Civ 6 doesn't have global happiness and encourages you to settle.
That automatically makes it better then 5 by miles.
This part was complete fucking shit about Civ 5, but the expansions and patches soft-addressed that by basically letting you get massive amounts of bonus happiness through religion, adding mercantile city states (which also give massive happiness bonuses), increasing the amount of types of luxuries (making it much easier to get more happiness from luxury tiles and trade), and I think BNW lets you get happiness from trade routes too. They also made Circuses much easier to build (and zero maintenance), added Circus Maximus national wonder (+5 happiness), and made a lot of happiness facilities faster to build and/or lower maintenance as part of their patches. The Circus change in particular (and addition of Circus Maximus) was huge.
When you were playing GNK or BNW happiness was
far less crippling than it had been in vanilla Civ 5 on launch. I remember doing full-on ICS base spam in Civ 5 multiplayer where I settled every scrap of land I could, even deep into zero yield tiles because I was getting so much out of every additional base and was able to get enough bonus happiness out of new bases that it didn't matter. In BNW you also have to look after income since trade routes are meant to be your primary source of income so they gutted gold-producing tiles, meaning your new bases don't get a lot of gold income while many facilities will
cost you gold in maintenance but you can still overcome that.
Back in vanilla the #1 strategy for dealing with happiness issues was permanent golden ages (ie. Persia with Chichen Itza) because back then golden ages suppressed all effects unhappiness (they patched this out since) and you could sacrifice every kind of great person for a golden age. Once you got permanent golden ages going (which wasn't too hard, especially if you went on a warpath and had a bit of Honor tree to get tons of great generals) you basically got to enjoy completely ignoring the happiness mechanic and just building expanding and conquering as much you want.
Other than that there's a hidden Civ 5 setting that disables happiness which you can make visible with some XML editing (works in multiplayer too), but removing happiness also kills golden ages, annoyingly.
Also,i remember playing gods and kings and the ai showed a lot of improvement which just vanished.
The ai was a consistent psychopath and used nukes in almost human way.Random subs hiding in corners with nukes ready to hit you.
Brave new world made every ai a "incompetent friendly neighbor",minus the zulus and atilla.
I think the complaint was that the AI was always going to declare war on you for all kinds of trigger-happy reasons, but I'm sure the attempted fix fucked shit up in its own way. Civ 5 has always lacked a competent AI, honestly. I only played Civ 5 online, which went a long ways to making Civ 5 not feel like shit (aside from the retarded multiplayer lobbies and ridiculous netsplits). The average idiots were still 10x better and more fun than the AI. Just make sure to set a turn timer and play with simultaneous turns. The default turn timer scales and becomes too long in lategame but a custom turn timer of 90 seconds is usually enough for a game that runs long while preventing somebody from trying to squeeze out 6 minute turns every time and making everyone else DC because that 20-30 turn war is going to take hours at that rate.
