Some other things that bothered me with civ 5:
- pretty ridiculous resource system - can't build enough modern units because a lot of them require aluminum, for instance; a helicopter gunship requires just as much aluminum as a spaceship factory does. A nuclear sub doesn't need uranium but it does need aluminum. So does rocket artillery, modern armor, helicopter gunships, missile cruisers, etc. Want to have lots of carriers filled with jet fighters or stealth bombers? Carrier only requires oil but all of the modern planes require aluminum, meaning 3 fully stocked carriers will cost you 3 oil and 9 aluminum. Almost the entire selection of modern units relies mostly on this one resource. This effectively means you either have to be extremely lucky that really large amounts of aluminum appear near your cities, or go to war with half the map to acquire the necessary resources. Don't even get me started on nuclear missiles (not atomic bombs, these are ICBMs) which require 2 uranium each (no plutonium in the game, but meh I can live with that). So a single ICBM requires the same amount of radioactive material you'd need to run two nuclear power plants indefinitely? It's not even a MIRV.. Of course once it detonates it frees up the two uranium it cost. This entire system is flawed from the get go.
- removal of sea transports, all units now magically turn into boats when they reach the sea (mentioned this before but it's such a huge point it deserves to be mentioned twice);
- removal of airports and the airdrop mechanics that came with them;
- removal of cool wonders like the space elevator;
- removal of a separate spaceship building screen like in Civ 4 (fluff, I know, but it was cool);
- various bugs pertaining to combat bonuses;
- graphical glitches and overall crap performance even on my system which is relatively powerful;
- global happiness system;
- unexplored parts of the map now remained unexplored even after you've researched "satellites" and/or built the apollo program; in previous civs the entire map would become "explored" once you got to space. They probably just forgot about this in civ 5, but it's still annoying and makes no sense.
- nuclear subs can't enter other empire's territory unless you have an "open borders" agreement with them (duh, didn't mean you should cruise to their shores on the surface, dive and be quiet ffs - I can partially accept this restriction on standard diesel electric subs as the time they can spend submerged is limited, even though modern diesel electrics can also stay below the surface for long periods of time)
- re-basing air units now only works for cities/carriers in range of that unit. On the surface this seems logical but let's think about it for a moment - you're not ordering that unit to perform an air strike here. Re-basing an air unit could be handled by other transports or it could automatically land to refuel on certain points along the way; they might be refueled in mid-air too - point is it should be done automatically for you, the way it was in Civ 4 where you could re-base an air unit to any city on the map. This way re-basing a fighter squadron to a city on the other end of the world can literally take years in game time. It particularly doesn't make sense when you look at some other design decisions that oversimplify matters - such as the mentioned removal of sea transports and making every unit in the game amphibious. It's like they didn't know themselves whether they want to simplify or complicate matters so they decided to have the worst of both worlds.
- "Science victory" (used to be called "space race victory" before) has been downgraded to complete suckage. Apart from not having a separate spaceship construction screen, there's only 4 different parts needed for the ship, one of which needs to be built 3 times. Once the ship is built, it launches automatically and all you get is an end-game victory screen. There's no countdown until the ship reaches destination; no end game cutscene of your colonists reaching their new home - nothing. After that needlessly long non-skippable intro sequence I expected at least a short outtro..
I still think this game has a lot of potential and in a year or two it'll probably be awesome - even though at present it seems like someone did his best to kick as much awesome out of it as humanly possible. At any rate, out-of-the-box product by itself needs a lot of work.