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Notes -
Did you know that there is a rally point function and 'all cities build this in queue' function? Alt-click cities bar to select all cities, click what you want them to build and right click a tile for them to rally there. Once I discovered this late-game with 20-30 cities became much more enjoyable.
I like early game because I aim to start a war by turn 75 and conquer a civilization. Or sometimes I'm trying to grab wonders and eco up really quickly.
City maintenance can be quite oppressive early on, when I've just conquered another civ. But I suppose it has to be to stop me snowballing incredibly quickly, taking another couple of civs. If things have investment costs to balance the rewards, that's alright. It's generally good to have more cities in 4, albeit they take time before they pay off their investment. But in 5 it's suboptimal to have more than 4 cities, as I understand it, due to Tradition's bonuses. Tall play dominates.
I think Sulla is unhappy about how V isn't so much about investment costs as fixed or proportionate costs. Cities make each tech or social policy more expensive in perpetuity, there are going to be many cities that can never pay off their science/culture debt. In addition to mere opportunity cost you get endless costs.
Yes, although I admittedly barely use it. Maybe I'm a bit too much of a perfectionist, so I tend to micromanage every city. Could be that I need to put more work into optimizing the ratio of suboptimality vs micromanaging tediousness more.
You still frequently click through like 30 turns with nothing happening except exploration though, and I don't like the ratio of unit speed vs tech advance in the faster modes.
Maybe it changed, but Sulla in that rant is complaining about the opposite? According to him, spamming cities in 5 is always strictly optimal since happiness doesn't scale appropriately - you only need to make sure that they don't grow too much, and only have a limited number of big cities. But smaller cities are always worth it, the opposite of Civ4.
In general though, I've increasingly grown somewhat disillusioned with 4X games. Imo the real reason why empires had a limited size historically is the limitations of army movement speed and communication speed, so that past a certain distance from the capital any state was de-facto independently managed, even if officially subordinated. From there, true independence often wasn't a large step anymore, and trying to micromanage at a distance leads to so much dysfunctionality that it speeds up the process if anything. Even worse, Emperors of large empires may have a decently sized crownland that they personally manage but are really mostly wrangling a bunch of subordinates. If you don't do that appropriately, or you are just plain unlucky with a bunch of spoiled brat troublemaker heirs of your originally competent subordinates, everything falls apart fast. Happiness, upkeep etc. increasingly seem to me like extremely stupid, gamey workarounds to the problem, and as a result large empires are always either way too stable in games, or the mechanics for instability also feel random and gamey. Only CK at least attempts to simulate internal politics. But the AI isn't really there yet to consistently make games fun that force you to set up subordinates. CK is fun for a few runs until you understand the blind spots of the AI, and then it also increasingly feels silly.
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