This isn't a dig. BUt you are prolly the V's target audience. A more casual player who enjoys the simplification.
+1. Couldn't leave it as just a like.
This is
exactly why I don't hate Civ V. I know
exactly why it exists, and it never really marketed itself as anything else. Not everybody is going to get into games as heady and complex as Crusader Kings II, and, well, that's okay! Not everybody needs to. (As for an example of modern complex games trying to combat endless min-maxing, Stellaris forces you to create sectors and have AI governors take care of things for you once you go beyond 5 (or 7 depending on government) planets. It's still really complex, it just shifts cleverly from a 4X to a Grand Strategy in the mid game with a single mechanic.)
If I enjoyed simplification I wouldn't be so obsess with mix-maxing in other games. :/
It just seems... Backwards with Civ IV.
I could aim all Production, and have no people, aim all food, and have no production or happiness.
And I can't find any real use for Gold or Culture in it... At all. The tiles expand way too fast for Culture to be that relevant.
This is from first impressions though mind you.
It's been a while since I last played Civ IV, but...
The idea behind culture is if your culture is oppressive enough against others, in combination with religion, you can actually cause the settlements of other people to rebel and join your faction
voluntarily without a declaration of war. Your culture spreads behind the scenes into other people's cities too, and it spreads further the stronger it is, so you can also convert a German city to a French city and then as France, demand that Germany "liberate" the French in that city. It makes you look like the good guy if you declare war, which is
fucking huge.
Later on in the tech tree in Civ IV you unlock additional civics, and one of these replaces slavery if you wish so you can instantly buy new strucutres, or units. This is highly useful in Civ IV since it lets you instant-buy an army to defend yourself against an attack. You can also make yourself intentionally appear weaker than you really are to the unsuspecting player or AI, who might only see 6 military units to their 15, then they declare war, and next turn, you instant buy 20 military units and
steamroll them. Later in the game it makes for a very intelligent cold war mechanic.
The AI is merciless. If you ever declare war and wipe out another culture entirely they will never forget it, and never forgive you. They also build massive death stacks, same as you, and if the AI is not confident enough to attack your cities, they will happily ruin your countryside, destroy all your improvements, and camp out on your tiles to prevent your citizens in the cities from working those tiles, thereby sieging your cities until they're too weak to defend themselves. They especially like doing this on higher difficulty settings, where they have a built-in combat advantage to off-set human ingenuity.
When you take over another settlement you have to combat the pre-existing culture there. You don't simply "get to have it" at 100% efficiency after 3-8 turns of revolts, no, they'll continue resisting you until you convert them to your culture/religion, and if you don't station military units there, they may even rebel back to their original faction. If you make friends with their original faction you don't
have to convert them, they'll work for you willingly. This means cities actually have distinctive cultures, and these cultures shape future conflicts and construction queues. You don't just build a courthouse and automatically make them happy.
Concerning production vs food, it's a serious decision in Civ IV. You can either grow quickly or build quickly, you don't get to do both arbitrarily. There is still a settlement automanage mechanic if I recall correctly for citizens, so it will automatically attempt a balance between production and food at all times. You can override this.
This is why I find it more mechanically rich than Civ V. Because there's a lot going on behind the scenes that you only get to see if you look for it, like the culture mechanics. Meanwhile, everything you need in Civ V is accessible through a single menu in the upper left corner. This makes it easier to understand, but also takes away a lot of the inherent complexity that was in IV that made it clever for its time. There's also little things, that didn't get transferred over from Civ IV to Civ V. Like if you do a new worlds continent map in Civ IV, and you colonize the new world with 10 or more colonies, there's a chance in the mid to late game for something to trigger that causes the new world to agitate for independence. You can give it to them to make a Canada-like buddy state, or try to chokehold them as an America-like independence movement rises to fight you. And instead of a piddling 5 units each on a single tile, there's like, 3 20 unit death stacks that march on your (probably undefended) new world colonies.
If you drop enough nuclear weapons in the world, it actually triggers global warming, causing tiles to turn into deserts. Keep doing it and you can actually create a post apocalyptic nuclear winter world, where a solid 80-90% of it will be dead earth tiles like snow and desert.
If everyone signs a treaty to not build nukes, you can still build them. The game doesn't stop you unlike in Civ V, but you incur significant diplomatic penalties for it. Just like in the real world.
Again, Civ V is a good game, it is, it's just... Brutally simplistic compared to Civ IV.