Sorry I kind of abandoned the thread - super busy with finals/final projects this past week.
So the entire thrust of the game was to give individual cities more character and importance, contrary to prior civ games where it was all about spamming cities to gain territory, sneaking settlers into enemy space to cut off resources, that kind of thing. This is also related to their concept of city states in the game, which are a single city/settlement but are supposed to have an appreciable impact on the flow of the game, even while holding relatively insignificant space.
To balance the benefit of additional cities, they mainly attacked it in two ways. 1) They made happiness civ-wide rather than isolated to a single city, and the more your population grew, the more cities you had, the higher unhappiness you would have to deal with. Unfortunately, this removed a huge amount of strategy from maintaining cities, and keeping a balance between different types of production and keeping your citizens happy.
2) By increasing the amount of culture needed for your next bonus for each new city. This method might actually work if culture wasn't such a catch 22 in the game. You'll never get huge culture output without some advanced techs, and you'll never get these advanced techs without a ton of pop/science. I'm not competitive or anything, but AFAIK in most cases pursuing a cultural victory is still essentially futile compared to a science/military victory.
The unhappiness can be managed as long as you keep each city below a certain pop, however, and is hugely, hugely outweighed by the tremendous benefits you get in science from having large populations. The system they set up to make tighter, more focused empires win out actually resulted in rewarding people
even more than in previous civs to pursue a strategy of infinite city sprawl. This was compounded by cities new defensive capabilities. At launch, the best possible strategy that could be pursued was to have as many cities as possible, 4 hexes away from each other, capped at a certain pop, sprawling the entire map. This was/is diametrically opposed to what the game's rules were supposed to encourage.
Another facet of this comes out in warfare. They give you a heavy unhappiness handicap when you conquer enemy cities thinking it would keep people from expanding too rapidly, but it simply makes the only sane course of action be to raze every city you capture and rebuild your own city there, which is incredibly boring and stupid.
So in sum, they removed a huge amount of strategy involved in previous civ games (and city flipping! one of the best parts of the series) in managing your cities and populations in an effort to change the dynamic of how your empire functioned, but the mechanics completely failed to do this, and the result was only a dumbing down of the series.
I don't want people to think that I HATE the game or something. It still does many things very well and is a pretty good game. It's just that the Civilization name carries some pretty lofty expectations, and this game failed to meet them somewhat spectacularly. It's a lot of fun, but it's just not that great of a strategy game. At least not yet. They should have some huge expansions out by now, but they seem more than content to make huge(ly expensive) DLC of varying quality. Over a year since the game is out and no sign of an expansion
