not sure if it's just because I'm older and less into gaming, but civ5 seems markedly less fun as a game than civ1 and civ2 were. I just couldn't get into it, and I used to spend entire nights on the older games.
Alpha Centauri was always my favourite game in the series but these days I find myself playing a lot of Master of Magic, a game with way more tactical and strategic variety than any of the Civ games.
Civ V changed it so that only a single unit of a given type (military vs utility) could occupy a tile, and switched from a square grid to a hex grid. Individual moves may matter less, but the combat game benefitted greatly.
One of the reasons (I think) that Civ 5 is not quite as much fun is the fact that the City no longer really has that sense of individuality.
In previous versions, the City was IT. Each one had its own production, trade, corruption, waste, polution, etc. It had personality! If a particular city had trouble, it could shut down or become extremely inefficient at production. The new game doesn't have this, only the aggregate of anything matters.
For me the game lost a bit of its personality, and that's why I like the older ones better.
Now I have the Beyond Earth with Rising Tide waiting for me, but that game doesn't scale that nicely to my television... And oh, btw, Civilization 5 played with the Steam Controller comfortably from the sofa is a very nice experience.
Recently I've found Endless legend and that is a bit of cross between SMAC and Civ 5. Very pretty but a lot of depth too, different strategies possible, varied factions, you HAVE to make custom units (there are only 5 by default, each has ~6 slots for one of 20 pieces of equipment). The combat is completely fucked up though.
EDIT: oh yeah and another thing I kinda like about it is how there is no civilopedia or good tutorial so you have to figure stuff out
No Baba Yetu, though :(
In the middle of all of the balance tweaks the expert players were calling for, the devs took the time to listen to my newbie feedback along the lines of "every so often this chart showing political alliances pops up, but I have no idea how to trigger it intentionally" and they added easy-access buttons to the HUD for me. At one point I counted something like a dozen minor UI improvements that had come out of me saying "I don't understand what I'm doing". They, of course, didn't make any game-balance tweaks for me because I had no business even attempting to comment on game balance.
The fact that they knew not merely to listen, but what types of feedback to listen to from which testers, really made the game shine. They listened to experts when it came to strategy, and noobs when it came to discoverability, and all sorts of players when it came to general aesthetics and coolness. IMO a lot of game-design efforts could learn from that.
Thousands of hours I lost in that game.
MOO2 was much more to my liking. (I still play it)
Civ end game are just brutally boring and just never really wanted to finish them. The start and middle were the best parts.
Maybe in a way, the team finally got their model of Civilization true to real life? :)
It's just some fantasy land composed of abstract references to the real world, and I find it hard to care.
If you played the older civs for the micromanagement aspects, then civ5 probably disappoints. I play Civ for the "macro" (I really enjoy watching my civ grow, and don't really do much in terms of strategising), and I enjoy Civ 5 a lot.