Credit to you for giving the game a fair review and not an automatic 8 or 9 for having "Sid Meyer" in the title. I found the biggest problem to be that the game is simply not a strategy game. No strategy is involved even when playing on the highest difficulty. The new features in the game is enough to have a few hours of fun as a simulator or sandbox game, but the replay value is minimal compared to real CiV games. Hopefully it will be improved with future expansions, but I wish the vanilla version was also worth buying.