaking as well.
I've never encountered disdain for Scientific Leaders on the Civ3 board, excpet for the fact that their Golden Age is broken (as in doesn't work, as in a known bug that no-one ever bothered to/could fix). It is indeed random and chaotic, but it's never frustrating, why would it be frustrating to get a free Wonder, it's great for Wonder junkies. You could be thinking of Civ2 where it was admitted by the devs that the AI would get a free Wonder if it felt the AI needed a helping hand (most often 1 turn before you completed the very same Wonder), leading to a forced bonus to the human player in Civ3 where if you were 1 turn from completing a Wonder then the AI could not finish a Wonder. They are also, to an extent, controllable in Civ3 if you know what you're doing, well, there are ways and means to increase your odds of getting them, and this system is interestingly complex and requires certain specialisations and requirements. I get what you're saying about Civ4's being more controlable, but most of the time you need to run at least two different kinds of specialists, and it does allow for a minor chance to become your GL, making a mockery of your attempted specialisation. I should imagine there is quite some complexity in working the specialists in your favour though, I'll concede to that, I felt it was a bit dumbed down because when you get them they're not really that great and you spend an awful lot of your time playing in a Golden Age, like the devs thought "people got really into timing their Golden Age in Civ3, if we give them 20 of them they'll love it even more!" you know, it's like more is less. Probably crucial to do all that stuff on higher difficulties, but just overkill on regular difficulties.
I guess a good parallel would be Worker choices. For Civ4 they completely nerfed the Worker's importance but then uber-buffed the Great Leaders. And Great Leaders aren't really units as much as awesome buttons (as you said about Civ3's rare and more random ones). So in previous Civs you carefully planned your work schedule but in Civ4 you carefully plan your awesome buttons.
The unit promotion system is dramatic and allows you to custom-tailor armies to certain situations. They weren't a "small percentage benefit," they were a drastic change that could allow units to take on different situations. Getting a unit to Medic III ASAP is, like, an essential part of any military campaign. The ability to speed up healing of everyone around you simply cannot be matched. A few City Raider promotions can make units extremely effective against cities, and of course, you can't sneeze at the massive power of siege with upgraded collateral damage. Also, a lot of the experience for promotions in Civ 4 is going to come from outside of combat - specifically, your Civic choices. If a city has a Barracks, then running Vassalage and Theocracy allows every unit built there to choose two promotions - three, if your leader is Charismatic. This lets you customize your army right out the gates. Of course, there are other powerful options for Civics in both of those fields as well, so it becomes a very difficult choice (moreso in the Religious tree - Vassalage is probably the weakest choice in the Legal tree).
High-tier promotions are also extremely powerful. You've got Blitz, which allows Mounted units (and tanks, of course) to attack multiple times in one turn without penalty; Drill IV, which gives you 3 guaranteed first strikes and 3 chances for a first strike, making it very possible for you to wipe out an enemy without taking damage; Commando, which lets you use enemy roads (something that happened by default in earlier games, sure, but in a game where you can't do it, the ability to do it becomes very powerful), and, of course, the investment-heavy Combat VI, conferring +75% strength and a bonus to healing.
The end result is that properly promoted units can often end up taking down even units from the next era (uh, depending. There can be huge gaps sometimes. Well-upgraded Pikemen taking down Cavalry is one thing, but don't expect well-upgraded Frigates to bring down Destroyers).
Civ 4's Promotions system is, effectively, an attempt to import SMAC's unit customization into a Civ environment. While it's obviously nowhere near as good as SMAC's workshop, it's still a massive step up from earlier Civs.
I disagree that they were anything more that small percentage upgrades, I'm not sure how you class the word drastic but I remember assaulting a city with a specialised city basher and he died whereas the non promoted one defeated the defender, cos at the ed of the day it's all crappy RNG anyway (another Civ3 invention). I guess on higher difficulties it helps tip the balance, but regular play it's like who gives a shit. I must admit I did like the healer class though, but, oh shit, when did Civ turn into an RPG all of a sudden? If it's Civ why don't they just have a healer as a recruitable unit? Now that would have been interesting and adding more complexity... 0 attack, 0 defence, 2 movement, and causes an international outrage if you kill one... but no, you can magically turn your grunts into professional doctors because they shot a spearman... whaaat. And then there are level-ups with zero experience tied to buildings and civics? Yeah, ok, I'll give you that one, that's more like traditional Civ. But in all previous games your Government choice has always provided the linchpin to your military strategy to tailor your game to your conquering requirements, adding a "this unit supposedly is better at attacking cities while this other one you've chosen to be a healer class" is moew World of Warcraft than Civ IMO, and not terribly complex and the upgrades speak for them selves and don't really require much complex thought.
I lolled at you saying Blitz is awesome. In the previous games Tanks and Modern Armour had 2 attacks anyway, right out the production line, making them not have this naturally but forcing you to work for this in the sequel seems like padding for padding's sake. While regular horse units couldn't do this, they did have things like chance to retreat, automatically, no earning required. I agree that this whole palava adds complexity where there wasn't any before (or at least much less) but it's not intelligent complexity, its obvious choice complexity, complexity by quantity rather than quality. At the end of the day, in both games, it's still who's stack is biggest and/or who's stack is the most advanced, to which, when you upgrade your unit, as you inevitably will, most likely before they get past level 1 or 2 (for the main bulk of the game) they'll be back to square one again anyway.
The long and short of it is that Civ 4 introduces a massive amount of new mechanics, most of which add a lot to the game's complexity. I haven't even touched on many of them - health, additional commerce sliders, religion, etc. Health in particular is a huge one - again, the type of thing that seems pointless or minor when you first play, but that can have a dramatic impact the more familiar you are with the game. Especially when it comes time to industrialize.
Health is an interesting one, and Religion. They're both certainly all-new complexities, but are they interesting and value added complexities or just more things that happen while you play? I guess, as an experienced player of Civ4 you'd say yes, because you know how every aspect of their functionality works, but meh, that all just represented more of an additional irritant IMO. You can't win from being the healthiest Civ and you can't win from being the most Religious Civ, it's all just crap you have to deal with because someone thought it was a good idea. Before you say "well you couldn't win Civ3 from having the Happiest Civ either", yes you could, as you earn points throughout the game from keeping people happy and if you happen to be in a tight game that goes to 2050 then it could be the difference. An amusing tidbit about Health in Civ3 (yes it does have a health system) is that one of it's methods of showing itself is practically in the world game map, not just a menu to satisfy whereby if you fortify a Unit in a Jungle then it will gradually die of disease. That's the kind of little complexity which is both fun
and interesting/entertaining. The little things. Also makes tiles more interesting generally.
