[Delk]

Some of the older Civilization games (Civ 2?) gave points in the final score for happy and content citizens, but not for unhappy ones. While that's a minor detail (you usually don't win the game by score anyway), I think that was a nice touch, and made it feel like something else also mattered beside just the attainment of power.

On a similar vein, I think in Alpha Centauri you could enable a rule that allowed a group of allied factions to win together.

I've occasionally lamented that Civ 5 feels like nothing but a power game where it's difficult to even justify the AI being "friendly" for the sake of being friendly and not just as a strategic, transaction-based move. The game may not be zero-sum, but it does feel like that sometimes. I don't know if my thinking has changed or if the later games just feel different somehow, but I didn't feel quite that way about some of the older Civ games.

The social policy advancement system in Civ 5 also feels a bit too "gamey" to me. What that guy on the video briefly mentioned about each social policy advancement being just another power bonus rather than having to make direct choices about tradeoffs (as you would in the previous games) struck a chord.

Some of the criticism in the video seems a bit nitpicky -- some historical inaccuracies such as lumping all of the ancient Hellenic areas together into a single unified Greek civilization are pretty much inevitable when your scale is the entire world and 6000 years -- but some of the points actually sounded like something I've kind of felt too, I just haven't been able to put them into words.