Civ V: Gods & Kings is disappointing. I type as someone who dumped over three hundred and twenty hours into Civ V vanilla, all in the single player. I've beaten the game with every Civ, used every policy track at least once, played through the game on every difficulty level on every permutation of type and size and have won the game through all possible victory conditions.
Civ V is my entry point into the series and while I enjoy the game immensely the longer I've played the game the more certain aspects have grown to bother me. There's the paltry diplomatic options available to the player, the A.I. has more options of interaction with the player than the player has with the A.I. This has gotten worse in Gods & Kings. Despite the game having numerous victory conditions, the A.I. is hardwired to be hyper aggressive and combative, even when such actions defy reason. There's no real choice's to be made in the game beyond where you settle your cities. You can game the tech tree and try to brute force you way up a specific branch but in the end you always have to research everything. I guess my problem with that is there's no specialisation, there's no choices to be made with the kind of civilisation you're building. You can't become a trade empire that becomes integral to the trade networks of all the surrounding empires and city states. There's a commerce policy track but all fully adopting that does is provide a few monetary and happiness bonuses. You don't actually engage any of the other civilisations. You can try and trade with the other Civs for luxury and strategic resources but their view of you is usually pretty skewed (how big is your military compared to theirs?). It would be nice if they fleshed out the economic and cultural aspects of the game more and if the A.I. wasn't so hardwired to be stupidly aggressive. That's what Gods & Kings needed to address or add. It needs to deal with its core system, not just re-add religion and espionage but also address how the A.I. behaves. Culture creep should have been re-added and the economic side should be looked at as well. I've seen the A.I. win through conquest and diplomacy, which is just conquest leading to large empire and lots of gold to buy off city-states for the UN vote. I've never seen the A.I. win through culture or scientific victory. Ever. If there's a victory condition, there should be an A.I. behaviour tuned for it.
Anyways, on to what Gods & Kings adds, not what Civ V isn't...
Religion really just provides more incentive to use the Piety policy track. Depending on your pantheon and what you choose your faith to be you get a few more faith, culture, science, happiness or monetary bonuses. That's it. I haven't noticed religion coloring the attitudes of the A.I. in any way, shape or form. It's still just as stupidly aggressive as it has always been. Religion seems to make allying city states a little easier, seems to make your relationship decay a little more slowly without the use of the Patronage policy track but in the end they can still be bought out with gold. You can't attack missionaries from other empires without declaring war but the A.I. can. The A.I. can plead with you to not have your missionaries prothletise their cities, whereas you cannot.
Espionage takes too long to kick in, you have to wait until the Renaissance, and it takes too long to get further spies, you have to hit a new era. You can steal the occasional technology or get a "warning" that another Civ will attack you (which is always and every Civ). You can try to rig elections to swing a city state to your favour without spending gold, I guess, I haven't tried to use a spy to mess with a city-state yet. Espionage is too slow to unlock and too minor an impact to being meaningful. It's like using a great scientist to learn a free tech whenever one spawns, stealing technology is nothing. From the moment you can trade embassies with other Civs, which is when you first encounter them, you should be able to spy on another Civ. Leave the auto-generation of new spies to every new era but make additional, purchasable spies prohibitively expensive. If you could have a genuine web of spies stealing technology from every other Civ from the get-go, then you could leapfrog up tech-wise and gain an advantage.
I've played with Sweden (game crashed midway through and I didn't save) and the Celts (on-going) but these Civs and the seven other new ones I have yet to try aren't really going to be game changers, they're not going to address any of Civ V's core problems. This expansion feels about as substantive as some of the free mods on the Steam Workshop, so kind of thin. They've tweaked the tech tree a bit, added some new units here and there, removed the unit tech dead ends, added some new wonders, re-added religion and espionage but it doesn't feel like it's enough.
If you were upset that Civ V felt kind of dumbed down, a little too simplified, I don't think Gods & Kings will change your opinion.
(and even then I'd still probably try to get it cheaper overseas as is my right as a consumer).
